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British government policy has much to say about video games, through production support, regulation, and recognition (or lack of it) of their cultural nature, with games defined and promoted as part of the creative industries in a manner which owes much to film policy. Yet the drive to promote both the games industry and games culture, and the inconsistent usage of terms like culture and creativity, produces tensions between different elements of 'Britishness', expressed and experienced not only through policy, but also through the creation and consumption of games. In considering the specificity of games' contribution to British identity, therefore, we must understand how different elements of cultural policy interact with the interests of audiences and creators to define 'British games' – games which have the quality of being, or being seen to be, British. Such games might be expected not only to represent British culture within a global marketplace, and to project soft power, but also to address the British nation in some manner. This diversity, of global and local, of present-mindedness and nostalgia, suggests that British games articulate a complex and plural sense of national (cultural) identity.

Preliminary Material /Nick Webber and Daniel Riha -- Prop Theory for Game Aesthetics /Chris Bateman -- Beyond Game-Fun /Adam W. Ruch -- Counterplay in the City: Exploiting Urban Spaces through Location-Based Gaming /Dale Leorke -- Ludic Interfaces /Mathias Fuchs , Georg Russegger and Moisés Mañas Carbonell -- Rapid State of Mind: What Rapid Prototyping Has to Teach Us /Jacob Naasz -- Driving Forces of Narrative in Videogames /Phonesury Lily Ounekeo -- The Potential of Video Games in Public Health Communication /Marcelo Simão de Vasconcellos and Inesita Soares de Araújo -- Biometric Storyboards to Improve Understanding of the Players' Gameplay Experience /Pejman Mirza-Babaei and Graham McAllister -- From Sackboy to Scribblenaut: Rethinking Videogame Cocreation /Dimitrios Pavlounis -- Videogames as Micro-Resistance /Cameron Vaziri -- 'Popping the Other': Orientalism, Appropriation and Assemblage in Little Big Planet /Ewan Kirkland -- Videogames.ru: Constructing New Russian Identities in Virtual Worlds /Catherine Goodfellow -- 'Girls Don't Play Video Games': How Gender Identity in Hobbies Can Affect Career Choice /Marian Carr , Rupert Ward , Nigel King , Simon Goodson and Sarah Jane Robinson -- Digital Companions: Analysing the Emotive Connection between Players and NPC Companions in Video Game Space /Julienne Greer -- More Fun Writing Than Playing: The Critical Videogame Blogosphere as Emerging Approach to Knowledge Creation /Ben Abraham -- Grief Play, Deviance and the Practice of Culture /Nick Webber -- Gaming through Historical Simulations: An Easy Target for a Public Attack? /Daniel Riha.

EVE Online is a MMOG which has gained notoriety for player organizations boasting thousands of active members. The complexity of these groups presents substantial challenges, and leaders have explored multiple approaches to organization and governance. They often employ structures and language drawn from historical social systems, family, or nationality to create social order. Here we examine the use of feudalism in EVE: as a structure of power, an indicator of legitimacy, and a mechanism of waging war. We demonstrate that even as leaders incorporate feudal language into their organizations, their application of these concepts is influenced by capitalism and individualism. We argue that the final social and economic system is neither truly feudal nor capitalist, but instead an accommodation between the two, shaped by player knowledge, experience, and in-game needs. We conclude that such systems support legitimate structures of power which encourage player participation and produce more sustainable player organizations.

This article looks at organizational culture and identity of different organisations in EVE Online, using a combination of critical historical and ethnographic approaches. We argue that it is helpful to understand major organizations in EVE as analogous to early polities, in terms of the ways in which claims to leadership and power are demonstrated (for example through the writing of history). Yet, as we show, these organizations have strong cultures which demonstrate resilience and a resistance to top-down cultural change, meaning that the successful implementation of such change is governed by rank-and-file members rather than their leadership. We propose that the cultural (rather than political or social) nature of this resilience is centrally important in understanding how organizations in EVE function. This unity of practices and understanding allows EVE's major organizations to suffer huge losses to their position and prestige, and yet remain viable communities and potentially resurgent powers. This seems to challenge the 'social network'-type descriptions often used to explain the persistent groups seen in many online games.

