Book Review: Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds; ; The Handbook of Computer Game Studies

2006 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 471-474
Author(s):  
Jason Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Computer Game ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Real Video ◽  
Fictional Worlds

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 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.

West of the Magic Circle

The Race Card ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 113-137
Author(s):  
Tara Fickle
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Times ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
Japan And China ◽  
Magic Circle

This chapter radically revises our understanding of game studies’ conceptual foundations by revealing the Orientalist assumptions embedded in Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) and Roger Caillois’s Man, Play, and Games (1958). These founding fathers’ discussions of play as a liberating “magic circle” have been endlessly cited, excerpted, and romanticized, most recently by popular and academic rhetoric extolling video games as the cure for a “broken” and alienating twenty-first-century reality. Unsurprisingly, contemporary scholars have regarded the patronizing and exotifying references to Japan and China which crop up nearly from the very first pages of these tomes as embarrassing but irrelevant signs of the times. Recontextualizing these early chapters within the longer and rarely read remainders of both monographs, however, reveals that those initial ludic schemas were in fact the raison d’être for an elaborate ethnocentric sociology that rationalized the cognitive and cultural inferiority of nonwhites by ranking them according to the “primitivity” of their play. Showing how these theorists legitimized their taxonomies by naturalizing fantasies of a ritualized, stagnant East and an innovative, rational West, this chapter demonstrates that Orientalist discourse was not tangential but essential to the seemingly global theories of play that form the basis of modern game studies.

Game Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shira Chess
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Specific Approach ◽  
Emerging Media ◽  
Video Game Studies ◽  
Media Objects

As a nascent form of screen culture, video games provide a challenging new lens to think about emerging media. Because video games do not abide by traditional narrative structure and because many different kinds of media objects fall under the purview of video games, they provide particular complications for researchers. In turn, within video game studies, which has been a growing field since the early 2000s, researchers often focus on a specific approach to understanding video games: studying the industry, studying audiences, or studying games as texts. Additionally, many researchers have found it useful to consider “assemblage”-type approaches that look holistically at several aspects of a video game object in order to understand the game from a broader context.

The Contributions of Perceived Graphic and Enactive Realism to Enjoyment and Engagement in Active Video Games

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jih-Hsuan Lin ◽  
Wei Peng
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Perceived Realism ◽  
Active Video Games ◽  
Video Game Playing ◽  
Active Video Game ◽  
Active Video ◽  
Movement Intensity ◽  
Practical Implications

How perceived realism in a video game contributes to game enjoyment and engagement is a theoretically important and practically significant question. The conceptualization and operationalization of perceived realism in previous video game studies vary greatly, particularly regarding the dimensions of perceived graphic realism and perceived external realism. The authors argue that it is important to examine perceived enactive realism, particularly for interactive and participatory media such as video games. This study examines the contribution of two types of perceived realism—perceived graphic realism and perceived enactive realism—to enjoyment and engagement as manifested by the level of physical movement intensity in an active video game playing context. It was found that perceived enactive realism was a significant predictor of enjoyment and engagement in playing active video games. However, perceived graphic realism was not found to be a significant predictor of enjoyment or engagement. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

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