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Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a chronic neurodegenerative disease, is the most common form of dementia that causes cognitive function impairment, including memory, thinking, and behavioral changes that ultimately lead to death. The overactivation of GSK-3, an enzyme from the proline/serine Ki NS family, has been associated with hyper-phosphorylation of tau proteins. The self- -assembly of hyper-phosphorylated tau proteins to form tangles of straight and helical filaments is known to be involved in AD. Therefore, GSK-3 has been considered a potential target of novel drug discovery for AD treatment. Research on the development of GSK-3 inhibitors has received enormous attention from the vast scientific community because they are targeted for AD and other diseases, including type 2 diabetes, cancers, stroke, Parkinson’s disease and bipolar disorder. Various drugs of both synthetic and natural origins have been designed to inhibit GSK-3 activity. However, there is a need to develop novel drug candidates that can selectively inhibit GSK-3. Hence, this review summarizes the potential of GSK-3 inhibitors for AD therapy and discusses the structure- activity relationship of current drug molecules and the potential problems associated with them.

2019 marked ten years since the publication of Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter’s Games of Empire, which has become a seminal book in videogame cultural criticism. Ten years later, there is still a pressing need for cultural and materialist criticism of the politics of production within game studies. In putting together this special issue, our hope is to identify new developments in the game industry and academia that are emblematic of 21st-century capitalism. Just as Games of Empire popularised critical political-economic perspectives ten years ago, we encourage others, as the authors in this issue did, to continue and maintain investigations into questions of ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations and radical struggle. Such analyses are necessary not only to trace but also to open up new directions in game culture and academia for decades to come. ispartof: Games And Culture vol:16 issue:3 pages:287-293 status: published

This article explores the cultural appropriation of the term avatar by Western tech culture and what this implies for scholarship of digital games, virtual worlds, social media, and digital cultures. The term has roots in the religious tradition of the Indian subcontinent and was subsequently imported into video game terminology during a period of widespread appropriation of Eastern culture by Californian tech industries. We argue that the use of the term was not a case of happenstance but a signaling of the potential for computing to offer a mystical or enchanted perspective within an otherwise secular world. This suggests that the concept is useful in game cultures precisely because it plays with the “otherness” of the term's original meaning. We argue that this indicates a fundamental hybridity to gaming cultures that highlight the need to add postcolonial perspectives to how issues of diversity and power in gaming cultures are understood.

With new technologies, increasing mechanization and automation, almost all challenging social and economic issues that people face can be investigated towards a prediction or a solution. Digital technologies have connected the world in a single knot, but the technical knowhow does not contribute to solving these challenges. Encapsulation of technological advancement and social responsibility is highly needed. This calls for cross-regiment and inter-field solutions coupled with social enthusiasm. This survey provides a study on two aspects of social relations within a connected world. It also investigates and reviews solutions and work for advanced interactive technology. The survey draws on major insights from few researchers highlighted in our reference list.

Source at https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.309 The treatment of colonialism in video games, barring a few notable exceptions, is marked by a Western and, specifically, late 19th-century imperialist bias. Simultaneously, in the past two decades of multifaceted research and the development of robust theoretical frameworks in the still fledgling discipline of game studies, postcolonial discourses, whether they comprise critiques of imperialism or neocolonialism, have not been prominently highlighted until very recently. A coherent effort to bring together the current research on postcolonialism in video games was also urgently required. Further, the past years has seen a rather persistent, albeit unexpected, emergence of a pro-colonial or pro-imperialist discourse in mainstream academia that even justifies the continuance of empire as an ameliorating influence on the people of the so-called developing countries, most of which had formerly been colonized by European powers. Thus, it is the aim of this issue to address this epistemic omission and counter such bias where it exists by also bridging video games research with larger discussions of postcolonialism in other humanities contexts and disciplines. The various articles in this special issue offer a range of perspectives from epistemological power to theory and praxis in critical academia, to contexts of production and practices of play, to close readings of postcolonial traces in video games. These varying approaches to the analysis of video games and their societal and historical contexts open up the debates further to a diverse set of topics ranging from board games to phone games or from mainstream high-budget console games to indie titles that question colonialism. As video games address issues relating to orientalism, subalternity, and hybridity as well as the current ambiguities in conceiving nationhood and the postcolony, the articles in this issue will also likely adumbrate further serious commentary that will develop both game studies research and current conceptions of the postcolonial.