This article looks at organizational culture and identity of different organisations in EVE Online, using a combination of critical historical and ethnographic approaches. We argue that it is helpful to understand major organizations in EVE as analogous to early polities, in terms of the ways in which claims to leadership and power are demonstrated (for example through the writing of history). Yet, as we show, these organizations have strong cultures which demonstrate resilience and a resistance to top-down cultural change, meaning that the successful implementation of such change is governed by rank-and-file members rather than their leadership. We propose that the cultural (rather than political or social) nature of this resilience is centrally important in understanding how organizations in EVE function. This unity of practices and understanding allows EVE's major organizations to suffer huge losses to their position and prestige, and yet remain viable communities and potentially resurgent powers. This seems to challenge the 'social network'-type descriptions often used to explain the persistent groups seen in many online games.

In recent years, non-state actors in the Middle East have engaged a new generation of activists through a variety of media strategies. Notable among these is a series of videogame interventions, which have appropriated Western game products to convey political and religious messages through the inversion or complication of the roles of hero and enemy. This article explores a selection of such media, produced by or in support of two non-state groups, Hezbollah and Islamic State (IS). The article takes a discourse theoretical approach to examine the ideologies presented in these media and reflects on the ways in which these game artefacts engage with, and reject, Western narratives of history and of US pre-eminence. It concludes that while these game interventions challenge existing hegemonic (re)presentations of the Middle East and the 'War on Terror', they remove or reduce agency to the extent that those who engage with them can only witness these challenges, rather than instigate their own. While we acknowledge that hegemony can always be challenged, we view this lack of agency as support for Mouffe's proposition that the result of counter-hegemonic resistance is often to maintain and reproduce the hegemonic order.

In recent years, non-state actors in the Middle East have engaged a new generation of activists through a variety of media strategies. Notable among these is a series of videogame interventions, which have appropriated Western game products to convey political and religious messages through the inversion or complication of the roles of hero and enemy. This article explores a selection of such media, produced by or in support of two non-state groups, Hezbollah and Islamic State (IS). The article takes a discourse theoretical approach to examine the ideologies presented in these media and reflects on the ways in which these game artefacts engage with, and reject, Western narratives of history and of US pre-eminence. It concludes that while these game interventions challenge existing hegemonic (re)presentations of the Middle East and the 'War on Terror', they remove or reduce agency to the extent that those who engage with them can only witness these challenges, rather than instigate their own. While we acknowledge that hegemony can always be challenged, we view this lack of agency as support for Mouffe's proposition that the result of counter-hegemonic resistance is often to maintain and reproduce the hegemonic order.

Harry Patch (1898–2009) was the last surviving soldier to have fought in the trenches of the Western Front, entering the media spotlight in 1998 when he was approached to contribute to the BBC documentary Veterans. Media coverage of Patch and the cultivation of his totemic status were particularly prodigious in anticipating and marking his death, producing a range of reflections on its historical, social and cultural significance. Focusing on the British popular press, this article examines media coverage of the last decade of Patch's life. It considers the way in which the Great War is memorialised in the space of public history of the media in terms of the personalisation and sentimentalisation of Patch, exploring how he serves as a synecdoche for the millions of others who fought, how he embodies ideas of generational and social change, and how the iconography of the Great War's contemporaneous representation works in the space of its memorialisation.

The compound term fan-historian may be used to describe fans who engage in a wide range of memory, archival, and other past-focused fan work, which helps make sense of the past and makes it usable for their communities. Fan-historians may thus be described in an inclusive way that recognizes the common practices that exist between the work of fans and historians; both take curatorial and transformative approaches to knowledge. This formulation also emphasizes the fact that fans are participants in historical work, not merely its subjects. Fan-historians thus work as both fans and historians to produce fan-historical work. This labor is centrally important to fan communities and vital in light of the established links between history and power.