To identify the factors that disrupt and maintain habit performance, two field experiments tested the conditions under which people eat out of habit, leading them to resist motivational influences. Habitual popcorn eaters at a cinema were minimally influenced by their hunger or how much they liked the food, and they ate equal amounts of stale and fresh popcorn. Yet, mechanisms of automaticity i...

In the last 100 years we have observed a great development of the technology. This development applied to the mass media as the radio, the cinema, the television, or Internet have influence in the human communication and the interaction of the society with the technologies. The new communicative environments need new actors (avatars) with high communicate face expression. The modeling and the a...

As both programmers of lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) film festivals and a certain percentage of their attendees will acknowledge, the lesbian feature film is the most persistently elusive of programming elements. Of course curators have other urgent desiderata: formally challenging work, work by people of colour and from underrepresented nations, transgender films. But the lesbian fea...

In an article in the Scottish cultural magazine, The Drouth, Mark Cousins provocatively bemoaned the lack of a vibrant film culture in Scotland. Putting Iran's cinematic achievements forward as a – perhaps surprising – example, Cousins identifies several reasons for Scotland's underdevelopment, most of which revolve around a lack of experimentation and a general absence of interest in exploring...

Interactive fiction (often called “IF”) is a venerable thread of creative computing that includes Adventure, Zork, and the computer game The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as well as innovative recent work. These programs are usually known as “games,” appropriately, but they can also be rich forms of text-based computer simulation, dialog systems, and examples of computational literary art. T...

Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed `women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and a fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imag...

Gladiatorial combat was in reality a lot less lethal than it is depicted in the cinema. This short paper highlights how cooperative strategies could have prevailed in the arenas, which is generally what happened during the Games. Cooperation in the arena corresponded to a situation of the professionalization of gladiators, who been trained in gladiatorial schools. This case provides an analogy ...

This paper describes a creative industries research project that has applied quantitative approaches commonly used in scientific research to the study of international cinema performance. Using film screening data collected over a two year period, this paper discusses analysis of a global dataset using Appadurai’s “-scapes” framework. We have identified several of these “-scapes” that help us i...

This paper explores the contentious notion of experiential narrative and proposes the first step in a narrative framework for game environment. It argues for a shift in emphasis from story-telling, the dominant mode of narrative in literature and cinema, to story generation. To this effect the paper forwards a perspective on experiential narrative that is grounded in the specific qualities of t...

Films portray mental illness and mental health problems in a variety of ways. Some can be used to teach medical students and psychiatric trainees about certain aspects of psychiatry: watching a film is useful when learning about mental state examination, how to reach a diagnosis, doctor-patient interactions and personality disorder. I have chosen a list of films to watch for each of these topic...