As in historical accounts, empire in videogames, too, is concerned with the acquisition of geographical space. Videogame empires work on the necessary logic of spatial expansion connected with which is the necessity to remove the “fog” which prevents the player’s ‘line of sight’ from accessing information about surrounding areas. Although much scholarship exists around the representations of the spatiality of Empire in more traditional media, there is little that addresses the videogame representations of Empire. Following on from the general position on the need to examine notions of postcolonial spatiality in videogames, this chapter specifically addresses the representation and experience of space in conceptions of Empire vis-a-vis in empire-building videogames, as understood in terms of both cartography and the lived experience of space.

The ludic has always been linked with colonial and postcolonial discourses across the world. This concluding chapter addresses the question of how even videogames that are ostensibly critical of colonialism nevertheless end up perpetuating its key assumptions. It also looks at the nascent discipline of Game Studies to encourage a deeper engagement with diversity within the field at large. As, arguably, the newest media to comment on and critique empire and colonialism, videogames provide yet another perspective for rethinking—and replaying—the key issues involved, here. The discussion book is intended not as a to open up the already growing Game Studies research on diversity and the margins to include the larger debates on empire and post colonialism.

Videogames have been analyzed from many perspectives in Humanities thinking and in recent years, a closer engagement with issues relating to gender, race, and diversity is in evidence. Despite early depictions of colonization in videogames, such as Sid Meier’s Colonization or Microsoft’s Age of Empires, there has been very little scholarship on postcolonial perspectives on gaming in almost two decades of game studies research. Despite this seeming absence, videogames in non-Western geographies have often critiqued colonialism and more recently, even mainstream titles such as Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry and Far Cry 2 have also addressed themes associated with post colonialism. This introductory chapter creates the context for exploring issues of space, time and identity as described in the postcolonial theoretical positions of leading postcolonial thinkers vis-a-vis their application in computer games.

Drawing on the work of Lisa Nakamura on race in videogames, and the previous chapter’s discussion on colonial cartography in videogames, this chapter will engage with current postcolonial theory such as that framed by commentators on how postcolonial identity is perceived. Complicating Ranajit Guha’s initial definition of subalternity, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak sees the subaltern as a voice from below that can never articulate itself. In a similar vein, one needs to consider the issues of identity and the denial of selfhood in slavery. This chapter examines what it may be like to identify with the postcolonial subject in the videogame, especially when the avatar is an ex-slave like Adewale the protagonist of Freedom Cry and what this identification or lack thereof means in terms of how identity is constructed in videogames.

Videogames allow players to replay their stories; strategy games based on historical situations, therefore, effectively play out historical events from a counter-factual perspective. In postcolonialist historiography, the past is often viewed as a colonized terrain where indigenous histories have been eradicated and rewritten by colonizing powers. Many videogames attempt to represent history from a critical and “othered” perspective. On the one hand, while videogames claim to provide a critical reading of history they games often end up supporting the dominant narrative and on the other, as games are played out, they continually challenge dominant narratives by changing the conclusions, the events and the validity of monolinear readings. This chapter will address the key problems regarding the postcolonial (re)construction of temporality and history in terms of how videogames provide a hitherto unique perspective on the issue.

What are the implications of freedom and agency when a player exercises agency to prevent another player or a non-player character fromacting freely? Such a scenario, taken to an extreme, would be that of slavery and in turn, would raise questions about the nature of freedom itself. Video games have recently begun to address questions of slavery in earnest although academic discussions on games have not yet caught up: the presence of slavers in Fallout 3, the portrayal of racism in Bioshock Infinite (Irrational Games 2014) and the direct depiction of the Caribbean slave trade in Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry (Ubisoft 2013) are extremely appropriate cases in point. This article compares the representation of slavery in video games to that of slave narratives in earlier media in order to examine how effectively digital games are able to convey the horrors of slavery as a human condition and what they can teach about the notion of human freedom and agency per se.

