Playthings

2021 ◽  
pp. 155541202110203
Author(s):  
Miguel Sicart
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Situated Knowledge ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Theoretical Contribution ◽  
Time Concepts

This article proposes the concept of “plaything” as an instrument to inquire on the ontology and epistemology of the things we play with. Extending Barad’s (2007) onto-epistemology and Ingold’s (2012) concepts of “things” and “objects,” this article intends to provide a theoretical contribution to the materialist turn in game studies (Apperley, T. H., & Jayemane, D. (2012). The main argument of the article is as follows: the ontology of the things we play with is separate from its epistemology. The concept of playthings provides a materialistic ontology that accounts for the technologies we play with. At the same time, concepts like video games, toys, or games are understood as being epistemological concepts, used to create situated knowledge (Haraway, D. (1987) about playthings. Playthings help describe how a technology is shaped for and through play, while other concepts place the experience of playthings in culture and society.

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.

scholarly journals Beyond Rules and Mechanics: A Different Approach for Ludology

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 587-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan J. Vargas-Iglesias ◽  
Luis Navarrete-Cardero
Keyword(s):  
Signal Processing ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Total Sample ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Empirical Validity ◽  
Fundamental Part ◽  
System Order ◽  
Do So

Due to its affiliation with formalism, ludology, the scientific perspective prioritized in game studies, considers the rule–mechanic binomial to be an essential principle of any scholarly approach to video games. Nevertheless, the limitation of the game system order implies that, as a fundamental part of this epistemological approach, the empirical validity of its methodology is already being rejected. As such, this article attempts to shift the focus away from the rule–mechanic relation, and from a cybersemiotic perspective, to refocus it on a conceptualization of the human–machine relationship. In order to do so, the concept of convolution regarding said relation is defined, including both parts of the video game system in terms of signal processing. Likewise, this model is contrasted with a randomized total sample of 1,200 games ( N = 1,200, n = 300) in order to arrive at a set of conclusions about the behavior of the distinct video game genres in the indicated terms.

scholarly journals Interpassivity and the Joy of Delegated Play in Idle Games

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Fizek
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
The Self ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
Human Machine Interaction ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Machine Interaction

This paper examines the youngest video games genre, the so called idle (incremental) game, also referred to as the passive, self-playing or clicker game, which seems to challenge the current understanding of digital games as systems, based on a human-machine interaction where it is the human who actively engages with the system through meaningful choices. Idle games, on the other hand, tend to play themselves, making the player’s participation optional or, in some cases, entirely redundant. Interactivity and agency – qualities extensively theorised with reference to digital games – are questioned in the context of idling. In this paper the author will investigate the self-contradictory genre through the lens of interpassivity, a concept developed by Robert Pfaller and Slavoj Žižek to describe the aesthetics of delegated enjoyment. This contribution aims at introducing interpassivity to a wider Game Studies community, and offers an alternative perspective to reflect upon digital games in general and self-playing games in particular.

Hypermodern Video Games as Emblems of Empire or How the Gaming Multitude Adapts to Hypermodernity

2020 ◽  
pp. 155541202096184
Author(s):  
Maude Bonenfant
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
University Of Minnesota ◽  
Modes Of Representation

To demonstrate how Games of Empire (Dyer-Witheford, N., & de Peuter, G. (2009). Games of empire. Global capitalism and video games, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota) elaborated an important standpoint within critical game studies, this article discusses the thesis that a specific type of video games perfectly converges with our contemporary modes of representation and praxis, which are best situated within the paradigm of hypermodernity (Lipovetsky, G. (1983). L’ère du vide: Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain. Paris. Gallimard, coll. «Folio essais»; Lipovetsky, G. & Charles, S. (2004). Les temps hypermodernes. Paris: Bernard Grasset, «Nouveau collège de philosophie»). Hypermodernity radicalizes modernity because, within hypermodernity, values such as progress, reason, and happiness are overly ( hyper) actualized rather than surpassed ( post) (Aubert, N. (2006) (dir). L’individu hypermoderne. Toulouse: Eres, coll. «Sociologie clinique»; Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press). Based on an archetypal account, that is, a theoretical model rather than a case study, this article will show how hypermodern video games' commercialization and use within a capitalist context are emblematic of hypermodernity. We will also evaluate how these games promote adaptation to hypermodernity toward an "ideal" becoming-player for Empire. In conclusion, if playing can be seen as the multitude's escape hatch out of the dominant order, this article will explain how hypermodern video games, as a media, may also be viewed as a key site where asymmetrical and unequal relationships replicate within Empire.

An Epistemology of the Event for the Digital Media

2020 ◽  
pp. 115-128
Author(s):  
Juan J. Vargas-Iglesias
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
The Ideal

Since the end of the twentieth century, game studies have concentrated on epistemological positions seemingly unable to make significant distinctions between traditional games and video games. This approach has hindered the development of a post-modern ontology for decades, in a medium—video games—that is decidedly postmodern. This chapter proposes going beyond the mechanistic notion of considering observable reality as a combination of a determined state of things, which is a prevalent feature in today's game studies. To achieve this, the author argues from the Deleuzian notion of the “event.” When referring to the concept of the “ideal game,” as proposed by Deleuze, is intended to enunciate an epistemology that describes the implicit potentialities of digital media in general. The application of the epistemology would comprise memetic and viral statements, generative aesthetics and the forms of video games themselves.

Playing with meaning: Productive frictions between gaming and dancing in Bound

2020 ◽  
pp. 135485652093319
Author(s):  
Kate Mattingly
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Intelligence ◽  
Problem Solving ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Educational Benefits ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Research Journal ◽  
Creativity Research ◽  
Dance Dance Revolution

Research into gaming and dancing has tended to highlight educational benefits, such as positive effects on problem-solving, creativity, and motivation (Hutton E and Sundar S, 2010. Can video games enhance creativity? Effects of emotion generated by Dance Dance Revolution. Creativity Research Journal 22(3): 294–303.). This article focuses on a game called Bound (2016), developed by Plastic Studios for PlayStation 4 and VR, to show how dancing can be defined as an embodied epistemology and a form of creative exploration that contributes to emotional intelligence. Using methodologies generated by Brendan Keogh, I show how and why dominant understandings of gameplay are insufficient to analyze the experience and meaning produced by playing Bound. Keogh’s theories are relevant to both game studies and dance studies and allow us to examine the fruitful intersections of game studies and screendance. Ultimately I introduce ‘choreographic thinking’ as a mode of engagement that is activated by gameplay and that resonates with Keogh’s theories: by calling attention to the choreographic potential of Bound, I demonstrate the value of noncompetitive gaming models for producing embodied knowledge.

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