Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Caroline Millar, Visiting Scholar, Queen’s Business School (Organisation, Work and Leadership), Queen’s University Belfast

The core premise of feminism is this: women can do anything. And yes, these days in developed economies, women without children earn about the same as men. The problem is not the opportunities available to them. It’s the opportunities that disappear as women become mothers.

This disconnect between paid work and care work is evident. In my research on work and motherhood, I have often found that organisations give little thought to the tensions that arise between women’s work and care identities.

A 2025 overview of how care is understood in feminist economic debates recognises the fundamental value of unpaid and underpaid care. But it doesn’t discuss how to reconcile paid work and care.

The unpaid work women do in the home alongside their paid work leads to reduced participation in the workforce, income inequality between the genders, time-poverty, and increased stress for women.

The challenges and constraints that women encounter in the workplace have long been recognised. But caring is also often viewed in a negative way – something that interrupts and stymies their participation in paid work. Motherhood is frequently framed as something that curtails ambition and income.

In contrast, paid work is valued because it generates financial resources. These perspectives speak to the outdated concept of the “ideal worker”, and the capitalist priorities of productivity and efficiency that underpin this idea.

Across academic research, financial resources are often seen as a means to buy exemption from some aspects of motherhood. Other research concedes that caring for older relatives can be rewarding, but then cites all the problems that caregivers may experience.

In short, it is almost impossible to find caring for children framed in a positive way. One paper positions care work as “responsibilities” and “obligations” that fall on women. But this framing is directly at odds with how the women I have spoken to understood their role as mothers: they talked fondly of their children, attended their needs and enjoyed spending time with them.

Rediscovering the value of care

The problem for both feminism and capitalism is that mothers must routinely combine paid work and caring responsibilities in order to make a living. This reflects the tensions that the research identifies but does not resolve: women are navigating systems that position care as a disruption rather than an important and valued form of work and identity.

Older women often recount their career success through a lens of sacrifice, while many younger parents resist long-hours cultures, experimenting with ways to share work and care. What this suggests is that there is a need for employers to have a more nuanced appreciation of parenting identities.

However, work structures often still rely on outdated breadwinner/caregiver identities – dictating how parents juggle paid work and care, and limiting the space for more flexible hybrid roles.

A model where the mother becomes the breadwinner and the father the caregiver is not ideal either. It may appear progressive, but in practice care work continues to be pressed to the margins and the financial precarity it leads to is not acknowledged or fixed. It is simply transferred to the male caregiver.

Breadwinner/caregiver norms are just not suited to society and family dynamics any more. But they can be dismantled and replaced by hybrid roles that allow people to combine work and care identities.

While the tensions of work and motherhood have not disappeared, other groups have emerged and are developing momentum. For example, fathers who understand and value their parenting role are prompting a groundswell of change.

In the UK, campaigns such as Parenting Out Loud, as well as demands for extended, government-funded paternity leave (for example, six weeks of leave paid at 90% of income), seek to enable fathers to care and bond with their children without worrying about work pressures. These movements imagine a future where care is equally valued and recognised for its importance to society.

Governments, employers and trade unions have an opportunity to create work cultures that enable parents to do their jobs well at the same time as caring. Structures that value both work and care will allow everyone to contribute to the economy while actively participating in their caregiving roles.

Acknowledging an employee’s care identity needs to extend far beyond workplaces begrudgingly accommodating a mother working from home to care for a sick toddler. It involves enabling and trusting parents to respond to routine parenting challenges in an appropriate way – without penalty or judgment. For example, a dad being able to take emergency leave to respond to his child’s sickness, or a mum arriving late to work after supporting a teenager who is stressed by exams.

Funded, high-quality and reliable care infrastructure is essential, alongside flexible working. The persistent motherhood wage penalty is a good barometer to see how things are changing: interventions that normalise combining work and care will narrow this pay gap, and give a clear indication of what works.

Caroline Millar received PhD funding from Department for the Economy (NI).

– ref. More joy, less juggle? Why workplaces should get on board with the value of care – https://theconversation.com/more-joy-less-juggle-why-workplaces-should-get-on-board-with-the-value-of-care-280179

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mags Lesiak, PhD Researcher in Psychological Criminology, University of Cambridge

Kimberly Milne was 28 when she climbed over the barrier of a motorway bridge and jumped to her death. That night, witnesses saw her cowering from her husband, Lee Milne, in a retail park in Dundee, as he trapped her against a wall. CCTV footage showed her trying to get away while he shouted, drove a car at her and pulled her back into his orbit.

In the year before her death, he had choked her, dragged her by the hair, hit her until she fell and lost consciousness, and apologised, promising he was “not that type of guy”. He went through her phone, controlled her movements and, according to messages shown in court, created a situation where leaving felt impossible: “How can I leave him if he’s saying he’s going to do himself in without me?”

In a first-of-its-kind case in Scotland, Lee Milne has now been held criminally responsible for his wife’s suicide. The 39-year-old was convicted of culpable homicide and sentenced to eight years in custody.

In Spain, Noelia Castillo, 25, underwent euthanasia after a long and highly contested legal battle. In early adulthood, she reported multiple incidents of sexual assault. Days after being gang-raped, she attempted suicide by jumping from a building. She survived, but with irreversible paraplegia, chronic physical pain, neurological damage and profound psychological suffering.

Her euthanasia was legally granted on the basis of that condition. But the question remains: if the injuries that made her life unbearable followed a suicide attempt triggered by sexual violence, can her death be understood without that violence?

Homicide has long been treated as the most extreme outcome of abuse. But recent evidence suggests that abuse-related suicide may be at least as common, if not more so. Yet it remains far less recognised in law, policy and public understanding.

In 2022, an England-wide study found that people who had ever experienced intimate partner violence were almost three times as likely to have attempted suicide in the previous year, even after adjusting for other adversities.