The western media has been eager to construct an apparent link between the so-called moral desensitization of soldiers in the 2003 Iraq War and their experience of video game combat. Commentators assert that games have avoided engaging the real-life issues to which they are responding (Zacny 2008), including the issue of combat trauma. Contrary to such positions, many video games already simulate the trauma in their gameplay experience; this article explores this concept from Brown's definition of trauma as outside the range of human experience (1995: 101). This evokes recent work in games studies on in-game involvement and identity-formation and raises questions about the role of morality in gameplay, especially in multi-player combat games like Counter-Strike, Call of Duty 4 and America's Army. Working from these hitherto overlooked aspects of trauma in gameplay experiences, this article challenges the oversimplified association of video games with the desensitization of US troops in recent conflicts.

While recounting his journey to Jerusalem, the French traveller Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand describes having faced a ‘real embarrassment’: ‘Should I give an exact description of the holy places? But then I will merely be repeating what others have said before me.… But would that not remove the most essential part of my journey, and defeat its end and purpose?’ (Chateaubriand 2011). In a rather different context and a narrative medium that Chateaubriand could not have anticipated, the player of Ubisoft’s cult videogame Assassin’s Creed (2007) faces a similar problem. As the fictional game protagonist, Altair ibn Ahad, perches atop a high tower inside a virtual recreation of the holy city, the same issue arises of representation and comparisons with earlier narratives and narrative media. How does Altair/the player’s experience compare with the narratives of the earlier travellers and storytellers? This chapter will briefly discuss this question; but it will also examine how narratives in the videogames themselves compare with novels adapted from those games. The Assassin’s Creed games and the popular series of Assassin’s Creed novels by Oliver Bowden (a pseudonym used by the author Anton Gill) will be considered here because they self-consciously take their stories across multiple media and into different periods of history. By looking at how narratives transition into particular kinds of media—from the printed book to the digital game and vice versa—this chapter aims to encourage a broader analysis of the ways in which ‘narrativity’ operates in literary and cultural terms.

In the introduction to his book on reading program-code, author and programmer Diomidis Spinellis writes that ‘in a few years our students will learn from existing open-source systems, just as their peers studying a language learn from the great literature’ (Spinellis, 2006, p. xxvii). This comparison between reading code and reading literature cannot be considered fortuitous; rather it vindicates and simultaneously follows from the machinic nature of literature itself, as Chapter 2 illustrates.

The plots of the video game narrative(s) are a great deal more complicated than the mesh of stories created in Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies. The structural constraints seen in the codex form are present in a lesser degree: unlike the apparently linear plots of earlier narrative media, the story-space in digital games is seemingly endless or multitelic. For some commentators, this poses major problems in conceiving of them as narratives. Often, unlike in older media, the game-text’s ending does not correspond to the spatial and the temporal limits of the game. Time operates in a complicated manner in the game-text and the replayability of the text gives rise to different narratives; yet, as any gamer knows, the ‘different’ narratives may be extremely repetitive with scarcely any variant feature to mark them out. A number of studies on ‘reading’ (or (w)reading) video games refer to their multiple endings as a unique feature but none attempt in-depth analysis. However, as this peculiar nature of the endings is a significant factor in compounding the problem with ‘reading’ digital game-texts as a narrative medium, a discussion of this is now long overdue.

Will it ever be possible to ‘read’ games as the previous chapter seems to suggest? How does one read a text that keeps changing and indeed, what is the text of a video game that is being played again and again by many players? In Literary Gaming, Astrid Ensslin, writing as recently as 2014, takes on the analysis of what she calls ‘hybrid literary-ludic artefacts’ (Ensslin, 2014, p. 38). In her conclusion, she points to possible projects, one of which is ‘to examine literary gaming from the user’s perspective, applying methods of empirical reader-response, audience, and player’ and also to look at ‘the creators of literary-ludic artefacts and studying their creative agendas and processes.’ As seen in the previous chapter, the analysis of storytelling in video games needs to reflect the originary supplementarity between the literary and the ludic; as such this book extends its scope beyond any specific category that can be called ‘hybrid literary-ludic artefacts’. Ensslin’s conclusion, however, points at some key interventions that are necessary in the field. The story that unfolds in the experience of playing a video game varies from player to player, of course depending on the game itself. This is the challenge that The Stanley Parable throws at its players/readers and the Prince of Persia in The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time reiterates in his attempt to negate the player’s death, ‘No no no, that’s not how it happened — do you want to hear my story?’ The complex multitelic experience described here will be addressed in the following chapter; this one will attempt to understand whether the ephemeral text, which the player plays out and changes with each gameplay, can be analysed at all.

