Electronic sport or esport is a trend that involves playing competitive video games professionally. Traditional sports and esport have been compared to each other because of their similarities. Esport has grown in terms of viewership. Every year more spectators get interested and the number rises. One popular genre played in esports is MOBA. It stands for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. Two teams face each other, and the goal is to destroy the enemy’s base with the help of their selected character, in-game mechanics and objectives. There are several focus points to highlight for the spectator. Hence, a dedicated spectator interface in the esports scene helps understand the progression of the game while watching. Developers might want to market their MOBA game into the esports scene, but it is hard to know what spectators want within the interface. This study investigates the major factors to consider when designing a spectator interface for a gaming genre; multiplayer online battle arena games (MOBA) in a competitive setting. The methods used to achieve the results were literature studies that include spectatorship, cognitive theories, and game interface theories. Analysing a popular MOBA game spectator interface and redesigned the interface of a game named League of Legends. Redesigns will go through an iterative process with the help of feedback, using questionnaires and interviews on the target group. Results discovered factors that could provide the spectator with a better viewing experience and contributed to producing a guideline for designers. The study concluded the guideline could help future work or contribute to previously established guidelines for general competitive games. However, further investigations are required to explore and validate the proposed guidelines in practice. / Elektronisk sport eller esport är en trend som handlar om att spela tävlingsinriktade videospel professionellt. Traditionella sporter och esport har ofta jämförts med varandra på grund av likheterna. Esport har vuxit enormt när det gäller tittarskap. Varje år blir fler åskådare intresserade och antalet stiger. En populär genre som spelas i esports heter MOBA. Det står för Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. Två lag möter varandra och målet är att förstöra fiendens bas med hjälp av spelmekanik och spelmål. Det finns flera fokuspunkter som ska visas för åskådaren. Därför används ett dedikerat åskådargränssnitt i esport-scenen för att hjälpa förstå spelets utveckling medan åskådaren tittar på. Utvecklare vill möjligtvis marknadsföra sitt MOBA-spel i esport-scenen, men det kan vara svårt att veta vad åskådarna vill ha inom gränssnittet. Denna studie undersöker de viktigaste faktorerna som ska beaktas när man utformar ett åskådargränssnitt för en spelgenre; flerspelarspel online (MOBA) i en tävlingsinriktad miljö. Metoderna för att uppnå resultaten var litteraturstudier som inkluderar åskådarskap, kognitiva teorier och spelgränssnittsteorier. Analys av ett populärt MOBA-spel åskådargränssnitt och redesignade gränssnittet för spelet som heter League of Legends. Det omformade gränssnittet kommer att gå igenom en iterativ process med hjälp av feedback med hjälp av frågeformulär och intervjuer på målgruppen. Resultaten upptäckte faktorer som kunde ge åskådaren en bättre

The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2015) is a film that invites the audience to rediscover the gaze of nature that has been a part of cinema since its birth. Nature is often treated as a tool to broaden our understanding of the inner world of humans but it is rarely explored in the manner that allows us to deepen our understanding of nature. Ecocinema is, to a large extent, concerned with how films communicate environmental processes, although the place of nature within this field may be contentious. This thesis aims to explore how the gaze of nature is being constructed in The Revenant in order to expand our understanding of the position of nature in film. The approach involves a close reading of the film where a selection of scenes were rendered by psychoanalytic film theory within the context of ecocinema. Particular attention was given to the concept of spectatorship, where investigations into how cinema positions us as subjects are crucial. The gaze of nature can shape the identity of ecocinema and position itself as a function of the unconscious that allows viewers to process their traumas related to the ecological crisis we are facing. This gaze facilitates an emotional and cognitive encounter with repressed realities. Through the lens of this gaze, nature is positioned as a subject with its own function and identity, of which humans are not independent but merely a small part.

This thesis explores the roles of widowhood and sympathy in Henry James's short and long fiction. By the time James established himself as a writer of fiction, the culture of sentiment and its formation of sympathetic identification had become central to American and British writers. Critically, however, sympathy in James's fiction has been overlooked because he chose to write about rich expatriates and European nobility. James's pervasive use of widowed characters in his fiction suggests the he too participated in the same aesthetic agenda as William Dean Howells and George Eliot to evoke sympathy in their readers as a means of promoting class unity. In this thesis I show how James's use of widowed characters places him in the same sympathetic tradition as Howells and Eliot not by eliciting sympathy for themselves, but, rather, by awakening a sympathetic response from his readers for his protagonists seeking love. In chapter one I explore why James may have used so many widowed characters in his fiction. I cite the death of his cousin Minny Temple as a defining moment in his literary career and argue that he may have experienced an "emotional widowhood" after her early death. I also discuss the role of widows in his short fiction, which I suggest, is different from the role of widows in his novels. This chapter is biographical, yet provides important background for understanding why, more than any other author, James's fiction is replete with widowed characters. Chapter two explains the culture of sentiment of which James has been excluded. It explores the theories of David Hume and Adam Smith and their influence on the aesthetic principles defining Howells and Eliot's work. In this chapter I contend that James is indeed part of this sentimental tradition despite his renunciation of sentiment in his fiction because he tried to promote sympathy among his readers through his widowed characters. In chapter three I do close readings of The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Wings of the Dove (1902) and argue that these two texts best represent James's attempt at sympathetic writing.