Data in England and Wales suggests that what might be termed “perpetrator-produced suicide” (where sustained abuse produces the conditions in which a person ends their own life) is not uncommon. The Domestic Homicide Project, a research project led by the National Police Chiefs’ Council, recorded 98 suspected suicides following domestic abuse between April 1 2023 and March 31 2024. This was more than the 80 intimate partner homicides recorded, overtaking them for the second year in a row.

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Read more:
Are women more safe today in England and Wales than they were in the past – or less? What the evidence shows

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This suggests that fatal outcomes linked to domestic abuse may be being categorised as individual acts, rather than perpetrator-produced harm. The result is underrecognition of abusers’ role in their victims’ suicide. There have only been five prosecutions of this kind in England and Wales, leading to just one confirmed conviction for manslaughter.

In Kimberly Milne’s case, the court found that sustained physical and psychological abuse was a significant contributing factor in her death. The judge concluded that Lee Milne’s actions drove his wife to a point of despair, from which she took her own life.

In Castillo’s case, the question of responsibility remains unresolved. The violence that preceded her suicide attempt and ultimately led to her death sits outside the frame of legal accountability. The law breaks these events apart: the assault is treated as a crime, the suicide attempt as her own act, and the later death as a medical decision, rather than recognising how violence can set the whole chain in motion.

‘Choice’ under coercion

To understand the link between suicide and domestic violence or coercive control, we must ask: what does it mean to “choose” to end one’s life, when that choice is made under coercion or threat?

My research explores weaponised attachment, where perpetrators of abuse deliberately use emotional bonds to control their victims. They form attachment through grooming, trauma-sharing and vulnerability, and then use that attachment to influence decisions about whether to stay, leave or seek help. Coercion often operates by shaping how decisions are made – narrowing the options a person can see and making the choice to leave feel impossible.

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Read more:
How domestic abusers use emotional bonding to control their victims – new study

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Research in behavioural economics and cognitive psychology shows that people make choices within the set of options they perceive as available, not the set that objectively exists. Under threat and loss, people seek more risk and are more likely to choose extreme options to escape unpleasant states.

When coercion shapes what a person sees as their obligations and options, a resulting decision cannot be treated as fully self-authored. It is made, but under conditions structured by another. In cases of perpetrator-produced suicide, the issue is not simply whether a victim “chose” to die, but whether that choice was made with the authority required for responsibility. The same mechanism operates in cases where victims are said to have “consented” to abuse.

Justice for victims

This conviction could change how criminal justice systems approach perpetrator-produced suicide. It could lead to more homicide-style investigations where suicide follows coercive control. In investigations, this would mean greater emphasis on patterns of abuse over time, rather than isolating the final event.

For this shift to be meaningful, changes are needed. First, there is a need for better recording of perpetrator-produced suicides, which are currently fragmented or likely misclassified as individual deaths. Second, what police consider as evidence must expand to include patterns of coercion, digital traces and how the relationship unfolded over time, rather than focusing only on what happened in the final moments.

Third, the law needs to be clearer about when sustained abuse leads to responsibility for a death, moving beyond vague labels like “vulnerability” and focusing on how a person’s options were restricted.

Finally, risk assessment practices should move away from predicting isolated incidents towards identifying coercive environments that generate escalating harm. Without these changes, this landmark ruling risks remaining an exceptional case, rather than a foundation for future accountability.

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If you’re struggling with suicidal thoughts, the following services can provide you with support: In the UK and Ireland – call Samaritans UK at 116 123. In the US – call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or IMAlive at 1-800-784-2433. In Australia – call Lifeline Australia at 13 11 14. In other countries – visit IASP or Suicide.org to find a helpline in your country.

Mags Lesiak does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Man convicted of causing his wife’s suicide – why this is a landmark moment for abuse victims – https://theconversation.com/man-convicted-of-causing-his-wifes-suicide-why-this-is-a-landmark-moment-for-abuse-victims-280480

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Carl Singleton, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Stirling

Football fans, broadcasters and even head coaches have been complaining this season about excessive time-wasting spoiling the flow of the men’s game.

In the Premier League, the proportion of a match where the ball is in play is at a near-record low. Football’s world governing body Fifa has a target of 60 minutes of ball-in-play per game. Yet two Premier League matches this season had only just above 45 minutes of action – less than half the total match time.

There are numerous factors explaining this decrease. One is the length of time players are taking over each corner, throw-in and free-kick. Repeated injury stoppages (including some that are allegedly faked by players seeking to delay a game) are also blamed – along with lengthy decision-making by each game’s video assistant referee (VAR).

Video reviews have increased the number and length of stoppages, particularly for penalties, red cards and goals. There is now a benefit to staying down after contact in the penalty area while officials check for possible infringements. What might once have been a marginal appeal can trigger a lengthy interruption that, according to our research, is not always fully accounted for in the time added by the referee at the end of each half.

With concerns mounting about how time-wasting could turn off viewers of the men’s World Cup in North America this summer, new rules are being introduced allowing referees to start five-second countdowns at throw-ins and goal-kicks. Teams may also face sanction if their substituted players take longer than ten seconds to leave the field of play.

So, will this make a difference to the amount of action fans see this summer?

Our research, published in the Journal of Sports Economics, suggests no amount of rule-tightening will solve football’s issue with time-wasters until referees are properly supported to withstand the psychological pressure placed on them by players, team officials and fans during each game.

We found that the time taken up by stoppages is often added inaccurately, depending on unconscious biases of referees who alone decide how much time is added. This can especially benefit home teams with stronger support in the stadium.

The “natural experiment” of playing football without fans during the COVID pandemic showed that referees are susceptible to the social pressure exerted by stadium crowds, especially for more subjective or marginal calls like awarding yellow cards and added time.

