Niko Ovenden

The master dataset of recorded instances of gambling, alcohol and hyperpalatable food advertising captured at English Premier League (EPL) football matches shown in three recordings of Match of the Day, a highlights show on a non-commercial channel, and three live matches shown on Sky Sports 1, a commercial channel. The data is used in the paper…

Background:
There is concern in the media and among public health professionals about the proliferation of advertisements for gambling and other risky products during sporting broadcasts and its potential impact on vulnerable groups including children and young people.

Methods:
An established coding framework was used to identify and categorize all instances of risky product marketing in six broadcasts of English Premier League football: three episodes of Match of the Day, a highlights program on the BBC (a public service broadcaster), and three full matches on Sky Television (a commercial subscription channel).

Results:
Gambling advertising occurred more frequently than either alcohol or hyperpalatable food advertising in both sporting highlights broadcasts on non-commercial UK television and full sports broadcasts on commercial stations. Overall, there was more advertising of risky products during highlights shows on the BBC than there was during live matches on Sky.

Conclusions:
Concern about the advertising of gambling, alcohol and hyperpalatable food has focused on commercial stations which include advertisement breaks in their broadcasts. However, this research suggests that public broadcasts of football highlights, which do not include advertisement breaks, are also saturated with gambling and other risky product advertising. Further research is needed to investigate how advertising impacts different groups, particularly children and young people.

This dissertation considers the use of the city as a site for “playful” movement, and how this form of circulation may yield insight into existing theories around motion within the city. Previous cultural theorists and philosophers who considered urban movement – including Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Michel de Certeau and Walter Benjamin – studied the city as a site of production and consumption, analysed rhythms of capital and the everyday, and considered dualisms in movement such as structure/freedom and constraint/wandering. Anthropologists, sociologists and cultural critics have considered the value and importance of play – Johann Huizinga and Roger Caillois foremost, but also more recently Mary Flanagan and Brian Sutton-Smith, and urban theorists such as Quentin Stevens look at architecture as being playful and lending a “ludic” quality to city space. These varied theorists are drawn into this dissertation on playful movement in the city, incorporating case studies of the use of the City of Edinburgh in 2013 and 2014 for the “zombie chase game” 2.8 Hours Later. This dissertation investigates how Edinburgh – whilst still in use by the general public – is co-opted by the game to host a scenario in which participants move through the city in a different, more playful, method than everyday motion in an urban setting. Through this analysis, the dissertation proposes there is much to be gained by considering how this playful movement offers augmented perspective of earlier work on urban circulation, specifically within Edinburgh, and highlights the importance of a critique of play and games within Cultural Studies.

Poker’s explosion in popularity over recent years has generated a potential demand for academic study into the game.  This paper will describe and explain case studies of two poker players.  Larry plays recreationally, looking to socialise and minimises exposure to risk by employing discourse of “enchantment” – instilling certain cards with “magical” powers and seeing the “poker world” populated with “gods” of “fate”.  Losses are viewed as ‘entrance fees’, winnings the result of good fortune he claims to possess.  The other player – Todd – is a “serious” player, with the explicit aim of maximising financial gain and implicitly asserting skill and gaining a sense of pride.  Exposure to financial risk elements in poker are controlled by managing “bankrolls” which absorbs the shock of prolonged losing streaks, statistical databases are employed to analyse the play of past hands and combined with study of poker theory, these methods “disenchant” Todd’s poker world and enables him to explain the game without using “enchanted” discourse.  This dissertation has links to and develops anthropological areas of “play”, specifically seeking reasons one plays poker; the anthropology of “risk”, notably methods to control financial risk in poker plus outlining broad “player types”.  The study of risk includes association to discourses of “enchantment” and “divination” which are used to explain events taking place in the poker world.  The argument will outline many people’s complicity or unconscious action in maintaining the view of an “enchanted” poker arena, concluding with an appeal for further studies whilst poker continues its rise in interest.

This essay will focus on the popular board game Monopoly, specifically the Edinburgh edition, as an object which can frame matters concerning the city (both the city of Edinburgh and the “city” generically) as a site for games and play, or a ‘ludic city’ (after Quentin Stevens).  Considering the board game itself, its curation, composition and deployment of Edinburgh landmarks, the game’s effects thereof on memory and visualisation of the city, plus the aerial “view” of the city via the game’s board, it will also address concerns regarding what could arguably be deemed “misuse” by the games designer of the city’s features – both in terms of selection and ordering of locations, plus the foreshortening of the physical city through its design and printing of the city on the surface of the board – and the resulting impact on the experience of the inhabitant (inhabiting either the game, the city, or indeed both).  The essay will further consider this foreshortening in terms of other cities and mapping methods, and the impact of this on one’s memories of the city’s structure and layout.  The city as ludic space has many examples within architecture, games design and urbanism (the edited volume Space Time Play is especially useful in terms of this essay and its remit) and the use of the Edinburgh Monopoly board to frame these matters in this essay will offer insight to the above investigations, and provide direction into further research of the city as a site for play and games.

This essay will focus on the Paris Ville Invisible project, written by Bruno Latour and with images by Emilie Hermant; via a close reading of a single Plan within the work – Plan Five, which concerns a University secretary preparing the teaching timetable for a Parisian institution – the essay will look in depth at the range of sources which inform, or are informed by, this fraction of the project as a whole. To be considered and compared by this essay are the original French print version and its accompanying English translation; the online version of the project, designed by Patricia Reed; and finally, use analysis of not only the Plan’s content and origins but also the origins of the author’s name, La Tour, to consider another (Ivory) Tower and the multiple ways it sees, or is seen. Through close reading other authors – scholarly and literary – are made visible, adjacent to Michel Foucault, whose work permeates the Paris Ville Invisible project throughout. What this essay finds is not only affirming the project’s central premise – in that each language version and publication method shed light on different aspects of the work, and different sources of information – but also that the act of scheduling space in a University is but one of many ways of seeing, and feed into wider issues of how the Ivory Tower sees its staff, students and space and, indeed, how others see the Institution. The essay concludes with potential avenues for further exploration which remain attentive to the theories proposed by Latour and Hermant, attentive to form, and to the methodology of close reading and interpretation.