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The study focuses on the relationship users of virtual worlds, such as Second Life, may or may not develop toward the avatar they use. A questionnaire was developed to collect both qualitative and quantitative data from students engaged in a university assignment that required them to use an avatar in Second Life. The findings are contextualized and discussed: The distinctions between software, hardware and self are blurred.

This paper explores the ways in which the experience of participation or interactivity in digital games may influence or reinvent the player’s ideological subjectivity. It offers an application to video game analysis of the theoretical perspectives of Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Slavoj Žižek, and thereby suggests that the simulated realities of commercial digital games cultures offer an illusion of agency or co-authorship which, in common with similar illusions promoted by parallel manifestations of industrial mass culture, may foster a critical complacency which permits the inscription of their consumers within virtually invisible ideological perspectives.

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University lecturer Charles reports how the media is full of stories about invading squirrels. One such report told how a local councillor proposed increased security measures at the usual ports of entry - overhanging trees should be pruned, commenting: "When I was a lad you didn't see squirrels coming into town - now we're inundated with them.... One woman told me she got surrounded by six squirrels.... One's OK, but five or six is a bit of a problem." Was the man is merely parroting racist phrases? asks Charles, contrasting his comments with those of the BNP's David Guynan: "This town is turning completely into a foreign land.... It's like the grey squirrels taking over. I'm a red squirrel, that's what I am." Writes Charles: Is this analogy of immigrants and asylum-seekers as grey squirrels merely a modern retelling of the Nazi metaphor of Jews as rats? There's an old joke: "What are the two differences between a squirrel and a rat? A bushy tail and a good PR guy." And these days the greys aren't getting great PR.