Football’s early history

Football has always been played in continuous rather than active time. Unlike sports where the clock stops, football absorbs interruptions rather than isolating them. This design goes back to the sport’s early history.

When the match length was standardised in the 19th century, a simple running clock was practical. One interpretation is that 90 minutes became the standard because it reliably produced 60 minutes of ball-in-play action. By the 1890s, this length of match was ingrained in the official rules by the International Football Association Board (Ifab).

The concept of added time was formally adopted in 1891 and applied at the referee’s discretion. It was – and still is – supposed to correct the most obvious losses of time during the 45 minutes of each half.

But added time is not measured mechanically. It is estimated by humans who often apply rules of thumb under pressure from players, managers and spectators.

At the last World Cup in 2022, Fifa extended the amount of added time referees could add at the end of each half in an attempt to discourage players from time wasting. It came close to delivering Fifa’s 60-minute target for ball-in-play. But it came at the expense of games that seemed to go on forever.

Decisions were not the same

We analysed the 2022 World Cup and 2024 European Championship for differences in how referees added time on at the end of the first and second halves. According to Fifa and Ifab, added time should be applied consistently across both halves, since the rules governing stoppage time are identical.

In practice, these decisions were not the same. Referees added on substantially more time in the second half than the first – in part because of the rising stakes of each game as it nears a conclusion. These patterns were stronger at the World Cup, which probably related to Fifa’s edict to increase ball-in-play time.

In particular, we found that referees allowed substantially more stoppage time in tight second halves, while first halves in close (low-scoring) contests were sometimes cut short. This can advantage the trailing team in second halves, giving them a greater chance of getting back to parity since the rate of goal-scoring generally increases as football matches near their conclusion.

Added time is often framed as a technical adjustment. But it is truly where football’s human element is exposed.

Should football introduce a stop-clock?

Does this mean football should follow the path of sports like basketball, American football and rugby and adopt a stop-clock, ending each half when the official time expires (with stopped-clock pauses along the way)? The appeal might seem obvious. But it would also change the nature of football.

We believe matches would grow even longer, interruptions would multiply and lengthen, and the continuous flow that gives the game its rhythm and tension would be under even greater threat.

The temptation to factor in television commercial windows might also grow. This summer’s World Cup will already include three-minute hydration breaks in the middle of every half to mitigate high temperatures in games.

Ultimately, added time is a reminder of what football is: a sport played in running time that cannot be perfectly measured. Referees will never be fully consistent, because the moments they arbitrate are charged with uncertainty – despite VAR’s best (and worst) efforts.

But the game’s authorities are still right to be addressing the issue of time wasting ahead of this summer’s World Cup. One of football’s great attractions is the pace at which it is played. Lose this and the game becomes a lot less beautiful.

Carl Singleton receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (UKRI). He is affiliated with the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research through the IZA@LISER network.

David Butler and Robert Butler do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Football is being spoiled by time-wasting – what can be done ahead of the World Cup? – https://theconversation.com/football-is-being-spoiled-by-time-wasting-what-can-be-done-ahead-of-the-world-cup-280501

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alexander Bor, Post-doctoral Researcher, Democracy Institute, Central European University

Hungarian voters have overwhelmingly rejected the 16-year rule of authoritarian strongman Viktor Orbán, electing his one-time political ally, Péter Magyar, to replace him. Magyar’s Tisza party has secured a two-thirds majority in parliament and therefore a supermajority. This will allow the new government to roll back some of the illiberal measures introduced Orbán governments over the years. Magyar has said that he intends to work for a “free, European” Hungary, which would reverse his predecessor’s rejection of Brussels.

One of Magyar’s key election promises was to restore press freedom, and reform state-run media, which, under Orbán, had become a powerful tool for distributing disinformation.

This huge win for Tisza followed a campaign marred by what many foreign monitors claimed were unprecedented levels of disinformation, foreign interference and government propaganda. In fact, the result may come as a surprise to those who believe that in information autocracies such as Hungary, where access to news and political discussion is controlled by what have been dubbed “spin dictators”, election results can easily be controlled by the ruling party.

Orbán is a textbook example of an information autocrat. The propaganda arsenal deployed by his ruling Fidesz party in this campaign was as formidable as ever. Pro-government election billboards blanketed the country, financed not just by Fidesz but by the government itself and by powerful publicly owned agencies such as the state energy conglomerate MVM, by the Magyar Nemzeti Bank (MNB) – Hungary’s central bank – and by a host of government-aligned NGOs.

State communication channels were repurposed wholesale for partisan messaging. Pro-government media and troll networks amplified existential warnings about the opposition.

But Fidesz’s tactics went further than messaging. Elaborate theatrics were deployed to scare or influence voters. A bomb was allegedly defused in Serbia that had supposedly targeted Hungarian election infrastructure. Ukrainian cash and gold assets were seized on spurious grounds concerning some shadowy threat from Ukraine’s “war mafia”. Each spectacle seemed designed to lend weight to Fidesz’s warnings about external interference.

Fidesz attempted to fire up its electoral base by framing the election as an existential struggle for Hungary itself. Since it was first elected in 2010, Fidesz has relied almost exclusively on this strategy, painting its challenger as a danger to the country, and turning elections into a matter of life and death.

But this time around, Fidesz has learned to its cost that it was insufficient to stick to the playbook that has kept it in power for 16 years. Things have changed – most notably the Hungarian economy, which has essentially flatlined since 2022, with near-zero real GDP growth compounded by the highest inflation in the EU. The second big shift has been political – the consolidation of the opposition behind a single credible challenger to Orbán. Previously, Fidesz had been able easily defeat the fragmented and ineffective coalitions it had previously faced.

Orbán’s failing appeal

Despite Orbán’s considerable arsenal of information manipulation tools, his election pitch appears to have been broadly rejected. This appears to have been a failure of strategy, unexpected from such a wily political veteran. In his annual “state of the nation” address in February, Orbán promised more of the same, to protect Hungary from change and outside threats such as from Brussels.