When the Prince of Persia turns the clock back yet again and recreates his narrative, who is the author of this story? Is it the player acting as (w)reader, both reading and scripting the story, or is it the game designer who shapes the outline of the plot and the spaces of possibility? Finally, what about the Prince himself — as the embodiment of the artificially intelligent processes and the algorithmic environment of the game? The multiple narrative strands in the rhizomatic structure of video games raise yet another key question in the analysis of video games as narratives. How is it possible to explain the creation of these multiple narratives? Can the process of (w)reading these narrative actualisations into existence be likened to authorship? Even if it is, then such a process is quite different from the commonly held conception of the text as a product of the author’s imagination. In video games, as stated previously, the process of narrative construction involves the machine and the player besides the game designers themselves. A straightforward explanation of gameplay as authorship cannot suffice to comprehend the situation in its full complexity.

The traveller in Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies begins his series of strange tales with an even stranger description of how they were narrated to him. In a castle, where some unknown power had rendered everyone speechless, the guests were still telling each other their stories but they were doing so in a rather unique way. The traveller describes a scene where tarot cards were laid out after the banquet and what followed thereafter: One of the guests drew the scattered [tarot] cards to himself, leaving a large part of the table clear; […] We all noticed the resemblance between his face and the face on the card, […] and that he was preparing to tell his story. (Calvino, 1979, p. 6)

The Prince of Persia in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Ubisoft 2003) is ever reluctant to accept an ignominious end to his story, whether after a fall from atop a tower or after being killed by the sand demons. Every time he fails, the Prince exclaims ‘no no, that is not how it happened at all’. Like the videogame player controlling his avatar , the Prince wants the game sequence to be reloaded and replayed; only he appeals to an entity that the player often does not notice – memory. The Prince justifies the reload because he does not remember the events as they happen and he hankers for a return to a ‘true’ memory. There is an implicit problem here, however. We cannot ask the Prince what he remembers and during the game the player ends up remembering the ‘false’ memories, albeit often unconsciously. To progress further in the game, the player needs to have learned from his mistakes or, in other words, to have remembered the previous iterations of gameplay. According to the Prince’s memory, these failed instances of gameplay never happened; yet they happened in the gameplay and are remembered by players. Often, many players share the same experience and this exists as a shared memory. Players might also be drawing on collectively recorded memories – the written step by step guidelines in a walkthrough and the comments left by players on various gaming forums or wikis. What the player remembers is also often influential in determining the in-game identity of the player. Videogames themselves, such as Assassin’s Creed (Ubisoft 2008) and STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl (GSC Gameworld 2007) have started self-reflexively exploring memory in their plots. Therefore, it will be useful to move the study of memory in videogames out of its relative obscurity and explore its multi-layered complexity.

After disappearing in the Reichenbach Falls while grappling with Professor Moriarty in ‘The Final Problem’ (1893), Holmes re-emerges in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’ (1903), supposedly having spent three years (in the Holmesian time-scheme) disguised as the Norwegian explorer Sigerson so as to fool Moriarty’s dangerous minions. Since then, Holmes has continued to return in many different places and times. In the world of Holmesian pastiche, he lives myriad lives in stories by enthusiasts all over the world. The Mary Russell novels, Anthony Burgess’s short story ‘Murder to Music’ (1989), Caleb Carr’s The Italian Secretary (2005) and films such as Murder by Decree (1980) are just a few examples. This narrative multiplicity of the Holmes stories is intriguing, and there are few parallels in literature. Like Lord Blackwood, Holmes’s antagonist in the recent Sherlock Holmes (2009) film, Holmes too is continually resurrected, almost as if by magic.