Every mistake will be magnified - if only I had done this instead of that, if only I had been a little faster or had taken my time - and every choice you made will be agonized over.
After beating the game, you will spend just as much time thinking about the things you didn't do as you will reflecting upon the things you did. There is only a sense of finality that looms over your every action and, more agonizingly, every mistake take a certain path, make a certain choice, and there is no going back. But there are no do-overs in Heavy Rain, no extra lives, no 1-ups or continues. Die during a boss fight or fail to reach the end of the mission and you will be resurrected so you can try it again. It's a jarring experience to be sure: As gamers, we're used to being given another chance. It affords these individuals an occasion for direct response to their cultural context.Unlike most video games, which are designed to allow gamers to get it right, Heavy Rain staunchly insists that there is no such thing: much like life, there are only the choices that we make and the consequences that arise from them. The PCAS thus offers an opportunity for the coming together of scholars from colleges, universities, community colleges, and the general public, who have something worthwhile to say on matters involving mass society. Its journal, Studies in Popular Culture, is a firmly established academic publication, and scholars working with topics in popular culture are invited to submit papers for consideration. Young and diverse, this energetic organization has brought together scholars who share an interest in inquiring into all sorts of mass phenomena through a wide variety of disciplines and approaches.
Its activities are financed by conference registration fees and sponsoring institutional support. Members of the organization come primarily from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia. The PCAS, organized in 1971, is the largest, and from the view of those who have visited several regional meetings, the most thriving of the regional associations. Its contributors, from the United States, Australia, Canada, China, England, France, Israel, Scotland, and Spain, include distinguished anthropologists, sociologists, cultural geographers, ethnomusicologists, historians, and scholars in mass communications, philosophy, literature, and religion.
Studies in Popular Culture publishes articles on popular culture however mediated: through film, literature, radio, television, music, graphics, print, practices, associations, events-any of the material or conceptual conditions of life.
Formerly triannual, the journal has spun off what was its third issue to become the Popular Culture Association in the South's second journal, Studies in American Culture. Studies in Popular Culture is published biannually, with one issue appearing in the fall and one in the spring. The editor invites the submission of articles dealing with any aspect of American or international, contemporary or historical, popular culture. Studies in Popular Culture is the refereed journal of the Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association in the South.