The bodies of work that I have created during graduate school stem from my interest in mass media, culture studies and spectatorship in the digital era. My research engages digital technology and media studies to consider the ethics and ambivalence associated with spectatorship. Using traditional art mediums, I explore social and digital media, revealing tensions through representation and materiality. This translation from digital to analogue media is pivotal in all my work. Handmade objects introduce slippage and meaning as they break from the limiting format of the screen. This thesis will explore the research and content that inspired the creation of my work over the past three years and demonstrate how the resulting artworks create content and meaning.

This project is concerned with exploring the relationship between postconceptual dance and its state as object. As a practice-led research project it aims to do so both through the written thesis and through artistic practice, which is here presented as a series of video projects that extend representations of dance. Over five chapters I trace the permutation of the ‘object’ from choreographer to spectator, participant, editor, collector and ‘reframer’, arguing for the multiplicity of roles that choreographers, and by extension dancers, take on at the beginning of the 21st century. My interdisciplinary research draws from a variety of theoretical discourses including performance theory, visual cultures and critical theory, and is therefore both relevant to the field of dance studies and beyond the discipline. Given the practice-led nature of the project, my aim has been to expand choreographic performance practices and to increases the range of ‘objects’ that can be considered dance. Therefore, the project resides in the gaps and tensions between practice and theory, performance and documentation, language and dance, text and movement, choreography and objecthood. Throughout I argue that post-conceptual dance operates within an extended field in which dancers and choreographers are expanding the boundaries of the art form, making dance relevant to a broader artistic, cultural, political and social context.

Nesta etnografia, o cinema japonês exibido na cidade de São Paulo entre as décadas de 1950 a 1980 é abordado a partir da memória de antigos freqüentadores das salas de cinema do bairro da Liberdade. O foco desta investigação são os significados locais atribuídos pelos públicos nikkei e não-nikkei aos filmes japoneses, às salas de cinema da Liberdade e à experiência de freqüentá-las. A experiência vivida é acionada pelo método da história de vida e ganha centralidade na análise por meio das reflexões suscitadas pela antropologia da experiência. / In this ethnography, the Japanese cinema which was shown in the city of São Paulo between 1950 and 1980 is evoked in the memories of old-time movie goers of the Liberdade district. This investigation focuses on the local meanings attributed by both nikkei and non-nikkei audiences to Japanese films, to Liberdades cinemas and to the experience of frequenting them. Lived experience, which is made accessible by the method of life history, becomes central to analysis in a reflexive process provoked by the anthropology of experience.

There is a current wave of interest in pornography as a vehicle for queer, feminist and lesbian activism. Examples include Dirty Diaries: Twelve Shorts of Feminist Porn (Engberg, Sweden, 2009), the Pornfilmfestival Berlin (2006-) and the members-only Club LASH in Stockholm (1995-). Based on ethnographic fieldwork designed around these cases, the purpose of the thesis is to account for, historicize and understand this transnational film culture and its politics and ethics. The fieldwork consists of interviews, questionnaires and participant observation, including participation as one of the filmmakers in Dirty Diaries. The thesis studies queer, feminist and lesbian pornography as an interpretive community. Meanings produced in this interpretive community are discussed as involving embodied spectatorial processes, different practices of participation in the film culture and their location in specific situations and contexts of production, distribution and reception. The thesis highlights a collective political fantasy about a safe space for sexual empowerment as the defining feature of this interpretive community. The figure of safe space is central in the fieldwork material, as well as throughout the film culture’s political and aesthetic legacies, which include second wave feminist insistence on sexual consciousness-raising, as well as the heated debates referred to as the Sex Wars. The political and aesthetic heterogeneity of the film culture is discussed in terms of a tension between affirmation and critique (de Lauretis, 1985). It is argued that the film culture functions both as an intimate public (Berlant, 2008) and as a counter public (Warner, 2002). Analyzing research subjects’ accounts in terms of embodied spectatorship (Sobchack, 2004, Williams, 2008), the thesis examines how queer, feminist and lesbian pornography shapes the embodied subjectivities of participants in this interpretive community and potentially forms part of processes of sexual empowerment.

