Alesha Serada

University of Vaasa · Department of Communication Studies

The technological term ‘blockchain’ became a common buzzword in the late 2010s. As of the 2020s, it is impossible to ignore the rise of blockchain technologies in emerging projects of digital identity and governance. In this chapter, I argue that these projects represent the reaction to invasive surveillance and algorithmic control in online enviro...

Investor sentiment is a major factor in financial markets. Long before the GameStop short squeeze and the market-crashing tweets of Elon Musk, social media signals demonstrated credible forecasting, and potentially, manipulative potential in the studies of stock markets and, later, cryptocurrencies. This chapter summarizes the existing research on...

There is no shortage in proposed blockchain-based solutions to solve the many problems of journalism. The Brave browser, which uses the blockchain-based token BAT, is the only one that has achieved reasonably wide adoption since its launch in 2016 with its 30 million users in 2021, according to its marketing department. After five years of operatio...

The concept of symbolic capital, introduced by Pierre Bourdieu (1986), has been applied to explain the circulation of value between game communities and the industry. The bottom-up approach can be found in the studies of so-called “gaming capital” accumulated by gamers (Consalvo, 2009), while the top-down approach focuses on the agents who hold the...

In this paper, I compare two fictional artificial agents who appeared on television in the 1980s in the USSR and in the UK. Despite their unrelated cultural genealogy, both characters project the similar emotion of sadness from the screen. First and foremost, I focus on the robot Werther from the Soviet children’s TV series Visitor from the Future...

This article investigates Twitter posts as an arena of organizations’ impression management. This is done by looking into the ways companies and organizations use this social media platform for establishing an image of competence and expertise around a new technological innovation. We approach this topic through a discourse analysis of 3,033 Finnis...

This is a WordStat categorization of keywords that describe the value of CryptoKitties in Discord communication

There was no measurable effect of scarcity on the 'floor price' of 'fancy' CryptoKitties that existed in quantities over 300.

This is the additional data to my paper in work. The initial data was sourced from the player community and the website https://ck.kotobaza.co/timeline/. I added the themes and storylines based on the developers' blog.

Since 2003, the primary goal of women-only Counter Strike tournaments has been to encourage more women to play competitively. And yet, 20 years later, this goal has not been achieved, despite the efforts of all involved parties. Esports are still perceived as entertainment primarily for young men by most industry stakeholders, and the number of wom...

Early computer games of the ‘Eastern bloc’ have been studied as important artefacts of early digital media, but their significance is usually limited to the historical context. In this article, I present a case study of the first popular computer game made in Belarus, which political relevance has persisted through over two decades. In order to ach...

Digital identities of collaborative robots/robots and human-robot/robot-human interactions are critical components in building systems. These digital agents (AI-powered software or robots/bots) are entrusted with tasks on behalf of specific individuals/companies using these identities. In this review paper, the authors synthetize several approaches...

Red Comrades Save the Galaxy is one of the most popular adventure game series from the early period of game development in Russia in the late 1990s. It presents adventures of characters borrowed from the century-long tradition of the Russian anecdote, most fertile in Soviet times. The majority of late Soviet anecdotes reused tropes from popular fil...

Urban planning needs to discover and incorporate new energy sources to meet climate protection targets in the future. Waste heat from industrial and urban infrastructure has proven to be a viable solution, but its proper identification can be challenging, especially for smaller and unconventional sources. Our project relies on the principles of gam...

It is often believed that blockchain technologies can ensure fairness in online transactions and interactions. What does ‘fair game’ mean in a blockchain-based game, which rules cannot be broken by design, and how does this relate to the concept of a ‘fair price’? In this chapter, I use the example of the best known blockchain-based game CryptoKitt...

In this chapter, we outline reasons why cryptogaming, like cryptocurrencies in general, is an area of special interest for blockchain research. We suggest that cryptogaming is a field that drives forward the development of blockchain applications. Games require continuous interest, added value through interaction, and sufficient content in order to...

Little known beyond the Russian speaking world, The Story of Wanderings is a dark fantasy film produced in the late period of the Soviet cinema. The film was classified as a children’s film by the director, film critics, and the state. Produced by Mosfilm, the third oldest and the most influential film studio in Soviet Russia, it is a rare example...

This paper presents the case of the blockchain-based game CryptoKitties (Axiom Zen, 2017), more specifically, one particular way of making game tokens potentially more valuable by labeling them ‘vintage’. Firstly, I show how the meaning of ‘vintage’ was collectively constructed by the community of players and negotiated online until it was acknowle...

Will humankind ever be able to live underwater? To answer this question from the perspective of visual media studies, I analyze narrative and expressive means used for positive representation of underwater experiences in several examples of screen media. My examples are principally different by origin and yet united by their highly enjoyable effect...

100 most popular BAT partners, according to their Alexa rank, categorized according to their content. There is only one category if the website has one general purpose. Information collected from the community-made website BATGrowth.com on June 25, 2021. Annotated by Alesha Serada

An important aspect of knowledge management is the transfer of know-how between generations. This raises the question of how new employees, especially young professionals, can acquire this knowledge from older generations in an efficient and sustainable way. This can potentially necessitate the creation of incentives for both sides. For the older g...

Best Poster Award at ECIAIR 20: Posthuman network architecture is presupposed by the earliest projects on blockchain, such as the white paper of Bitcoin. Vidan and Lehdonvirta notice: “Nakamoto here seems to appreciate Actor-Network Theory’s call for symmetry by equating participants and nodes, votes, and CPUs. His imagined community fully embraces...

Digital/electronic identities are essential components of collaborative robots/robots and human-robot/robot-human interactions. Through such identities, digital agents (AI powered software or robots/bots) are entrusted with tasks in the name of certain individuals/companies. Digital identities can come from various sources; these can be assigned by...

Both cryptocurrency researchers and early adopters of cryptocurrencies agree that they possess a special kind of materiality, based on the laborious productive process of digital ‘mining’ [1]. This idea first appears in the Bitcoin White Paper [2] that encourages Bitcoin adopters to construct and justify its value in metaphoric comparison to gold m...

This article analyzes specific characteristics of value created through digital scarcity and blockchain-proven ownership in cryptogames. Our object of study is CryptoKitties, the first instance of a blockchain-based game that has garnered media recognition and financial interest. The objective of this article is to demonstrate the limits of scarcit...

This paper presents an analysis of CryptoKitties (Axiom Zen 2017) as an educational tool for blockchain adoption. The focus is placed on the official agenda of the game, presented in its white paper ("White Pa-Purr") and the user guide. I compare statements of the game's developers to the actual practice of playing CryptoKitties for a year. Althoug...

Taken together, this collection of papers takes us on an encouraging journey from the gloom and doom of current news reports to possible utopias — but also to much more ubiquitous dystopias — in literature, film, TV, and games. As in any game with

The Playful Undead provides an indispensable groundwork for further explorations of zombies in games. It takes its readers along a wide array of safe pathways across horrific imaginary worlds. Such guided tours are even more important now, when the real world has come dangerously close to the fictional image of a zombie apocalypse.