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The genre of history strategy games is a crucial area of study because of what is at stake in the representation of controversial aspects of history in popular culture. Previous work has pointed to various affordances and constraints in the representation of history, based on the framing of the game interface, the alignment of goals with certain strategies and textual criticism of the contents of the games. In contrast, this article examines these games from the perspective of the player’s experience of play in relation to a wider gaming community. It is in these counterfactual communities that players negotiate their individual experience with their knowledge of the history that is presented in the games that they play, indicating that the relationship between digital games, players and history is highly contextual. The relevant practices of players of history strategy games are illustrated with examples from the official and unofficial communities of the Paradox Interactive games Europa Universalis II and Victoria: Empire Under the Sun. The shared paratexts demonstrate how positions are negotiated in relation to the ‘official’ version of history presented in the games. These negotiations are made tangible through the production and sharing of paratexts that remix the official history of the games to include other perspectives developed through counterfactual imaginations. These findings indicate the importance of including perspectives from gaming communities to support other forms of analysis in order to make rigorous observations about the impact of digital games on popular history.

Feminism in Play focuses on women as they are depicted in video games, as participants in games culture, and as contributors to the games industry. This volume showcases women's resistance to the norms of games culture, as well as women's play and creative practices both in and around the games industry. Contributors analyze the interconnections between games and the broader societal and structural issues impeding the successful inclusion of women in games and games culture. In offering this framework, this volume provides a platform to the silenced and marginalized, offering counter-narratives to the post-racial and post-gendered fantasies that so often obscure the violent context of production and consumption of games culture.

Korea was the fifteenth country in the world to start television broadcasting when it first launched in Seoul in 1956. Since then, the structure, content and policies concerning Korean television have continuously transformed, due largely to changing contextual circumstances such as wide-ranging socio-political democratization and the rise of the neoliberal global economic system and digital technologies. Up until the 1980s, the oligopolistic structure of the two public broadcasting networks  – Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) and Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC)  – dominated the broadcasting market. However the landscape has dramatically changed since the early 1990s, with 11 newly launched commercial terrestrial broadcasting channels (including Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS) in December 1991) and 153 cable channels when the multichannel television era began (Jin 2005 : 1). A digital satellite television system called Skylife was launched in March 2002, and airs 176 channels at the time of writing. Such changes stem from the shift in the domestic political climate where liberalization and privatization were promoted in assertively practiced neoliberal reform movement in the early 1980s, as well as changes in the global cultural industry environments based largely on globalization and the development of digital technologies. This chapter explores democratization, transnationalization and digitalization, three active factors within Korean television broadcasting by analysing changes and shifts in popular music programmes.

Three seasons of NZ Idol , the New Zealand adaptation of the global Idols format, were aired on public broadcaster TVNZ’s channel TV2 in 2004, 2005 and 2006. The final episode of the first season was the most-watched television programme in New Zealand in 2004, with 1.4 million people, a third of the New Zealand population, tuning in (South Pacific Pictures, 2004). In terms of ratings NZ Idol has been one of the most successful locally made television programmes of the last decade. At first glance, NZ Idol has also been very successful in representing ethnic and cultural diversity. In the auditions phase of the show young New Zealanders of 16 years plus from a range of backgrounds are featured, and in the subsequent phases the audience gets to know a selection of them intimately. The winners of all three seasons (Ben Lummis in season 1, Rosita Vai in season 2, and Matt Sounoa in season 3) have Pacific Island roots, and as a result three young “brown” people were crowned “New Zealand Idols.” This is remarkable, since according to a previous study by Misha Kavka (2004: 231) non-white people have largely been absent from New Zealand reality TV programmes. A closer look suggests, however, that featuring contestants from different cultural backgrounds in NZ Idol generally serves a particular nation building agenda that New Zealand is heavily involved in as a postcolonial society, in which ethnic minorities are subjected to representations that favour the interests of dominant cultural groups. The aim of this nation building agenda is to establish a new and distinct sense of national identity which will set New Zealand apart from Britain, the former colonial power, and other English-speaking nations.

Chronicles the global critical reception of Aboriginal art since the early 1980s and argues for a re-evaluation of Aboriginal art's critical intervention into contemporary art.

