The Looking Glass

The outbreak of a novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 disease has meant that the world has had to take precautionary public health measures to help eliminate the spread of the virus (Heymann and Shindo 2020) however this pathogen threat can also translate into willingness to distance ourselves from others on a psychological level. Will the ongoing pandemic of Coronavirus affect attitudes toward foreign nationalities? The COVID-19 virus outbreak has dominated the news and the constant processing of information about it can be highly arousing and eliciting anxiety (Al-Rabiaah et al. 2020), thereby influencing the level of any potential prejudice. Research by Sorokowski et al. (2020) has examined whether Polish and UK participants’ media exposure predicts their level of prejudice toward four nationalities. China and Italy were used, representing one culturally close and one culturally distant nation with a large outbreak of the virus, and Hungary and Mongolia, representing one culturally c...

JAMIE BARRETT As anyone that has heard of genetic engineering or artificial intelligence can attest, ethics are often messy, with a grey area for every thin line. But the difference between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” is often very clear among books, films, and games. Knowing what exactly it is that sets apart the heroes from the villains may help us to navigate these grey areas. There are many definitions of a “hero” or a “villain”, but starting from the basics and using examples to derive a definition will help us discover why the defining traits matter, as well as what those traits are. Protagonists - the leading character or characters - are ubiquitous in literature. Someone needs to be there to drive the story forward, for the story to be told about. Antagonists, meanwhile, create conflict and challenge our hero. Automatically describing protagonists as “heroes” in this way may be a misconception, however - let us explore further and find out. In tabletop roleplaying games,...