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This oral and written history examines three generations of pioneering women game developers from Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile—the South American region known as the Southern Cone. Each of the individuals interviewed—Marcela Nievas, Sofía Battegazzore, Maureen Berho, and Martina Santoro—offers insight on female leadership over three generations of precipitous growth in regional game development. Together, their personal and professional trajectories demonstrate how the embodied and material conditions of game production condition diverse histories of game development, challenging universalizing myths of a global game industry in which “anybody can make games.” At the same time, these four developers' histories working outside the conventional centers of the global game industry reflect the transformative role of women developers and game designers across the Global South in shaping three generations of global game culture.

This paper examines the artist Sámal Joensen-Mikines (1906-1979) and how he and his work manifest Faroese national identity. The theoretical background used in thispaper is Anthony D. Smiths theory on the potential of art to reproduce and re-interpret national identity. He describes three different elements of how this can be achieved in art – evocation, commemoration and didactic. The paper examines the form, style and subject of three of Mikines’ paintings from this theoretical perspective, as well as how the artist positions himself and how he is positioned by critics and experts both during and after his lifetime. The results show that his home island Mykines and his identity as Faroese are central for Mikines and his work. His artwork is clearly identified as Faroese by experts, and he has a strong position in the Faroese art world. The form and style of his work is international, strongly inspired by Nordic and European artists, and he uses this as his language to communicate Faroese national identity in form of evocation and commemoration to both a Faroese and an international audience.

Video games have become important objects of study for different academic disciplines. From the birth of the medium in the mid-twentieth century to the present, video games have offered new and creative ways of approaching reality and fiction, and not only serve as entertainment, but also have significant cultural, social, and technological implications. The formal study of this medium is the purview of the field of game studies, which brings together the contributions of various disciplines. This paper presents a bibliographical review of several theoretical trajectories in game studies, reflecting on the relevance of early debates on narratology and ludology, and examining the ways these initial divisions of the field have branched beyond that debate. Over the past several years, the narratological line of critique has established links with other theories such as cognitivism, the theory of fictional worlds and the contributions of unnatural narratology to the analysis of new technologies; ludology, for its part, has grown through its adaptations to postcolonial and decolonial theories in cultural studies, as well as through its connections to critical race and gender studies. We conclude that as game studies has evolved as a discipline, its initial theoretical debates have undergone profound transformations that have brought depth to the analysis of games’ meaning and diversified to the tools and techniques we have for analysing games as digital and cultural artefacts.

Design of functionalized biomimetic scaffolds is one of the key approaches for regenerative medicine and other biomedical applications. Development of engineered tissue should optimize organization and function of cells and tissue in vitro as well as in vivo. Surface topography is one factor controlling cellular behavior and tissue development. By topographical patterning of biocompatible materials, highly functionalized scaffolds can be developed. Gelatin is hereby a promising candidate due to its biocompatibility and biodegradability. It is low in cost and easy to handle, enabling a variety of applications in science and medicine. However, for biomedical applications at physiological conditions, gelatin has to be additionally stabilized since its gel-sol-transition temperature lies beneath the human body temperature. This is realized by a reagent-free cross-linking technique utilizing electron beam treatment. By topographical patterning, gelatin can be functionalized toward scaffolds for cell cultivation and tissue development. Thereby, customized patterns are transferred onto gelatin hydrogels via molds. Thermal stabilization of gelatin is then achieved by electron-induced cross-linking. In this study, we investigate the influence of gelatin concentration and irradiation dose on pattern transfer, long-term stability of topographically patterned gelatin hydrogels, and their impact on the cellular behavior of human umbilical vein endothelial cells as well as normal human dermal fibroblasts. We will show that contact guidance occurs for both cell types due to a concrete stripe pattern. In addition, the presented studies show a high degree of cytocompatibility, indicating a high potential of topographically patterned gelatin hydrogels as tissue development scaffold for prospective biomedical applications.

Video Games and the Global South aims to redefine game culture from south to north, analyzing the cultural impact of video games, the growth of game development and the vitality of game cultures across Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America, the Indian subcontinent, Oceania and Asia.

In this special issue of Letras Hispanas we bring together a collection of interventions that illustrate a variety of ways of approaching digital storytelling, from multidisciplinary perspectives, by a new generation of scholars working on this field. While the contributions to this special issue vary considerably in terms of the primary materials they analyze and the critical approaches they employ, there are several identifiable tendencies that allow us to divide these interventions into three major trajectories. A first set of articles deals with the evolving relationship between electronic narrative and print media, analyzing examples of crossover between the two spheres. A second trajectory among the contributions to this volume examines specific digital media technologies and the new genres and modes of expression they have engendered. The third and final set of contributions focuses on the ways digital communities and social networks have impacted literary practice and creative expression in the Spanish-speaking world.

This article examines the use of literary and narrative elements including letters, text, and dialogue in recent works from Latin American videogame designers. Beginning with a review of scholarship on the so-called “crisis in written expression,” the essay then turns to an examination of the relationship between textual and ludic modes of analysis and their relative usefulness for game studies. Bringing this scholarship to bear on real-world examples of video games from Latin America, the article then offers an examination of games categorized as Horror, Science Fiction, Neomedievalism. Based on an examination of these examples, this essay ultimately argues that since the relationship between games and narrative continues to evolve in previously unforeseen ways, textual analysis remains both insufficient and indispensable to game studies.