But that’s a pitch to true believers, not to the wavering or undecided. There was no attempt to build bridges to new groups or attempt to extend his electoral coalition.

Having watched Fidesz govern all this time, I believe that answer is that the voter manipulation system the party built built over the years is poorly suited for this purpose. Persuading new voters to come round to your side is hard and requires credibility, good arguments and strong messages, none of which the government has any more. Much easier to focus on fear caused by slander, misinformation and the moral panic button.

This clearly didn’t work. In February, a survey found that only 23% of Hungarians believed the government’s central claim that victory for Magyar and his Tisza party would result in Hungary being dragged into a foreign war, a theme hammered on by Orbán in his state of the nation speech. Even among Fidesz voters, nearly half – 43% – said they didn’t believe this.

Political science literature is clear on the risks of negative campaigning helps explain why. Attack messages can attract attention – but their effectiveness hinges on whether voters find them credible. Dishonest attacks can boomerang, eroding trust in the attacker rather than the target. And this clearly happened in Hungary in this election campaign.

All of which points to a broader lesson about information control in illiberal regimes: it can easily be overstated. Hungary’s 2026 election has revealed that an information autocracy can have its limits. And in the face of a faltering economy and a united and credible opposition, Orbán’s campaign reached those limits – and failed as a result.

Alexander Bor receives funding from European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

– ref. Viktor Orbán’s election loss shows the limits of his propaganda machine – https://theconversation.com/viktor-orbans-election-loss-shows-the-limits-of-his-propaganda-machine-280439

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jamie Torrance, Lecturer and Researcher in Psychology, Swansea University

“Welcome bonus: get 150% up to £150 on your first deposit”. It’s the kind of offer that greets anyone who visits a British online betting site. What it doesn’t say is that if you decide to spend £50 on this offer, you’d need to stake an additional £750 of your own money before any winnings could be withdrawn.

Recent research by colleagues and I asked nearly 600 UK bettors to work out the true cost of exactly that kind of offer. Nearly everyone got it wrong, underestimating the real amount often by hundreds of pounds.

Financial inducements, “free” bets, deposit matches and welcome bonuses are a standard part of signing up with almost any UK operator. Their behavioural harms are well established. They encourage people to gamble more often, push bettors towards riskier wagers and are linked to chasing losses. The heaviest effects tend to fall on those already experiencing gambling harm.

But behaviour is only half the story. Harm can also stem from something more basic: not understanding what an offer actually requires of you in the first place. That’s where wagering requirements come in – the rules saying you have to bet the bonus amount a certain number of times over before any winnings attached to it can be withdrawn.

Until recently, these multipliers could be as high as 50 times the bonus. Since January 2026, the UK Gambling Commission has capped them at ten times and required operators to make their terms clearer. It’s a meaningful step. But it stops short of requiring operators to show consumers what that ten times multiplier actually means in pounds and pence, and that omission turns out to matter.

Our research

We ran an online experiment with 585 adults who had gambled in the past year. Each participant saw a realistic welcome bonus modelled on a real 2025 promotion, fully compliant with the 2026 rules. Half saw it in the standard industry format. The other half saw the same offer with one addition: a three-sentence example spelling out what the 10 times wagering requirement actually meant for a £50 deposit.

The correct answer was £750. The median estimate was £500. More than 90% of participants underestimated the true cost. Only around 5% got it right.

The £500 figure is telling. It is exactly what you would get if you applied the 10-times multiplier to the £50 deposit but ignored the 150% bonus on top. Most people understood part of the calculation but missed the compounding effect.

Matched bonuses combined with wagering multipliers are among the most common inducements in the UK. Together, they appear to obscure the true cost in a systematic way.

Crucially, this misunderstanding was not confined to any one group. People at low risk of gambling harm miscalculated at almost the same rate as those at high risk. The issue is not that some bettors are bad at maths. It is that the offer itself is structured to make the true cost hard to calculate.

When we added the worked example, attractiveness ratings dropped significantly. Once people could see what the offer required, they found it far less appealing.

What bettors told us

Participants’ responses revealed three consistent themes. Many described the offers as manipulative, using words such as “predatory” and “deceptive”. Others argued they were economically worthless, with one participant saying “99% of people will fail to benefit”. Many also called for stronger regulation.

Several made a comparison worth taking seriously: gambling inducements, they argued, should follow the same upfront disclosure rules as credit products. One 23-year-old said wagering requirements should be shown on the advert itself, “similar to how interest rates need to be shown clearly on sites offering loans”.

They may have a point. The Annual Percentage Rate was introduced in UK consumer credit precisely because people couldn’t compare loan products when costs were hidden behind different headline formats. Gambling inducements present an almost identical problem.

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Why people are watching livestreams of influencers gambling – and how it could be fuelling addiction

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Capping wagering requirements at ten times is welcome. But it’s not the same as making costs visible. Even a reduced multiplier still requires a multi-step calculation, and an understanding of compounding that many people do not have.

A worked example, shown in the same print size as the headline offer, would take only a few lines. It would not ban anything or restrict choice. But our study suggests it would change how people evaluate these offers. Denmark already requires something similar. Australia, Spain, Belgium and Italy have gone further, banning inducements to new customers altogether.

Worked examples are not a complete solution. But as a low-cost addition to existing Gambling Commission rules, they could help consumers see these offers for what they are before deciding whether to take them up.

Jamie Torrance has received, in the last three years: (1) Open access publication funding from Gambling Research Exchange Ontario (GREO), (2) Conference travel and accommodation funding from the Academic Forum for the Study of Gambling (AFSG), (3) A minor exploratory research grant from the ASFG and GREO, (4) Seed Grant funding from the International Centre for Responsible Gambling (ICRG), (5) Studentship funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), (6) Rapid evidence review (RER) funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), (7) Policy Fellowship funding from UKRI, and (8) A Gambling Harms Research and Innovation Partnership (GHRIP) award from UKRI.

