scholarly journals O game levado a sério: o sujeito lúdico em Arlindo Machado

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (56) ◽  
pp. 54-75
Author(s):  
Gilson Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Game Studies

A obra de Arlindo Machado questiona de modo pioneiro o automatismo da sociedade do espetáculo e suas ideias abrem-se para o diálogo com as novas formas de produção e consumo da imagem, assim como para o modo de ser do olhar. Apesar de não figurar entre os autores mais citados no campo dos jogos eletrônicos ou game studies, a trajetória de Machado revela-se certeira e pioneira na identificação dos limites e potenciais dos automatismos audiovisuais. Assim como os casos do cinema, do documentário e do vídeo, o game é levado a sério nessa obra crítica propícia às reinvenções criativas que redefinem os horizontes do olhar para a sociedade do espetáculo audiovisual.

scholarly journals Artgames vs. Game Art – Diskurse und Strategien der Computerspielkunst zwischen spielbarer Rhetorik und unspielbarer Ästhetik

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-37
Author(s):  
Sebastian Möring
Keyword(s):  
Game Studies

ZusammenfassungComputerspiele sind vielfältig. Freizeitvergnügen, professioneller Sport, kulturbildend und kulturkritisch. Sie inspirieren die Kunst und mit ihnen wird Kunst gemacht. Dieser Beitrag betrachtet die Diskurse und Strategien der Computerspielkunst. Im Rückgriff auf die Game Studies und die medienwissenschaftliche Computerspielforschung beleuchtet er die Unterscheidung zwischen Artgames und Game Art (insbesondere Modifikationen) und versucht zu zeigen, dass beide Genres unterschiedlichen Diskursen entstammen, die mit verschiedenen Begriffen und künstlerischen Strategien operieren: Artgames setzen auf Spielbarkeit und Rhetorik und Game Art setzt auf Unspielbarkeit und Ästhetik. Sie grenzen sich so auf unterschiedliche Weise von den Sorgestrukturen kommerzieller Computerspiele ab.

scholarly journals The economics of free

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 563-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Evans
Keyword(s):  
Game Design ◽  
Temporal Dynamics ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Gaming Industry ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Simpsons ◽  
The Social ◽  
Casual Games ◽  
Branding Strategies

The gaming industry has seen dramatic change and expansion with the emergence of ‘casual’ games that promote shorter periods of gameplay. Free to download, but structured around micropayments, these games raise the complex relationship between game design and commercial strategies. Although offering a free gameplay experience in line with open access philosophies, these games also create systems that offer control over the temporal dynamics of that experience to monetize player attention and inattention. This article will examine three ‘freemium’ games, Snoopy Street Fair, The Simpsons’ Tapped Out and Dragonvale, to explore how they combine established branding strategies with gameplay methods that monetize player impatience. In examining these games, this article will ultimately indicate the need for game studies to interrogate the intersection between commercial motivations and game design and a broader need for media and cultural studies to consider the social, cultural, economic and political implications of impatience.

The Short and Happy Life of Interdisciplinarity in Game Studies

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 323-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Malaby ◽  
Timothy Burke
Keyword(s):  
Game Studies ◽  
Happy Life

scholarly journals Game Studies meets Surveillance Studies at the Edge of Digital Culture: An Introduction to a special issue on Surveillance, Games and Play

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer R. Whitson ◽  
Bart Simon
Keyword(s):  
Data Gathering ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Finite Range ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Surveillance Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Sorting ◽  
The Relationship

While we could attribute the close ties between surveillance and video games to their shared military roots, in this editorial we argue that the relationship goes much deeper to that. Even non-digital games such as chess require a mode of watchfulness: an attention to each piece in relation to the past, present, and future; a drive to predict an opponent’s movements; and, a distillation of the player-subject into a knowable finite range of possible actions defined by the rules. Games are social sorting, disciplinary, social control machines.In this introduction we tease apart some of the intersections of games and surveillance, beginning with a discussion of the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden on using games to both monitor and influence unsuspecting populations. Next, we provide an overview of corporate data-gathering practices in games and further outline the production of manageable, computable subjectivities. Then, we show how the game Watch Dogs explores the surveillant capacities of games at both the game mechanical and representational scales. These three different facets of surveillance, games, and play set the scene for the special issue and the diverse articles that follow.  In the following pages we pose new lines of questioning that highlight the nuances of play and offer new modes of thinking about what games - and the processes of watching and being watched that are a foundational part of the experience – can tell us about surveillance.

