Brand owners use virtual communities to strengthen brand loyalty by engaging consumers in active content creation activities. Personal and reciprocal communication and consumers’ participation in virtual brand communities are the main sources through which communities contribute to brand loyalty formation. This research examines the antecedents and consequences of advocacy participation in virt...

The growing use of the Internet to provide a sense of personal connection and community is converging with the development of shared virtual spaces. In particular, the strong popularity of Multi-User Domains (MUDs), text-based networked virtual worlds, suggests the high premium many people place on social interactivity in their virtual environments. The project described in this paper was desig...

Due to limited resources, organizations are constantly facing challenges. To take advantage of new opportunities and mitigate possible risks they look for new ways to collaborate with each other, sharing knowledge and competencies. Hence, coordination among partners is critical to achieve success. The segmented South African public sector is no different. Driven by the desire to ensure proper s...

Virtual communities have been extensively examined—including their history, how to define them, how to design tools to support them, and how to analyze them. However, most of this research has focused on adult virtual communities, ignoring the unique considerations of virtual communities for children and youth. Young people have personal, social, and cognitive differences from adults. Thus, whi...

In the written English variety used in a community ofWorld of Warcraft players, two iconic lexical items created from symbols have undergone semantic change. The words analyzed are 4 and o-, which have shifted from iconic deictic items used for discourse reference to non-iconic epistemic meanings. 4 shifted from a discourse deictic to an affirmative of a previous utterance, and o– shifted to a ...

In this paper, we set out a basic approach to the modeling of narrative in interactive virtual worlds. This approach adopts a bipartite model taken from narrative theory, in which narrative is composed of story and discourse. In our approach, story elements – plot and character – are defined in terms of plans that drive the dynamics of a virtual environment. Discourse elements – the narrative’s...

Department of Computer Science North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC, 27695 [email protected] 919.513.3038 In this paper, we set out a basic approach to the modeling of narrative in interactive virtual worlds. This approach adopts a bipartite model taken from narrative theory, in which narrative is composed of story and discourse. In our approach, story elements – plot and character – ar...

Department of Computer Science North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC, 27695 [email protected] 919.513.3038 In this paper, we set out a basic approach to the modeling of narrative in interactive virtual worlds. This approach adopts a bipartite model taken from narrative theory, in which narrative is composed of story and discourse. In our approach, story elements – plot and character – ar...

The purpose of our paper is to illustrate the fundamental importance of developing academic community among first-year students. We argue that a sense of academic community is of fundamental importance in combating the effects of the neo-liberal economic discourse on higher education, and that the values of higher education are incongruent with those of economic rationalism. The discursive comm...