Toward a translational news ecology:covering the 2022 Australian Federal Election on WeChat

This article examines the coverage of the 2022 Australian federal election on WeChat for Australian audiences. We analyzed 3, 462 public articles collected from May 2021 to May 2022 from 135 WeChat news services called WeChat Official Accounts (with 99 still active at the time of this analysis). We found that diasporic Chinese media accounts had a more prominent role in shaping online discourses compared with China-based media accounts, Australia-based business accounts, and Australian politicians’ accounts. In reporting the 2022 Australian federal election, COVID-19 policies, the economy, immigration, and international relations, with particular regard to Australia–China relations, were common themes. Our findings reveal the formation of a “translational news ecology” that bridges diasporic media to Australia’s English-speaking, mainstream public sphere, which is primarily shaped by Australian national media and politicians. Notably, for future regulation of election media, we witness domestic political actors featuring paid advertisements or direct contributions on influential news service accounts, including instances of misinformation sitting in a lacuna of active regulation from both Australian and Chinese states in managing platform content and labor in this space.</p

Modelling systemic racism: mobilising the dynamics of race and games in everyday racism

This article is concerned with attempts to pose videogames as solutions to systemic racism. The mobile app, Everyday Racism, is one such game. Its method is to directly address players as subjects of racism interpellating them as victims of racist language and behaviour within Australian society, implicating the impact of racism on mental health and wellbeing. While the game has politically laudable goals, its effectiveness is undermined by several issues themselves attributable to the dynamics of race and games. This paper will spell out those issues by addressing three separate facets of the game: the problematic relationship between the player and their elected avatar; the pedagogic compromises that are made in modelling racism as a game; finally, the superliminal narrative that attempts to transcend the limited diegetic world of the game

Dwarf Fortress

The “fortress simulator” game Dwarf Fortress (Bay 12 Games, 2006-present) allows players the space to conduct experiments in economics. The player is not granted an avatar in the world, but this does not mean the player is granted the role of a transcendent deity either. Instead, the player operates on the relational level—completely managing all economic interactions and assigning social codes to different spaces. Lacking a “win” condition, players are free to engage with the game however they wish, including allowing for the immediate and unsympathetic demise of the community. As play continues, Dwarf Fortress ceases to be a fortress and becomes what the autonomists describe as a “laboratory.” The social relations of the fortress are upturned and become the site for experiments in production. The fortress too becomes the site for thought experiments on alternative economies, containing not one but many social laboratories. </jats:p

WeCapture

&lt;p&gt;This is the alpha release of the WeCapture software tool used in the capture of data in the leadup to the Australian election in 2022.&lt;/p&gt

Play, History and Politics: Conceiving Futures Beyond Empire

The worlds of games are important places for us to think about time, as demonstrated by historical game studies in evaluating the past, but there is a role for games to help us consider the future as well. Because games are, to some extent, systems, they facilitate a systems thinking approach that connects the material to the immaterial. Because games also tend to be action-based, they allow thinking through of acts as well as representations. Games allow us to think about a time and place that is different from the present and how it might operate as a system that we could live in. I argue that a post-autonomist method of game analysis requires an explicitly political interpretation that is focused on trying to imagine a political future through experiments in gaming. </jats:p

Yet Another Computational HASS Tool for the Mobile Investigation of Platforms

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yet Another Computational HASS Tool for the Mobile Investigation of Platforms&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;yacht-mip&lt;/strong&gt; is a relatively easy to use tool for researchers to annotate social posts into a research database from a mobile phone. For the uninitiated, HASS stands for Humanities and Social Sciences.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;yacht-mip&lt;/strong&gt; is designed to act as a mid-level technical solution that provides lightweight automation for researchers studying social platforms by creating a quick way to select and code social data. &lt;strong&gt;yacht-mip&lt;/strong&gt; works by allowing a research participant or researcher to easily share posts from social media platforms into a research database and to conduct &lt;a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coding_(social_sciences)"&gt;qualitative coding&lt;/a&gt; on the fly, then making data accessible for analysis using either &lt;strong&gt;pandas&lt;/strong&gt; or by exporting to spreadsheets.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;yacht-mip&lt;/strong&gt; is currently in development, and is internally functional, however the current public release is &lt;i&gt;not functional&lt;/i&gt;. The current release has been made in order to snapshot the project in its current form for posterity.&nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The project development page and full instructions can be followed on &lt;a href="https://github.com/rdef/yacht-mip/"&gt;Github&lt;/a&gt;. The current page will be updated with a new version when a full release is available.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;yacht-mip&lt;/strong&gt; relies on Telegram in order to operate, and all users will need an account in order to contribute or receive data. Telegram does have spammy bots, so I recommend hardening your accounts against spam after signup.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;yacht-mip&lt;/strong&gt; only provides mild automation. It is not a tool for researchers wanting to grab arbitrary data at scale. It has no crawlers in place. If you are a looking for a research tool for scalar study of platforms I recommend starting with &lt;a href="https://smat-app.com/"&gt;SMAT-APP&lt;/a&gt;, which is very easy to use.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;yacht-mip&lt;/strong&gt; is not intended for gathering data about individual users, although could be repurposed in order to achieve such goals through modification of various &lt;strong&gt;ships&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;yacht-mip&lt;/strong&gt; also includes a web snapshot tool that can capture some data from certain websites, currently listed in the repository's &lt;strong&gt;ships&lt;/strong&gt; folder.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because of these potentials, a project lead should ensure that their research project is compliant with all relevant institutional policies and obligations covering research ethics, such as IRBs, HERCs, and similar.&lt;/p&gt