scholarly journals Transformative (h)activism: Breast cancer awareness and the World of Warcraft Running of the Gnomes

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren B. Collister

Players of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW) are accustomed to a transformative culture that appropriates off-line events and personas into virtual-world representations inside of the game. Following this culture, players have transformed an off-line event—the Race for the Cure, to benefit breast cancer charities—into an online event called the Running of the Gnomes with parameters and participation properties appropriate for the virtual world. This transformative event is a disruptive form of civil disobedience including elements of hacktivism. Though the event conforms to the game's culture and rules, the mass collective action of the Running of the Gnomes disrupts the player experience by flooding the game's chat boxes with messages about an off-line concern (breast cancer) and also disrupts the game itself by crashing the server through the sheer volume of player participation. This disruption is embraced as an integral part of the event and is one of the primary causes for the event's success as a fundraising activity.

Author(s):  
Chaka Chaka

This chapter explores the potential both Second Life (SL) and World of Warcraft (WoW) as instances of a virtual world (VW) and a massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG), respectively, have for leveraging presence learning. The latter encapsulates, in this chapter, presence pedagogy, tele-presence, co-presence, social presence, and cognitive presence as mediated by both SL and WoW. In this context, this chapter contends that both SL and WoW help harness presence learning. Against this background, the chapter first provides a brief overview of SL, WoW, and presence learning. Second, it presents and discusses seven case studies demonstrating how both SL and WoW help harness presence learning. Third and last, the chapter outlines future trends for presence learning in respect of both SL and WoW.


2014 ◽  
Vol 04 (04) ◽  
pp. 084-087
Author(s):  
Arkierupaia Shadap ◽  
Maria Pais ◽  
Anusuya Prabhu

AbstractBreast cancer was considered to be one amongst the most commonly cancer disease in the world. Now it is considered to be the second cancer disease among women in India, with most of the affected population is in the urban areas. Breast cancer is seen mostly after the age of 40 years. According to the Cancer fact 2012, breast cancer is now seen to be among women aged from 35 years above. Materials and methods: The study was a descriptive survey study to assess the knowledge on breast cancer, awareness and utilization of mammogram among 320 married and unmarried women who were willing to participate in the study. After the consent, a questionnaire prepared by the investigator was given to them. Results: Majority 46.6% had low knowledge for breast cancer. There was an association between knowledge and age, marital status, education and source of information about breast cancer and it was found to be significant (p< Mammogram is underutilized among participants, from the total number of population i.e; n = 320, only 19.1% (61) were aware of mammogram. Out of 19.1% (61) who were aware of mammogram, did not utilise it. Conclusion: The study concluded that women have low knowledge on breast cancer and very less population was aware of mammogram which is one of the screening tests for breast cancer. Their low knowledge on breast cancer and unaware of the screening test is the main reason for not utilising mammogram even those who are aware of it. So, nurses as health care members play an important role in providing information and educating the community people.


BMC Cancer ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Thackeray ◽  
Scott H Burton ◽  
Christophe Giraud-Carrier ◽  
Stephen Rollins ◽  
Catherine R Draper

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean Anthony Fabi Gui

World of Warcraft® (WoW), a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) extends to its members a virtual landscape of live gaming opportunities through such platforms as “dice” rolled character stats, open-ended story development, and interactive AI. These affordances are underpinned by a kind of virtual sense of community bringing players together in order to develop relationships and the self, adventure together, build up wealth, and overcome obstacles in order to complete quests. In addition to live game-play (or “in-world”) communities, WoW residents create alternative communities through rich online forums—here, new members are recruited into guilds, disputes are spawned and slayed, and seasoned warriors reminisce over worlds and lives that once- were. However, a third type of community is also evident through particular threads crafted within forums specifically for collaborative storytelling (or roleplaying). This paper examines sense of community—a sense of “belonging to, importance of, and identification with a community”—through one particular thread, “The Darkening Grove Tavern” under the forum World’s End Tavern using an adaptation of McMillan and Chavis’ theory and Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce & Taylor’s ethnographic data collection methodology for qualitative analysis of virtual worlds . Findings from players’ story text (or “turns”) suggest that online storytelling forum threads exhibit a linguistically and semiotically branded sense of virtual community. 


2006 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter A. Fasching ◽  
Gunter von Minckwitz ◽  
Thorsten Fischer ◽  
Manfred Kaufmann ◽  
Beate Schultz-Zehden ◽  
...  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document