– ref. Gamblers don’t understand ‘free bets’ – and the costs can be huge – https://theconversation.com/gamblers-dont-understand-free-bets-and-the-costs-can-be-huge-279873

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alan Stewart, Senior Lecturer in Games Development, University of Portsmouth

When thinking back to the gaming experiences of your youth, it’s easy to get misty-eyed. Depending on your generation, you might yearn for Dizzy on the Commodore 64, marathon GoldenEye sessions with friends or your first Minecraft world.

And games publishers know this. Recognising the nostalgic appeal of games, there has been a recent slew of re-releases of beloved classics. Tomb Raider Remastered (2024), Croc: Legend of the Gobbos (2025) and System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster (2025) all show publishers know how to capitalise on nostalgia.

Our research into player engagement frequently encounters nostalgia as a key driver of player satisfaction. Nostalgia is both potent and delicate: powerful when done right, disappointing when not. So, why do some games nail nostalgia while others fail?

Cultural theorist Svetlana Boym has argued that two different types of nostalgia exist: restorative and reflective.
Restorative nostalgia is about conquering the past – a belief that what was lost can, once again, be found, with enough effort. Whatever your political views, there’s no denying that the slogan “Make America Great Again” is a clear encapsulation of a restorative nostalgic philosophy.

The Blizzard Arcade Collection (2021) is a good example of a game design underpinned by this restorative philosophy. Here, players can experience original versions of Blizzard’s early work with visual effects applied that mimic the effect of playing the games on old, grainy televisions from the 1990s.

By contrast, reflective nostalgia is less interested in accurately recreating the past and keener, instead, on recapturing a remembered feeling. For instance, instead of yearning for the specific place in which they grew up, a reflective nostalgic may realise it’s the sense of carelessness they felt as a kid they yearn for – not their actual hometown.

Shovel Knight’s (2014) design adheres to this philosophy wonderfully. Synergising a smorgasbord of inspirations from original NES games – a world map akin to Super Mario Bros 3’s (1988), themed bosses like those seen in Mega Man (1987) – it feels less like a specific game a millennial might’ve played as a child and more like their fragmented memories of playing games in the late 1980s.

Shovel Knight has sold well since its release and, as of 2026, has made an estimated US$12.5m (£9.3m) in revenue. This shows there’s a hunger for nostalgic content among players. But, this being the case, why aren’t all re-releases cash cows? The answer relates to the above nostalgic philosophies.

Nostalgic inconsistency in remasters

If Blizzard Arcade Collection and Shovel Knight represent a strict adherence to their respective nostalgic philosophical underpinnings, then Croc: Legend of the Gobbos Remastered (2025) serves as the antithesis. Croc is certainly not a bad attempt at a remaster, but its nostalgic inconsistency dampens its emotional impact.

Take the art direction. By dropping Croc’s original pixelated textures, the remake signals that it isn’t aiming for perfect authenticity. Instead, it reflects a nostalgic approach that priorities reinterpretation over faithful recreation. Some critics even argued that the new textures look flatter, losing the illusion of depth that the original textures created.

At other times the game adheres rigidly to the original source material, aligning it with a restorative nostalgic philosophy in ways that feel incredibly dated. The anticlimactic pause screens that appear upon defeating a boss – who seems remarkably unaffected by the beating it just took – is one such example. So, too, is the lack of level scenery – indefensible in an era of high-powered PCs capable of rendering vastly more complex environments.

Personally, we’d have enjoyed a re-release of Croc that more wholeheartedly committed to the reflective philosophy – updating textures, sure, but also level scenery and boss animations. Doing so might have helped to better capture the joy we felt when playing the original even if it meant deviating more widely from the source material.

It’s true that dissatisfaction at the choices made when updating beloved cultural artefacts is nothing new though. Indeed, Boym cites the restoration of the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes as a potent symbol of this. In preserving Michaelangelo’s original work, the restoration team were lambasted for removing aspects that made the original artwork so special.

It’s likely you’ll always disappoint some when restoring a historical relic. But if more developers commit wholeheartedly to a nostalgic philosophy when remaking their games, we’d argue they’d more effectively nail nostalgia and, in turn, leave players more satisfied.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Video game nostalgia is powerful – but it only works if developers understand the psychology behind it – https://theconversation.com/video-game-nostalgia-is-powerful-but-it-only-works-if-developers-understand-the-psychology-behind-it-277421

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Heidi McIlvenny, PhD Candidate, School of Biological Sciences, Queen’s University Belfast

I spent last summer wading through seagrass meadows across Northern Ireland, from the sheltered waters of Strangford Lough to the exposed coast at Waterfoot Bay. I was collecting seagrass leaves and testing them for nitrogen pollution. Every meadow I visited sits inside a marine protected area – a stretch of sea that’s been given legal protection to safeguard the wildlife living there. And every single one was polluted beyond the limit for healthy seagrass.

Seagrass meadows are among the most valuable habitats in our coastal waters. They store carbon, nurture young fish and shellfish, stabilise sediment and buffer shorelines from storms. They are also woven into the heritage of coastal communities who have fished and foraged around them for generations. But they are disappearing worldwide, and nitrogen pollution from farming, sewage and urban runoff is one of the biggest reasons why.

It’s easy to assume that designating an area as “protected” keeps the habitat inside it safe. My research shows that, for seagrass, this assumption is dangerously wrong. Physical protection from anchors and dredging means little when pollution flows freely across the boundary from the land.

What matters most for seagrass is not lines drawn on a map, but what happens on shore.