Automated State of Play

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Fizek
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Fictional Character

Abstract Automation of play has become an ever more noticeable phenomenon in the domain of video games, expressed by self-playing game worlds, self-acting characters, and non-human agents traversing multiplayer spaces. This article proposes to look at AI-driven non-human play and, what follows, rethink digital games, taking into consideration their cybernetic nature, thus departing from the anthropocentric perspectives dominating the field of Game Studies. A decentralised posthumanist reading, as the author argues, not only allows to rethink digital games and play, but is a necessary condition to critically reflect AI, which due to the fictional character of video games, often plays by very different rules than the so-called “true” AI.

scholarly journals Is Pokémon GO Feminist? An Actor-Network Theory Analysis

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carina Assuncao
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
Game Design ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Entertainment Media ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Pokémon Go ◽  
Politics And Gender ◽  
And Gender

The Pokémon franchise has been targeted and has been successful with males and females (Tobin, 2004). In it, cute-looking creatures with superpowers fight each other for the fame and glory of their masters (the players). The franchise includes a plethora of entertainment media. This essay will focus on the recent release, Pokémon GO. This particular game and its location-based technology will be analysed using cyberfeminism and actor-network theory to explore the play space as a context for kinaesthetic awareness and embodiment. The cyberfeminism herein exploited is that of “the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender” (Haraway, 2000, p. 292). Actor-network theory, a strong methodological tradition in science and technology studies, sees actors and the networks they create as completely ‘flat’ and non-hierarchical. ANT has been criticised for its lack of concern with politics and gender (Lagesen, 2012) but, in combination with a feminist lens, ANT has the potential to uncover issues that other approaches in game studies cannot. This original framework can help game studies scholars to see gameplay processes in a new light by following the many actors involved in game design and use.

scholarly journals Bodies That Count: Augmentation, Community, and Disability in a Science Fiction Game

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Carr
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Digital Game ◽  
Game Play ◽  
Disability Theory ◽  
The Grotesque

The article examines the overlaps between disability studies and digital game studies through an analysis of the science fiction digital game Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Using an adaptation of Mitchell and Snyder’s work on disability and narrative prosthesis in literature, the power implied by erasure-by-metaphor is considered, as are issues of migration, appropriation, and the grotesque. By examining ability, disability, and tangibility in relation to the game’s rules, game-play, and narrative elements, this analysis demonstrates the relevance of disability theory to science fiction games.

scholarly journals On the Publishing Methods of Our Time: Mobilizing Knowledge in Game Studies

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Wilcox
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
First Person ◽  
Academic Interest ◽  
Middle State ◽  
The University

There is a considerable amount of academic and non-academic interest in the production and reception of video games. At the same time game scholars encounter questions such as, “are video game academics irrelevant?” In this article I connect questions of relevancy in game studies with the need to develop forms of publishing capable of asserting that relevancy more broadly. As the co-founder and editor-in-chief of First Person Scholar (FPS), a middle-state publication based in the Games Institute at the University of Waterloo, I detail how FPS has attempted to reach beyond the traditional scope of game studies to engage a wider audience and assert a new degree of relevancy for the game scholar.

scholarly journals What Can Play: The Potential of Non-Human Players

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kara Stone
Keyword(s):  
Game Design ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Cause And Effect ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post Humanism

What can post-humanism teach us about game design? This paper questions the line drawn between what species and matter can play and what cannot play. Combining works by scholars of feminist post-humanism, new materialism, and game studies, primarily Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, and T.L. Taylor, it proposes that play is a form of communication not only between animals and humans but also between plants and cyborgs, insects and atoms. Beginning by interrogating the borders of the human that have been built on ableist and racist discourses, this paper moves towards considering the human as interspecies and outlines that we must reassess the ways in which a multiplicity of species experience the intra-action that constitutes “play.” With a brief look into the history of defining play in both game studies and animal studies and their small crossover, play is reconfigured into an outlook or an approach rather than a set of rules. It is a drive that all species and matter experience, including insects, bacteria, and metal. This moves us beyond considering solely the materiality of our bodies at play by reconsidering the objects of play as our co-players, as matter with agential force. I argue that we need to reconsider the videogame player as an interspecies being, an assemblage of human and non-human bodies. The de-anthropocentricization of the popular notions of player agency allows for a multiplicity of reactions not created in the linear cause and effect course, the belief in ultimate player control within procedural systems, which dominates game studies. This paper concludes by submitting possibilities of what considering the non-human through a feminist and anti-ableist lens can offer game designers, players, and critics, such as considering the material platform’s impact on play, reforming the individualistic agency of players, and designing for the Other(s).

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