This thesis seeks to investigate the ways in which late medieval English drama produces and theorises emotions, in order to engage with the complex nexus of ideas about the links between sensation, emotion, and cognition in contemporary philosophical and theologial thought. It contributes to broader considerations of the cultural work that religious drama performed in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England in the context of the ongoing debates concerning its theological and social relevance. Drawing on recent research in the cognitive sciences and the history of emotion, this thesis conceives of dramatic performances as passionate encounters between actors and audiences – encounters which do not only re-create biblical history as a sensual reality, but in which emotion becomes attached to signs and bodies through theatrical means. It suggests that the attention paid to the processes through which audiences become emotionally invested in a play challenges assumptions about biblical drama of the English towns as a negligible contribution to philosophical and theological thinking in the vernacular. The analysis is conducted against the background of medieval and modern conceptions of emotions as ethically and morally relevant phenomena at the intersection between body and reason, which is outlined in chapter one. Each of the four main chapters presents a detailed examination of a series of pageants or plays drawn mainly from the Chester and York cycles and the Towneley and N-Town collections. These are supplemented, on occasion, with analysis of individual plays from fragmentary cycles and collections. The examinations undertaken are placed against the devotional and intellectual backdrop of late medieval England, in order to demonstrate how dramatic performances of biblical subject matter engage with some of the central issues in the wider debate about the human body, soul, and intellect. The second chapter focuses on the creation of living images on the stage, and specifically on didactically relevant stage images, in the Towneley Processus Prophetarum, the Chester Moses and the Law, and the N-Town Moses. The third chapter shifts the focus to the performance of the Passion in the N-Town second Passion play and the York Crucifixio Christi, concentrating on the potential effects of the perception of physical violence on audience response. The subject of chapter four is the emotional behaviours and expressions accorded to the Virgin Mary in the Towneley and N-Town Crucifixion scenes, and those of her precursors, the mothers of the innocents, in the Digby and Coventry plays of the Massacre of the Inncocents. In chapter five, the analysis finally turns to dramatisations of the Resurrection, examining its realisation on stage in the Chester Skinners’ play, as well as staged responses to the event by the apostles and the Marys in the N-Town The Announcement to the Three Marys; Peter and John at the Sepulchre and the Towneley Thomas of India. These four central chapters pave the way for a summary, in the conclusion, of the central problematic underpinning this thesis: how the evocation of emotion in an audience is linked to embodiment in theatrical performance, and tied to a certain awareness, on the part of playwrights, of the popular biblical drama’s potential as a locus of philosophical-theological debate.

Smart film, a term coined by Jeffrey Sconce in his 2002 Screen article, “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film”, refers to a wave of controversial, contemporary American films characterised by irony, quirky black humour, deadpan performance and an observational, blank style. Apart from Sconce, there has been little theorisation on smart cinema within the field of American screen studies. This thesis redresses this gap by providing the first extended study on smart film. It draws on, and adds to, the framework provided by Sconce, via the examination of a particular ‘subset’ of smart films concerned with the representation of youth and adolescence. These specifically target a more adult, ‘smart’ niche audience, who derive pleasure from their ironic ‘cleverness’, and ‘arty’ sensibility. In particular, this project focuses on the way these films are differentiated from more mainstream narrative cinema by their generic, affective and ethical structures. Following Sconce, this thesis analyses the constituents of the ‘art of the smart’—of the aesthetic strategies that differentiate the smart youth film, and the modes of address that may encourage, or discourage, particular experiences of affectivity and ethical engagement in the films’ portrayals of their youthful, anti-heroic protagonists. This includes a discussion of their cinematic origins, their production contexts with specific reference to institutional shifts in American independent cinema, and the way their reception is particularly aligned to the cultural tastes and consumption patterns of ‘Generation X.’ This thesis argues that smart film necessitates the development of more far-reaching ways of theorising the intersection between cinema, genre and youth. It extends the current theorisation on melodrama and the teenpic by arguing that smart film incorporates stylistic and thematic features, which both intersect with these established generic modes for representing youth and the family, and, at the same time, reflect a paradigm shift away from them as a result of their emphasis on irony and black comedy. It explores the cultural significance of their representations of youth, and their familial relationships, and the way this relates to social and cinematic constructions of youth and the family over time. This draws particular attention to their engagement with more serious, socially relevant, and taboo acts of sexual transgression, and how this is problematically mediated by what may appear as an ‘inappropriate’ aesthetic of black comedy. Much of the distinction of smart youth films lies in the way they challenge normative modes of cinematic representation via their portrayals of youth, which combine psychological realism with blank, ironic affect. This has specific implications in terms of their spectatorship and reception, and leads to a central concern in this thesis to determine the ways in which irony and distanciation create ambivalent modes of engagement in these films. This is specifically examined in relation to character, drawing on the cognitive framework provided by Murray Smith’s “structure of sympathy”, and the analysis of their ironic, anti-naturalistic strategies of performance, which complicate a realist construction of character subjectivity, authenticity, and allegiance. However, this thesis also argues that an astute examination of smart film’s formal content and narrative construction often reveals key moments of sincerity, character authenticity, and avenues of empathy that may allow for a momentary emotional connection with character and the filmic world. The final chapter focuses on the ethical dimension of these films, their relationship with nihilism, and the question of whether youth films have a responsibility to offer positive role models and ethical guidance. It discusses the way that irony functions as a strategic gesture, which can offer incisive moral and social criticisms, but is complicated by the lack of cues for how to morally judge, or emotionally relate to, characters and their actions. Overall, smart films’ ambivalence suggests that the spectator may be required to extend their paradigms of response, particularly in the way these films articulate their ‘taboo’ content. This necessitates an examination of the dialogic, intersubjective process of the way the materiality of the film intersects with the socialised, contextual body of the spectator to embrace the possibility of a more active, intellectual spectatorship. Specifically, this incorporates an evaluation of the social cognitions, epistemology, and pleasures derived from the contemporary circulation and comprehension of irony, and how this can generate an understanding of smart film in relation to their affective and ethical regimes. Finally, this thesis concludes with an examination of the influence of smart film on television and current post-ironic trends in American cinema.

