“It’s All Just a Game”: How Victims of Rape Invoke the Game Metaphor to Add Meaning and Create Agency in Relation to Legal Trials

Metaphors are common in legal discourse because they reify abstract legal concepts. The game metaphor, sometimes used to characterise legal trials, tends to be associated with legal professionals’ work in court. This metaphor portrays a legal trial as a competitive, hostile and masculine process that excludes victims from participating in the trial. In this article, I analyse interviews with victims of rape who have had their case prosecuted in the courts in Norway. The victims use the game metaphor to characterise both the trial and their participation in it. I investigate how the game metaphor adds meaning to rape victims’ understanding and experience of a legal trial and creates room for agency in relation to the prosecution of their rape case.

Political TV debates: how to get more power and damage the opponent’s face?

The paper aims to reveal the process of face and power construction in the context of political TV debates in Lithuania and to analyse face threatening acts (FTAs) in terms of propositional content and orientation to the addressee’s face. This study adopts the qualitative content analysis approach to analyse 360 minutes of political debates broadcasted before the 2016 Lithuanian parliamentary elections. The current paper presents the concept of impoliteness, which is later applied in the empirical analysis to address two main objectives: (a) to analyse the process of face and power construction in political TV debates and (b) to study FTAs in terms of propositional content and orientation to the addressee’s face. The results of the study have revealed that politicians seek to get more power by producing FTAs towards their opponents; a zero-sum game metaphor can be used to describe this process. Also, the analysis of FTAs has demonstrated that politicians tend to apply both negative and positive impoliteness strategies. The analysis of FTAs in terms of propositional content has shown that politicians are mostly described as the ones who are lying, hiding the truth, and have performed wrong and ineffective actions in the past. This suggests that participants in Lithuanian political TV debates seek to damage their rival’s face in a way which does not harm their own face by applying indirect – positive and negative – impoliteness strategies and by negatively describing their opponents’ professionalism and general competencies.

Gaming Algorithmic Hate-Speech Detection: Stakes, Parties, and Moves

A recent strand of research considers how algorithmic systems are gamed in everyday encounters. We add to this literature with a study that uses the game metaphor to examine a project where different organizations came together to create and deploy a machine learning model to detect hate speech from political candidates’ social media messages during the Finnish 2017 municipal election. Using interviews and forum discussions as our primary research material, we illustrate how the unfolding game is played out on different levels in a multi-stakeholder situation, what roles different participants have in the game, and how strategies of gaming the model revolve around controlling the information available to it. We discuss strategies that different stakeholders planned or used to resist the model, and show how the game is not only played against the model itself, but also with those who have created it and those who oppose it. Our findings illustrate that while “gaming the system” is an important part of gaming with algorithms, these games have other levels where humans play against each other, rather than against technology. We also draw attention to how deploying a hate-speech detection algorithm can be understood as an effort to not only detect but also preempt unwanted behavior.

The pragmatics of metaphor and metonymy in a media text

This article deals with metaphor and metonymy as language tools that function in a media text. Metaphors and metonymy violate the Grice’s maxims and serve a disinformation strategy. The metonymy in a media text is expressed mainly with the help of names (-onyms) and performs two functions. The pragmatic function is to shape the reader's perception. The instrumental function is to form the subjective image. The metonymic models (part – the whole, concrete – abstract, dominant – secondary) indirectly refer to an object, which allows the author to create a negative image without the risk of incriminating lies or disinformation. A metaphor in a disinforming media text helps to form a pejorative assessment of an object. The main functions of a metaphor in a media text are manipulative (metaphors form and fossilize stereotypes) and emotional-evaluative (metaphors appeal to emotions). The nature and game metaphors are frequently used in a media text. The nature metaphor is effectivebecause of its simplicity. The game metaphor forms the image of an adversary/enemy. Metaphors and metonymy in a media text make it either informationally redundant or eager, ambiguous and emotional. Metaphors and metonymy violate the Cooperative Principle and contribute to the manipulation of the readers’ perception and consciousness stimulating verbal aggression in readers’ comments on media texts

The Metaphor of a “Level Playing Field” in Games and Sports

In sports, the concept of a “level playing field” is much praised but not well understood. One way to construct the idea is in terms of the rules of the game: if the rules are public, consistently enforced, and respected by players, the game is fair. Another approach to construction is in terms of justice: some rules of the game are unfair and thus the field is not level. Interestingly, although the “rules of the game” metaphor is drawn from games to sports, the corresponding idea of a level playing field is not incorporated into the design of games. This chapter explores the relationship between ideas of a level playing field and rules of games. It argues that how games are constructed sheds light on constructivist accounts of level playing fields in sports. Games take many forms and are fluid rather than static; rules develop and change over time. Sports do so as well, responding to pressures for inclusion and fairness. There is no one perfectly level field; there are fields that are more or less level, in different directions and dimensions.

Ludic Scopes for Environmental Crisis and Education

The article aims to add a ludic perspective to those generally used for studying environmental issues in social sciences. To introduce in the debate a play/game metaphor enriches the interpretations of environmental crisis and provides a further motivation to action. The ludic perspective has a sociorelational background. That tradition of studies helps in constructing a set of categories that are then applied to environmental education (EE). The choice of such a topic is motivated by two factors: EE is an aspect generally practiced but mistreated in the main theorizations, and EE is exemplary of the potentialities of the playing games metaphor, which are the desire to create, the acceptance of slow changes, the protection of an experimental bubble, and irony toward environmental issues.

University students’ behavioral culture development by means of personality-oriented education technologies

The paper substantiates that one of the ways to solve the problem of university students behavioral culture development is to use technologies of personality-oriented education. The specificity of actions-words and deeds-actions in human behavior is indicated. The distinction between the action-operation (considered without regard to its moral and moral significance) and the action-action (considered from the point of view of moral and moral value) is revealed. It justifies the effectiveness of technologies of personality-oriented education to form a culture of student behavior through an appeal to the main provisions of the paradigm of personality-oriented education: a statement on the values of personality-oriented education (personality, culture, creativity), a statement on the goal of a personality-oriented education (education of a culture person whose natural, social and cultural essence is interrelated); position about the functions of personality-oriented education (humanitarian, cultural, integrating). The specificity of personality-oriented education is shown. The triad Task - Dialogue - Game is considered as a base of technologies of personality-oriented education. The author gives examples of games built using the technologies of personality-oriented education and contributing to students behavioral culture development (the game Verbal behavior (confident, uncertain and rude); the game Non-verbal forms of confident, uncertain, rude behavior; the game Self-esteem; discussion game Be able to feel a person next to you; a game-metaphor, a game of self-criticism, a game - the choice of tactics).