Casual Games Before Casual Games: Historicizing Paper Puzzle Games in an Era of Digital Play

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark R. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Game Design ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Initial Examination ◽  
Six Traits ◽  
Casual Games ◽  
Temporal Flexibility ◽  
Puzzle Games ◽  
Ease Of Access ◽  
Casual Game ◽  
First Time

This article examines “paper puzzle games”—crosswords, Sudoku, Kakuro, word searches, and so forth—in order to historicize and contextualize “casual games,” complicate our notions of “casual” play, and open up paper puzzle games to game studies consideration for the first time. The article begins by identifying the dearth of literature on paper puzzle games and offers an initial examination of these games through the lens of casual games, play, and players. It focuses on six traits in casual game design: appealing themes, ease of access, ease of learning, minimal required expertise, fast rewards, and temporal flexibility. It demonstrates that—from a perspective of mechanics, demographics, and contexts of play—paper puzzle games are excellent examples of casual games and therefore important to fully study. It also shows the complexity of paper puzzles as a topic in their own right, opening them up for future examination.

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.

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 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).

Apportioned Commodity Fetishism and the Transformative Power of Game Studies

2016 ◽  
pp. 95-122
Author(s):  
Ken S. McAllister ◽  
Judd Ethan Ruggill ◽  
Tobias Conradi ◽  
Steven Conway ◽  
Jennifer deWinter ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Game Design ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Commodity Fetishism ◽  
Transformative Power

This chapter explores the ways in which the field of Game Studies helps shape popular understandings of player, play, and game, and specifically how the field alters the conceptual, linguistic, and discursive apparatuses that gamers use to contextualize, describe, and make sense of their experiences. The chapter deploys the concept of apportioned commodity fetishism to analyze the phenomena of discourse as practice, persona, the vagaries of game design, recursion, lexical formation, institutionalization, systems of self-effectiveness, theory as anti-theory, and commodification.

scholarly journals Story beats in videogames as value-driven choice-based unit operations

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (38) ◽  
pp. 5-31
Author(s):  
Michał Mochocki ◽  
Raine Koskimaa
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Game Design ◽  
Design Patterns ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Unit Operation ◽  
Action Unit ◽  
Unit Operations ◽  
Cognitive Narratology ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
Game Design Patterns

We present a framework of story beats, defined as microunits of dramatic action, as a tool for the ludonarrative analysis of videogames. First, we explain the Goal - Action - Reaction - Outcome model of the story beat. Then, we present six types of story beats, Action, Interaction, Inaction, Mental, Emotion, and Sensory, providing videogame examples for each category. In the second half of the paper, we contextualise this framework in the classic game studies theory of videogame narrative and player action: unit operations, gamic action, anatomy of choice, and game design patterns, wrapping it up in the most recent trends in cognitive narratology. Ultimately, we present the story beat as a ludonarrative unit, working simultaneously as a ‘unit operation’ in the study of games as systems, and as a microunit of character action in narrative analysis. The conclusion outlines prospective directions for using story beats in formal, experiential, and cultural game research.

scholarly journals PASSION, PIPELINES, AND PRECARITY: WORKING LIVES IN GAMES FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Game Design ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Young Male ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Labour Relations ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Game Developers ◽  
Creativity And Innovation

For years, academics and journalists have proclaimed a crisis of gameswork, detailing the ‘destruction’ of the lives of those in this creative workforce, and wondering when the ‘breaking point’ of professional game design, premised on crunch, work limbo, and churn, would come. Still it was only at the March 2018 Game Developers Conference, typically a heavily corporatized event, that a large-scale discussion of unionization was staged, leading to the formation of Game Workers Unite. While collective organizing in games is going global, with branches forming from France to Australia to South Korea, these developments are outpaced by increasingly transnational dynamics of outsourcing and automation, threatening to devalue and even eliminate already highly-competitive jobs in ‘cool industries’ of ‘passionate’ workers. This paper considers these global contradictions and tensions through analysis of a group heavily implicated in visions of the future of gameswork- students in formal games education. While within game studies there has been sustained interest in the production of this form and labour relations therein, the shape and role of games higher education remains underexplored. The existing scholarship indicates that these formal sites of training tend to cultivate the still-largely young, male, and passionate fan-workforce on which games depend. Furthermore, these contexts are vital in the formation of future gamesworker identities that are conservative, uncritical, and risk-adverse, despite pervasive discourses of creativity and innovation linked to them. Vitally, however, the question of how these norms relate to shifting work realities has yet to be explored.

How Does Games Critique Impact Game Design Decisions? A Case Study of Monetization and Loot Boxes

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (8) ◽  
pp. 1004-1025
Author(s):  
Matthew E. Perks
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Game Design ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Design Decisions ◽  
Video Game Industry ◽  
Game Industry ◽  
Pragmatic Sociology ◽  
Game Developers

Games critics arguably influence the form games take, identities of players, and identities of game developers. However, very little work in Game Studies examines how critical games journalism, games, developers, and independent actors intersect. This article argues that pragmatic sociology of critique, developed by Luc Boltanski, can act as a theoretical framework to aid in understanding these processes of critique. Utilizing a theoretical lens such as this helps us better understand the function of games critique within the video game industry. Applying this framework to a case study of monetization and “loot boxes,” this article emphasizes the role and power of journalistic critique in shaping gaming cultures, and the consumption and production of media more generally.

Games | Game Design | Game Studies

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gundolf S. Freyermuth
Keyword(s):  
Game Design ◽  
Game Studies

Games | Game Design | Game Studies

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gundolf S. Freyermuth ◽  
André Czauderna ◽  
Nathalie Pozzi ◽  
Eric Zimmerman
Keyword(s):  
Game Design ◽  
Game Studies
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