To understand how much nitrogen pollution seagrass is absorbing, we can measure nitrogen content in the leaves themselves. Seagrass continuously takes up nutrients from the surrounding water, so the chemistry of its tissue works like a long-term pollution record. And my results showed that every meadow in Northern Ireland exceeded the pollution limit.

But knowing the pollution level is only useful if you know how much is too much, and what it means for the health of the meadow. To answer that, we pulled together data from 13 countries across the northern hemisphere and found a clear pattern.

When nitrogen in the leaves rises above 1.8%, seagrass starts to suffer and loose plant growth. Above 2.8%, the decline accelerates rapidly, and in this danger zone small increases in pollution trigger disproportionately large plant losses. Think of it as a traffic light system: green is below 1.8% where meadows can cope; amber is between 1.8% and 2.8%, where managers should be watching closely and acting to reduce pollution; and red is above 2.8%, where urgent intervention is needed before the damage becomes irreversible.

The starkest example of a meadow in the red zone comes from Dundrum Bay, on the County Down coast. According to government assessments, it’s healthy. But my data tells a different story. Nitrogen levels here were nearly double the pollution limit of 1.8%. Surveys over the past decade paint an even bleaker picture: where lush meadows once thrived, dense mats of green algae now smother what little remains. This meadow has likely crossed a tipping point, and may never recover even if we clean up the pollution.

A few miles up the coast we see a very different picture. At Castle Espie, beside a wetland reserve in Strangford Lough, a seagrass meadow is thriving. The plants here belong to the same genetic population as struggling meadows elsewhere in the lough. But the difference is that the reserve’s reedbeds and willows act as natural filters, cleaning the water that runs from the land before it reaches the sea.

The same species with the same level of marine protection, but dramatically different outcomes. The difference is what happens on land. But current monitoring methods aren’t designed to spot this kind of trouble before it’s too late.

An early warning system

Current monitoring methods tend to measure how much seagrass is still there. But by the time a meadow visibly shrinks, the damage may already be done. The tissue chemistry approach we used picks up stress signals much earlier, while there is still time to act.

The nitrogen thresholds my research identifies could give environmental agencies a practical early warning system: meadows at or above 1.8% need closer watching, and those at or above 2.8% need urgent action to reduce nutrient pollution from catchments.

Seagrass meadows can recover but only if we tackle the pollution at its source. That means better management of urban and agricultural runoff, investment in sewage treatment and recognising that marine conservation cannot stop at the high tide mark. If we lose these meadows, we lose their carbon stores, their fish nurseries, the coastal protection they provide, along with a piece of our coastal heritage.

Heidi McIlvenny receives funding from the National Environment Research Council as part of the QUADRAT DTP. DAERA and Ulster Wildlife also part funded this PhD research.

Heidi McIlvenny is a member of Ulster Wildlife, RSPB and the National Trust, and Director of the Irish Ocean Literacy Network.

– ref. ‘Protected’ seagrass meadows aren’t necessarily healthy – because pollution doesn’t stop at the shoreline – https://theconversation.com/protected-seagrass-meadows-arent-necessarily-healthy-because-pollution-doesnt-stop-at-the-shoreline-279805

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Kevin Burke, Associate Professor in Statistics, University of Limerick

Recently, a cheerful 100-year-old message in a bottle was found on the south-west coast of Australia. In it, a world war one soldier proclaimed to be “as happy as Larry”.

If you’re a betting person, you probably wouldn’t expect great odds of this happening. A bottle cast into the ocean could end up absolutely anywhere.

If it floats to a remote location, there is little chance of somebody stumbling upon it. And if it lands somewhere more favourable where people could potentially find it, there are other issues. The message itself will deteriorate over time as light degrades it. If the bottle fills with water, it will sink and almost certainly never be found.

So, what are the chances of a message in a bottle being found and it being over 100? And what are your chances of finding this bottle?

Despite these many possibilities during a bottle’s lifetime, the probability we are after is a straightforward calculation. Just count up the number of bottles with messages that have been found and are over 100 years old, and divide by the number of messages that have been sent this way (assuming we know how many are sent):

Our diagram below shows a hypothetical situation where 20 bottles are sent in total, of which six are found (indicated in gold) and one of these is over 100 years old (indicated by the “100” stamp). So, one in 20 bottles are found and over 100 years old. (Note: This is only a hypothetical calculation, not the real data.)

Instead of calculating the probability directly, another way to do it is by breaking the problem into two parts: (A) a bottle with a message is found, and (B) the found bottle is over 100. These two probabilities can be calculated separately and multiplied together to get what we want:

This is known as the “multiplication rule” of probability, and we confirm from our hypothetical numbers that (6/20)×(1/6) = 1/20, as before.

Both approaches to calculating this probability are simple. However, the direct calculation requires knowing the total number of bottles sent out, which is very difficult to know in the real world.

The multiplication rule has the advantage that it breaks the calculation into two parts. We can tackle each separately, then bring the two results together to get the probability we want. This is useful in the real-world situation where we can draw information from different sources.

First, we’ll deal with the probability that a bottle with a message is found, irrespective of its age.

Experts from the Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency of Germany suggest a one in ten chance that a message in a bottle will be found. This aligns broadly with various historical “drift bottle” experiments, where oceanographers released large numbers of bottles to understand ocean currents.

For example, studies from the 1960s and ’70s in the North Atlantic Ocean led to recovery rates of 14% from the Gulf of Mexico, 8% from the Caribbean Sea and 7% from the northern Brazilian coast. A more recent and more northerly study (between Canada and Greenland) from the 2000s led to a 5% recovery rate.

We would expect the results to vary naturally from different experiments in different parts of the world. But to keep things simple, we will stick with 1/10 as the probability that a bottle with a message is found.

Now for the second piece of the calculation: of the bottles that are found, what proportion are over 100 years old?

The table below summarises data from news articles collected on Wikipedia about very old bottles with messages that have been found. However, only data on bottles over 25 years old has been collected, presumably because older bottles are more newsworthy.