Smart film, a term coined by Jeffrey Sconce in his 2002 Screen article, “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film”, refers to a wave of controversial, contemporary American films characterised by irony, quirky black humour, deadpan performance and an observational, blank style. Apart from Sconce, there has been little theorisation on smart cinema within the field of American screen studies. This thesis redresses this gap by providing the first extended study on smart film. It draws on, and adds to, the framework provided by Sconce, via the examination of a particular ‘subset’ of smart films concerned with the representation of youth and adolescence. These specifically target a more adult, ‘smart’ niche audience, who derive pleasure from their ironic ‘cleverness’, and ‘arty’ sensibility. In particular, this project focuses on the way these films are differentiated from more mainstream narrative cinema by their generic, affective and ethical structures. Following Sconce, this thesis analyses the constituents of the ‘art of the smart’—of the aesthetic strategies that differentiate the smart youth film, and the modes of address that may encourage, or discourage, particular experiences of affectivity and ethical engagement in the films’ portrayals of their youthful, anti-heroic protagonists. This includes a discussion of their cinematic origins, their production contexts with specific reference to institutional shifts in American independent cinema, and the way their reception is particularly aligned to the cultural tastes and consumption patterns of ‘Generation X.’ This thesis argues that smart film necessitates the development of more far-reaching ways of theorising the intersection between cinema, genre and youth. It extends the current theorisation on melodrama and the teenpic by arguing that smart film incorporates stylistic and thematic features, which both intersect with these established generic modes for representing youth and the family, and, at the same time, reflect a paradigm shift away from them as a result of their emphasis on irony and black comedy. It explores the cultural significance of their representations of youth, and their familial relationships, and the way this relates to social and cinematic constructions of youth and the family over time. This draws particular attention to their engagement with more serious, socially relevant, and taboo acts of sexual transgression, and how this is problematically mediated by what may appear as an ‘inappropriate’ aesthetic of black comedy. Much of the distinction of smart youth films lies in the way they challenge normative modes of cinematic representation via their portrayals of youth, which combine psychological realism with blank, ironic affect. This has specific implications in terms of their spectatorship and reception, and leads to a central concern in this thesis to determine the ways in which irony and distanciation create ambivalent modes of engagement in these films. This is specifically examined in relation to character, drawing on the cognitive framework provided by Murray Smith’s “structure of sympathy”, and the analysis of their ironic, anti-naturalistic strategies of performance, which complicate a realist construction of character subjectivity, authenticity, and allegiance. However, this thesis also argues that an astute examination of smart film’s formal content and narrative construction often reveals key moments of sincerity, character authenticity, and avenues of empathy that may allow for a momentary emotional connection with character and the filmic world. The final chapter focuses on the ethical dimension of these films, their relationship with nihilism, and the question of whether youth films have a responsibility to offer positive role models and ethical guidance. It discusses the way that irony functions as a strategic gesture, which can offer incisive moral and social criticisms, but is complicated by the lack of cues for how to morally judge, or emotionally relate to, characters and their actions. Overall, smart films’ ambivalence suggests that the spectator may be required to extend their paradigms of response, particularly in the way these films articulate their ‘taboo’ content. This necessitates an examination of the dialogic, intersubjective process of the way the materiality of the film intersects with the socialised, contextual body of the spectator to embrace the possibility of a more active, intellectual spectatorship. Specifically, this incorporates an evaluation of the social cognitions, epistemology, and pleasures derived from the contemporary circulation and comprehension of irony, and how this can generate an understanding of smart film in relation to their affective and ethical regimes. Finally, this thesis concludes with an examination of the influence of smart film on television and current post-ironic trends in American cinema.