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This chapter focuses on another group of marginalized actors in the game industry: game testers. As a means of getting one's foot in the industry, video game testing constitutes an arena of “cruel optimism.” Video game testing is a decidedly temporary position appealing mostly to young people with fewer occupational skills than the core creatives. Testers endure extreme precarity in hopes of garnering the symbolic capital they gain in the industry, a permanent position, or new job in one of development's other disciplines, such as design, art, or programming. The chapter coins the term “degradation of fun” to illuminate the process through which the joy derived from testing is diminished due to precarity, instrumentalized play, and surveillance in the workplace.

The chapter focuses on the Social Construction of Technology approach (SCOT) by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, introducing the reader to its initial formulation (1984), and to the subsequent extensions – and sometimes reformulations – elaborated in more than 30 year of empirical research. It first clarifies how the Empirical Programme of Relativism, elaborated by the Bath School to address the social construction of scientific facts, was adapted to technological artifacts. In particular the concepts of relevant social groups, interpretative flexibility, closure or stabilization are in-depth discussed. Regarding relevant social groups, the chapter dedicates a peculiar attention to users, sellers and testers, all understudied in the original formulation of SCOT. The chapter then clarifies SCOT’s take on materiality, and discusses its main differences with the idea of nonhuman agency proposed by Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Finally, it goes back to the Golem Trilogy to discuss with the author the specific take on politics implied by SCOT.

Dental trauma in childhood and adolescence is common. At 5 years of age 31–40% of boys and 16–30% of girls, and at 12 years of age 12–33% of boys and 4–19% of girls, will have suffered some dental trauma. Boys are affected almost twice as often as girls in both the primary and the permanent dentitions. The majority of dental injuries in the primary and permanent dentitions involve the anterior teeth, especially the maxillary central incisors. Concussion, subluxation, and luxation are the most common injuries in the primary dentition, while uncomplicated crown fractures are most common in the permanent dentition. Prognosis of traumatic injuries has improved significantly in the last 20 years. This has been largely due to a greater understanding of dental pulp reaction patterns and vital pulp therapies. Children are most accident prone between 2 and 4 years for the primary dentition and between 7 and 10 years for the permanent dentition. Coordination and judgement are incompletely developed in children during the primary dentition years, and the majority of injuries are due to falls in and around the home as the child becomes more adventurous and explores his/her surroundings. Most injuries in the permanent dentition are caused by falls and collisions while playing and running, although bicycles are a common accessory. The place of injury varies in different countries according to local customs, but accidents in the school playground remain common. Sports injuries usually occur in the teenage years and are commonly associated with contact sports. Injuries due to road traffic accidents and assaults are most commonly associated with the late teenage years and adulthood, and are often closely related to alcohol abuse. One form of injury in childhood that must never be forgotten is child physical abuse or non-accidental injury (NAI). More than 50% of these children will have orofacial injuries (see also Chapter 4, Safeguarding Children). Accidental dental injuries can result from direct or indirect trauma. Direct trauma occurs when a tooth receives a direct blow, making this sort of injury more common at the front of the mouth.