Noel Brett

This edited collection brings in multiple scholarly perspectives to examine the impact of the pandemic and resulting government policies, especially lockdowns, on one particular cultural sphere: games. The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted virtually every aspect of our lives, regardless of where we live. In the initial months, many industry reports no...

With live streaming rising in popularity, many people stream the creation of 3D avatars However, many of these avatars end up following a similar output: a hyper-feminized anime girl. Why is this? What are the social and technological processes constructing these avatars? To answer these questions, I propose that human (streamer and audience) and n...

For many digital games, a player is able to construct their digital identity with an avatar . Digital games often prescribe character customization interfaces (CCIs) which allow the player to create or customize their avatar. Yet, the range of possibilities given to a player is restricted by the design choices placed by the game’s interface, ultima...

In queering gameplay, cues of sexuality concentrate the possibilities of action communicated by (avatar) design. However, many games such as Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (Blizzard 2004) ensure the erasure of queerness by “correcting” threats on heteronormative gameplay – updating the queer bugs which permit the player to embody queerness. Centering...

Analysis of complex security and privacy policies (e.g., information flow) involves reasoning about multiple execution traces. This stems from the fact that an external observer may gain knowledge about the system through observing and comparing several executions. Monitoring of such policies is in particular challenging because most existing monit...