The past decade has seen an explosion of lifestyle makeover television shows with audiences being urged to “renovate” everything from their homes, bodies, and children to their pets, a process that has seen the emergence of an army of lifestyle gurus on television advising us on what not to eat and what not to wear. While critical academic attention has largely focused on blockbuster reality television formats like Big Brother and Survivor, more recently a growing body of scholarship has started to focus on the “lifestyle turn” on television and the rise of the makeover format. To date much of the work on makeover television has focused on its role in the US and UK. However, in the past couple of years the lifestyle makeover show has become an increasingly global phenomenon with audiences around the world embracing everything from home renovation to plastic surgery makeover shows. This essay is concerned with examining the implications of the global dissemination of such modes of programming, associated as they are with ideologies of neoliberal individualism, self-surveillance and self-promotion, and with a strongly consumption-oriented aesthetic. It emerges out of a pilot study I have been conducting with Dr Fran Martin at the University of Melbourne as a preliminary step in a larger transnational comparative study of lifestyle programming in Asia in which we seek to examine the role of lifestyle television in both shaping and reflecting broader shifts in social and cultural identity accompanying the rise of consumer-based modes of modernity.

This paper is based on ongoing research into the gendered use of mobile convergent media in the Asia-Pacific region. In particular, what role does the cute have and how does it correlate with types of consumption? As a region, the Asia-Pacific is marked by diverse penetration rates, subject to local cultural and socio-economic nuances. Two defining locations - Seoul (South Korea) and Tokyo (Japan) - are seen as both mobile centres and gaming centres which the world looks towards as examples of the future-in-the-present. Unlike Japan, which pioneered the keitai (mobile) IT revolution with devices such as i-mode, South Korea has become a centre for mobile DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadband) with the successful implementation of TV mobile phones (TU mobile) in 2005. One of the key features of mobile media technologies is the attempt by the industry to find the next killer application . One such application is the possibility of online multiplayer games accessed through mobile (broadband) telephonic devices such as MMO golf RPG Shot Online (a golf game for mobile phones). Amongst this frenzy of trend spotting and stargazing, Seoul as a mobile broadband and gaming centre provides a curious case study for the social and cultural intricacies informing the rise of gaming as an everyday practice for many Koreans.This article begins by outlining the game play and technoculture particular to South Korea and then explores the phenomenon of Kart Rider in South Korean gaming cultures - and its perception/ reception outside Korea - to sketch some of the issues at stake in playing it cute (particularly in the form of cute avatars), consuming Korea and the endurance of co-present communities. In particular, it contemplates the implications of current emerging online mobile gaming genres such as so-called female games such as the cute' Kart Rider in order to think about changing modes of game play and attendant social spaces.

* Are cultural identities socially constructed? * How are race, nation, sex and gender constructed and represented on television? * What is the impact of globalization on television and cultural identities? This introductory text examines issues of television and cultural identities in the context of globalization. It is a wide-ranging volume, exploring many of the central cultural issues in contemporary cultural studies, such as media, globalization, language, gender, ethnicity, cultural politics and identity - perhaps the topic of cultural studies over the past decade. At the core of the book are two critical arguments - that television is a proliferating resource for the construction of cultural identity, and that cultural identity is not a fixed essential 'thing' but a contingent social construction to which language is central. The book will be essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on television and cultural identities in the fields of cultural studies, communications, media studies and sociology, with a wider appeal to those with an interest in the television industry. Key concepts are introduced and explained for those new to cultural studies, whilst debates are extended and enriched for those already familiar with them. The text is well structured, links the vocabularies of media studies and cultural studies, and is supported by original case study material.

"Addressing both the scope and the significance of television program format transferthe practice of using the basic idea of a program to produce a new version of that programthis book details this rapidly growing area of the international television distribution system. Also addressed is the remaking of a program by the television industry of another nation, highlighting issues of meaning and cultural identity of national audiences."

This text provides readers with useful summaries and evaluations of key arguments relating to the development of television as an industry across the globe and its potential cultural impact. There is a continual insistence in the book on the need to connect issues of industry with those of culture.