So, we needed to estimate the number of 0- to 25-year-old bottles with messages ourselves – here’s how we did this.

The table shows that fewer bottles with messages are found as they get older. Messages in bottles degrade over time, which means the bottles have an increased chance of breaking and sinking, or just getting covered in layers of sediment. Plotting this data in the graph below helped us see the trend in the ages of found bottles more clearly.

We drew a line to match this observed trend in the ages of found bottles. This red line in the graph corresponds to the equation:

This equation provides an estimate of how many bottles have been found for any specific age range (where 25 = 0-to-25, 50 = 25-to-50 and so on). We are interested in the the 0- to 25-year-old bottles, so the equation suggests 46 bottles have been found in this range.

Adding up this and all of the numbers in the table gives a total of 106 bottles found, of which 12 are over 100 years old, and 12/106 is about one in ten.

Recapping the above, we have that: (A) one in ten bottles with messages are found, of which (B) one in ten are over 100 years old. Bringing these results together using the multiplication rule, we estimate the chance of a message in a bottle being found and it being over 100 years old to be (1/10)×(1/10) = 1/100.

So, if there are 100,000 bottles with messages floating around the oceans waiting to be found, we’d expect 1,000 of these to be found and be 100 or more years old. Assuming anybody in the world is equally likely to find one of these, with 8 billion people currently, that’s about a one in 8 million chance of you finding one – pretty unlikely.

However, some people are more persistent at message-in-a-bottle hunting than others. Following the paths of ocean currents (known as gyres) could provide clues on where to look.

Specifically, peninsulas or islands intersecting with these gyres could be good spots. For this reason, it has been suggested the Caribbean islands are ideally placed for finding bottles as they lie on the path of the North Atlantic Gyre. Which seems like a great reason to travel to the Carribean!

But let’s also spare a thought for the poor soul stranded on their desert island, who surely won’t appreciate the low odds of their SOS being found.

Kevin Burke receives funding from Research Ireland.

David O’Sullivan receives funding from Research Ireland

– ref. What is the chance of a message in a bottle being found? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-chance-of-a-message-in-a-bottle-being-found-272122

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alex Fitch, Lecturer and PhD Candidate in Comics and Architecture, University of Brighton

To coincide with the 250th anniversary of her birth, last year saw the publication of two graphic biographies of Jane Austen.

These books take different approaches to the novelist’s life. The Novel Life of Jane Austen: A Graphic Biography, by Janine Barchas and Isabel Greenberg, is a slim volume in a cartoony style that begins in 1796. Kate Evans’ painterly book Patchwork: A Graphic Biography of Jane Austen, meanwhile, starts with Austen’s birth. The latter also includes historic digressions to give her writing additional context.

Both are handsome editions. The Novel Life of Jane Austen is slightly more approachable for the casual reader due to its brevity and smaller focus. But Patchwork may be more rewarding to graphic novel fans thanks to the painted artwork and a mixed-media collage approach that incorporates fabric cuttings into its pages.

Patchwork

Inspired by a patchwork coverlet sewn by Austen, her sister Cassandra and their mother, now displayed in Jane Austen’s House in Hampshire, Evans’ book shows how the bits and pieces of Austen’s life were recycled as material for her novels. Patchwork is an apt image for Austen, who “lopp’d and cropp’d” her prose as deftly as her cloth.

Some of Austen’s early biographers were fond of putting emphasis on the domestic tasks she undertook such as needlework, often deflecting attention from her desire to write and make money. As Austen researcher Kathryn Sutherland has recently observed in writing about Austen’s quilt: “Sewing, like letter writing, is not redundant work; it is necessary to social functioning.” It is apt that Evans’ includes this activity in her biography.

Evans also brings the bookish and close-knit Austen family vividly to life. The sense of the mischievousness and rebellion that brought Austen’s early work into being is present here. The comic strip renderings of her teenage skits and her spoof Plan of a Novel are wonderfully exuberant.

The texture of Austen’s life, and the threads that connect one life to others, is a distinct aspect of her approach. Evans’ shifts of focus add context to the author’s life. The material that Austen sews links ordinary domestic practice to the horrors of British colonialism which delivered cotton thread to Britain.

This incorporation of fabrics that Austen showed interest in during her life – with her family having to make do and mend during periods of impoverishment – is an continuing technique used by Evans in her graphic work. An earlier graphic novel by the artist – Threads: From the Refuges Crisis (2017) – included comic book documentation of interviews with women in the Calais “Jungle”. It embedded their embroidery and needlework in the book, made as a way of escaping the horror of their situation.

Patchwork uses the Austen family’s interest in fabric as a metaphor for their changing domestic experience in different decades and patchwork as a medium which gets added to over time. This works well as a visual leitmotif to accompany the narrative. It shows Evans’ continuing interest in depicting textiles alongside her artwork as a rich storytelling technique.

The Novel Life of Jane Austen

The structure of The Novel Life of Jane Austen echoes the typical triple volume publication of novels at the time. Budding Writer, Struggling Artist and Published Author indicate distinct phases of Austen’s writing life. They begin with a letter from August 1796 and end with Cassandra’s destruction of some of the correspondence in 1844 (the last pages acknowledge how her final house in Chawton has become a pilgrimage site for fans).

Barchas and Greenberg give a strong sense of Austen’s links with other writers, such as Shakespeare, whose “stunning literary celebrity” prefigures her own. For Evans, fictional influences can be seen in the presence on Austen’s bookshelf of those professional women authors (Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, for example) who did so much to set the stage for Austen’s success. However Samuel Richardson, whom Austen both revered and parodied, Henry Fielding, from whom she derived much of her facility with the burlesque and Samuel Johnson, an important influence on her sentence structure and tone, are either absent or fleetingly mentioned.

