Live action role-playing games share a range of characteristics with massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Because these games have existed for more than 20 years, players of these games have a substantial amount of experience in handling issues pertinent to MMOGs. Survey and review of live action role-playing games, whose participant count can be in the thousands, reveal that features such as size, theme, game master-to-player ratio, and others interact to form complex systems that require several different groups of control tools to manage. The way that these games are managed offers a variety of venues for further research into how these management techniques can be applied to MMOGs.

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Players in online games frequently choose the opposite gender when they select an avatar. Previously, this has been attributed to a player's unconscious sexual anxieties and the need to experiment through the anonymous location of the avatar. However, this paper argues that the development of choice in games, where players have frequently selected the female form for ludic reasons, means that this choice has become normalised through a historical process. The avatar is frequently considered as a tool, with gender regarded as a freely admitted aesthetic pleasure. The player does not see this as a site of tension, or seeks to absolve this tension publicly as an act of appropriation typical to Jenkins¹ textual poachers. Overall, the act of gender switching is not considered deviant within gaming; more, it is embraced as a common practise with historical precedents to support it.

Children's Literature post 1970 does not often tackle the First World War, and this paper investigates why this might be so. What emerges are a series of texts which are often received with some acclaim, but are also restricted to very specific patterns of representation. These patterns clearly follow a morally didactic way of representing WW1, one which often restricts the ability of writers to diversify their writing and seek alternative representations. This paper examines the way that several texts have dealt with these 'parables' of warfare, and asks whether diversification might be a more healthy alternative.

This article looks at a genre of games that most frequently appears on the Nintendo DS and discusses how they use multiple techniques drawn from several different sources to gain popularity. The desert island simulation blends a series of familiar game genres with those of popular television, specifically serial television, to produce a genre that deliberately appeals to non-traditional users (although this definition relies more on preconceptions than actuality, as games continue to develop in scope). This article examines the techniques that these games use, including the shrewd marketing tools of the DS, the ways in which the games borrow from existing games genres, how they draw the player into a narrative web through a reconstruction of player agency, and the linkage with serial television. By specifically examining The Sims 2 Castaway (S2C, 2007), this article discusses how the changing of ludic objectives during these games influences player expectation and how this is increasingly reflected in other texts such as long-haul television series. These developments indicate not only an evolving canon within games but argue for their growing influence elsewhere in cultural production.