Nanodust can be found in many natural and technical plasmas and attains a charge depending on the charging mechanisms. If ions flow through a cloud of such dust particles, dust-density waves (DDWs) are excited. This dissertation introduces the dust-density wave diagnostic (DDW-D), which allows to determine the plasma parameters and the dust charge from the wave frequency and wave number. The waves are observed and analyzed in a nanodusty plasma. Using a hydrodynamic model of the complex plasma consisting of dust, ions, electrons, and neutrals, the observed waves can be compared to a theoretical dispersion relation. The dominance of the local most unstable mode links the experimentally-observed modes with the plasma parameters in the model. This requires that enough system parameters, e.g. particle size and number density, are measured in the experiment to reduce the number of unknowns in the model. The analysis of the wave data shows that the dust charge is only ten to fifty elementary charges due to electron depletion in the plasma (Havnes effect). The ion density profile deviates from the commonly observed bell-shape profile. The electron density is found to be a hundred times smaller than the ion density. In dusty magnetized plasmas, the DDW-D shows in agreement with probe measurements in the dust-free plasma that the ion density decreases clearly towards the edge of the confined plasma column and that the electric field increases towards this edge. The dust-density distribution shifts its maximum towards the edge of the plasma column if a magnetic field is present. It is concluded that this is a consequence of a rotation of the dust cloud, which was found for micron-sized dust particles in similar situations. The new diagnostic DDW-D can be applied to many different applications, ranging from basic research to technological nanodusty plasmas. Nanostaub ist in vielen natürlichen und technischen Plasmen vorhanden und lädt sich darin je nach den dominierenden Mechanismen positiv oder negativ auf. Wenn Ionen durch eine solche Staubwolke strömen, werden Staubdichtewellen (engl. dust-density waves, DDW) angeregt. Diese Dissertation führt eine Diagnostik ein, die dust-density wave diagnostic (DDW-D), mit der diese Parameter aus Wellenzahl und -frequenz ermittelt werden können. Hierzu werden Wellen in einem nanostaubigen Plasma beobachtet und analysiert. Mithilfe eines hydrodynamischen Modells des komplexen Plasmas aus Staub, Ionen, Elektronen und Neutralen können die beobachteten Wellen mit einer theoretischen Dispersionsrelation verglichen werden. Die Dominanz der lokal instabilsten Mode verknüpft die im Experiment beobachteten Moden mit den im Modell vorhandenen Plasmaparametern. Allerdings ist dies erst möglich, wenn ausreichend viele Unbekannte des Modells, wie z.B. Partikelgröße und Anzahldichte, im Experiment bestimmt werden. Durch Anwendung der DDW-D auf das nanostaubige Plasma wird gezeigt, dass die Staubladung durch eine Elektronenverarmung des Plasmas (Havnes-Effekt) nur einige zehn Elementarladungen beträgt. Das Ionendichteprofil weicht von dem sonst beobachteten Glockenprofil ab. Die Elektronendichte ist um das 100-fache kleiner als die Ionendichte. In staubigen magnetisierten Plasmen zeigt die DDW-D in Übereinstimmung mit Sondenmessungen im staubfreien Plasma, wie die Ionendichte am Rand der im Magnetfeld eingeschlossenen Plasmasäule abfällt und das elektrische Feld zunimmt. Außerdem wurde beobachtet, dass die Staubwolke ihr Dichtemaximum im magnetisierten Plasma nach außen verschiebt. Dies lässt darauf schließen, dass die Nanostaubwolke im Magnetfeld rotiert, wie es auch schon bei Mikrostaub in magnetisierten Plasmen beobachtet wurde. Die vorgestellte Methode der DDW-D bietet vielfältige Anwendungsmöglichkeiten für andere staubige Laborplasmen, aber auch für nanostaubige Prozessplasmen.

Plasmas growing or containing nanometric dust particles are widely used and proposed in plasma technological applications for production of nano-crystals and surface deposition. Here, we give a compact review of in situ methods for the diagnostics of nanodust and nanodusty plasmas, which have been developed in the framework of the SFB-TR24 to fully characterize these systems. The methods include kinetic Mie ellipsometry, angular-resolved Mie scattering, and 2D imaging Mie ellipsometry to get information about particle growth processes, particle sizes and particle size distributions. There, also the role of multiple scattering events is analyzed using radiative transfer simulations. Computed tomography and Abel inversion techniques to get the 3D dust density profiles of the particle cloud will be presented. Diagnostics of the dust dynamics yields fundamental dust and plasma properties like particle charges and electron and ion densities. Since nanodusty plasmas usually form dense dust clouds electron depletion (Havnes effect) is found to be significant.

Durable, mechanically robust osseointegration of metal implants poses one of the largest challenges in contemporary orthopedics. The application of biomimetic hydroxyapatite (HAp) coatings as mediators for enhanced mechanical coupling to natural bone constitutes a promising approach. Motivated by recent advances in the field of smart metals that might open the venue for alternate therapeutic concepts, we explore their mechanical coupling to sputter-deposited HAp layers in a combined experimental-theoretical study. While experimental delamination tests and comprehensive structural characterization, including high-resolution transmission electron microscopy, are utilized to establish structure-property relationships, density functional theory based total energy calculations unravel the underlying physics and chemistry of bonding and confirm the experimental findings. Experiments and modeling indicate that sputter-deposited HAp coatings are strongly adherent to the exemplary ferromagnetic shape-memory alloys, Ni-Mn-Ga and Fe-Pd, with delamination stresses and interface bonding strength exceeding the physiological scales by orders of magnitude.