Like Evans, artist Isabel Greenberg uses a technique to contrast one aspect of Austen’s creative practice with another. While Evans contrasts Austen’s making patchwork fabrics with her writing, as two different but related creative pursuits, Greenberg uses different colour schemes to delineate ways that the author’s imagination operated at different times.

Most of the colour scheme is a combination of yellow and blue, including renditions of both Austen’s biography and performances of her novels. However, for scenes where the novelist enters a moment of reverie – imagining her characters’ inner lives – the colours used become red, purple and yellow. This signifies heightened feelings in contrast to the more muted emotions observed in her everyday life.

As with Evans’ mixed-media approach to graphic novel art, Greenberg’s use of heightened colour to separate everyday experience from imagination, is often found in the artist’s work. Her first two graphic novels The Encyclopedia of Early Earth (2013), and the recently adapted One Hundred Nights of Hero (2016) both contrast everyday experience in different historical time periods with characters’ storytelling activities.

Her previous project to illustrating The Novel Life of Jane Austen, was Glass Town (2020) which like the contrast between fantasy and reality in Austen’s life, took a similar approach to biography of Charlotte Brontë and her sisters.

Both of these Jane Austen graphic biographies are, in their different ways, reinvigorating guides. They emphasise different aspects of Austen’s life and times, using different visual techniques to bring the writer’s history vividly to life on the page. Most importantly, they both give prominence to the force of her imagination, and the innovative fiction it produced.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Jane Austen in pictures: two graphic biographies bring the novelist’s life to the page – https://theconversation.com/jane-austen-in-pictures-two-graphic-biographies-bring-the-novelists-life-to-the-page-278006

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Michelle Spear, Professor of Anatomy, University of Bristol

Many households will recognise this familiar exchange. One person insists an object simply isn’t there: impossible to find despite what they describe as a thorough and highly competent search. Another walks in, glances briefly at the same spot and points to it almost immediately.

“It’s right under your nose!”

This frustrating (for both sides) situation reflects something real about how the brain works. Finding objects in everyday environments relies on a process called visual search, and our brains are surprisingly imperfect at it. Even when something is directly in front of us, the brain can fail to register its presence. In other words, we are looking without seeing.

At first glance, searching for something seems simple. You scan a surface – a kitchen counter, a desk, the “everything” drawer – until the missing item appears.

But the brain cannot analyse every object in a scene simultaneously. Instead, it relies on attention, selecting certain features while filtering out the rest.

Psychologists often describe attention as a kind of spotlight sweeping across the visual field. Wherever that spotlight lands, information is processed in detail. Everything outside it receives far less scrutiny.

There is a practical anatomical reason the brain must constantly shift its gaze. The centre of the retina – the fovea – provides our sharpest vision. But it covers only a tiny part of the visual field, roughly the size of your thumbnail held at arm’s length. To inspect a scene properly, our eyes must repeatedly jump so that different parts of the environment fall onto this small, high-resolution patch.

Those jumps are called saccades, and they happen constantly. Even when you think you are staring steadily at something, your eyes are quietly darting from point to point.

Most of the time, this system works remarkably well. It allows us to navigate visually complex environments without becoming overwhelmed by information.

Looking without seeing

Seeing, it turns out, is not just about what reaches the eyes. It is also about what the brain expects to find. This phenomenon is known as inattentional blindness.

One of the most famous demonstrations of this involves a video in which participants watch a group of people passing a basketball and are asked to count the number of passes. While viewers concentrate on the task, a person in a gorilla suit strolls casually through the scene.

Roughly half the viewers never notice the gorilla at all.

The gorilla is not hidden. It walks directly across the centre of the screen. But the brain, focused on counting basketball passes, simply fails to register it.

If you have ever searched a kitchen counter for your keys only to have someone else pick them up instantly, you have experienced the same phenomenon.

Once visual information reaches the brain, it is processed along different pathways. One of these – often called the dorsal stream – runs toward the parietal lobe of the brain, an area that plays a crucial role in spatial awareness and directing attention. This helps the brain determine where objects are in space. This system plays a crucial role in guiding attention during visual search.

Do men and women search differently?

In describing this familiar household moment, I avoided invoking a particular stereotype. The one where it is my husband who cannot find the object sitting directly in front of him.

Studies of visual search tasks have found small differences in how men and women scan complex scenes. On average, women tend to perform slightly better at locating objects in cluttered environments, while men often perform better on tasks involving large-scale spatial navigation or mentally rotating objects in three dimensions.

The reasons for this are still debated, but part of the answer may lie in how we move our eyes while searching.

Visual search relies on shifting our gaze from one point to another – the previously mentioned “saccades”. Eye-tracking studies show that some people tend to scan a scene methodically, moving their gaze in a more systematic pattern. Others make larger jumps across the visual field.

A systematic scan is more likely to cover every part of a cluttered surface, increasing the chances of spotting something small, such as a pair of keys or the elusive kitchen scissors. Larger jumps, by contrast, can skip over areas entirely, leaving an object sitting in plain sight but never quite falling under the brain’s attentional spotlight.

Some evolutionary psychologists have suggested these tendencies may have deep historical roots in hunter-gatherer societies. However, there is limited evidence for this. Experience, familiarity with an environment, and simple differences in attention probably matter far more than gender alone.

Ultimately, visual search is less like scanning a photograph and more like running a prediction algorithm. The brain constantly guesses where something is likely to be and directs attention accordingly.

Most of the time those predictions are correct. Occasionally, they are not, and an object sitting in plain sight fails to match the brain’s expectations.

Which means the next time someone insists they have looked everywhere, they may well be telling the truth. They just haven’t looked in quite the right way.

Michelle Spear does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. It’s right under your nose – why some people can’t find things in plain sight – https://theconversation.com/its-right-under-your-nose-why-some-people-cant-find-things-in-plain-sight-277845