scholarly journals Automation of play: Theorizing self-playing games and post-human ludic agents

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 203-218
Author(s):  
Sonia Fizek
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
New Framework

This article offers a critical reflection on automation of play and its significance for the theoretical enquiries into digital games and play. Automation 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. On the following pages, the author explores various instances of automated non-human play and proposes a post-human theoretical lens, which may help to create a new framework for the understanding of video games, renegotiate the current theories of interaction prevalent in game studies, and rethink the relationship between human players and digital games.

scholarly journals The Animation of Gamers and the Gamers as Animators in Sierra On-Line’s Adventure Games

Animation ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 83-95
Author(s):  
Raz Greenberg
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Free Play ◽  
Digital Gaming ◽  
Adventure Game ◽  
Adventure Games ◽  
Software Publisher ◽  
On Line ◽  
The Relationship

Produced throughout the 1980s using the company’s Adventure Game Interpreter engine, the digital adventure games created by American software publisher Sierra On-Line played an important and largely overlooked role in the development of animation as an integral part of the digital gaming experience. While the little historical and theoretical discussion of the company’s games of the era focuses on their genre, it ignores these games’ contribution to the relationship between the animated avatars and the gamers that control them – a relationship that, as argued in this article, in essence turns gamers into animators. If we consider Chris Pallant’s (2019) argument in ‘Video games and animation’ that animation is essential to the sense of immersion within a digital game, then the great freedom provided to the gamers in animating their avatars within Sierra On-Line’s adventure games paved the way to the same sense of immersion in digital. And, if we refer to Gonzalo Frasca’s (1999) divide of digital games to narrative-led or free-play (ludus versus paidea) in ‘Ludology meets narratology: Similitude and differences between (video) games and narrative’, then the company’s adventure games served as an important early example of balance between the two elements through the gamers’ ability to animate their avatars. Furthermore, Sierra On-Line’s adventure games have tapped into the traditional tension between the animator and the character it animated, as observed by Scott Bukatman in ‘The poetics of Slumberland: Animated spirits and the animated spirit (2012), when he challenged the traditional divide between animators, the characters they animate and the audience. All these contributions, as this articles aims to demonstrate, continue to influence the role of animation in digital games to this very day.

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 The Form of Game Formalism

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ea C. Willumsen
Keyword(s):  
Computer Science ◽  
Formal Language ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Level Of Abstraction ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Literature And Film ◽  
Aristotelian Tradition

This article explores how the concept of formalism and the resulting method of formal analysis have been used and applied in the study of digital games. Three types of formalism in game studies are identified based on a review of their uses in the literature, particularly the discussion of essentialism and form that resulted from the narratology-ludology debate: 1) formalism focused on the <em>aesthetic form</em> of the game artifact, 2) formalism as<em> game essentialism</em>, and 3) formalism as a <em>level of abstraction</em>, related to formal language and ontology-like reasoning. These three are discussed in relation to the distinctions between form and matter, in the Aristotelian tradition, to highlight how the method of formal analysis of games appears to be dealing with matter rather than form, on a specific fundamental <em>level of abstraction</em>, and in turn how <em>formal analysis </em>becomes a misleading concept that leads to unnecessary confusion. Finally, the relationship between <em>game essentialism </em>and the more computer science-centric approach to <em>ontology </em>is studied, to account for the contemporary trend of identifying the unique properties of games and opposing them with properties of, e.g., traditional storytelling media like literature and film, explored through their <em>aesthetic form</em>.

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.

scholarly journals Bearded Dragons at Play

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Theo Plothe
Keyword(s):  
Digital Games ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Digital Game ◽  
Digital Gaming ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
The World ◽  
Youtube Videos ◽  
Human Actors ◽  
The Relationship

Animals have long appeared as the subjects and characters in digital games, but game studies scholars have rarely considered animals as players of digital games. This paper examines the mobile digital game Ant Smasher and YouTube videos of bearded dragons playing the game. This article advocates for the inclusion of these bearded dragons in gamerspace as not only a personification of the gamer within the space but as a conduit for play, a channel for gamers to breach the boundaries of gamerspace – the cultural and discursive space surrounding digital games that negotiates the relationship between the digital game and its impact on the world at large. Through an analysis of 50 YouTube videos representing these play experiences, this article considers the place of these videos within gamerspace. The implications of this work serve to better understand the relationships between digital gaming, play, and human and non-human actors in interaction with haptic media. This example also expands upon our understandings of play as a whole.

scholarly journals The expressive power of the Possible Worlds Theory in video games: when narratives become interactive and fictional spaces

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 289-302
Author(s):  
Antonio José Planells de la Maza
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Game Design ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Expressive Power ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Philosophical Concept ◽  
Interactive Nature ◽  
The Relationship

The philosophical concept of possible worlds (Lenzen, 2004; Lewis, 1986) has been used in literary studies and narratology (Dolezel, 1998; Eco, 1979) to define the way in which we conceive different narrative possibilities inside the fictional world. In Game Studies, some authors have used this concept to explore the relationship between game design and game experience (Kücklich, 2003; Maietti, 2004; Ryan, 2006), while Jesper Juul (2005) has studied the fictional world evoked by the connection between rules and fiction. In this paper we propose a new approach to video games as ludofictional worlds - a set of possible worlds which generates a game space based on the relationship between fiction and game rules. In accordance with the concepts of minimal departure (Ryan, 1991) and indexical term (Lewis, 1986), the position of the player character determines his/her actual world and the next possible or necessary world. Lastly, we use this model to analyse the video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and show that the possible worlds perspective provides a useful, flexible and modular framework for describing the internal connections between ludofictional worlds and the interactive nature of playable game spaces.

Reprogramming the History of Video Games: A Historian’s Approach to Video Games and Their History

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawler ◽  
Sean Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Games Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
States History

Abstract This paper explores the need and opportunities for historians to recognize the importance of video games to their research in modern American history. While this paper is rooted in examples specific to United States history, the call for historians to examine video games, engage with the rich field of games studies, and explore video games as sources in historical scholarship is a universal one, applicable to all fields of history. In this paper we argue that digital games are an essential part of media and cultural history and while media scholars and others interested in game studies have taken up the mantel of video games history, historians have been slow to respond to the medium and even slower to engage with video games as historical sources.

“Footage Not Representative”

2016 ◽  
pp. 297-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Švelch
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Interface Effect ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
New Framework

This chapter provides a revised framework of paratextuality which deals with some of the limitations of Gérard Genette's (1997b) concept while keeping its focus on the relationship between a text and socio-historical reality. The updated notion of paratextuality draws upon Alexander R. Galloway's (2012) work on the interface effect. The proposed revision is explained in a broader context of intertextuality and textual transcendence. Regarding Genette's terminology, this chapter rejects the constrictive notion of a paratext and stresses that paratextuality is first and foremost a relationship, not a textual category. The new framework is then put to the test using four sample genres of official video game communication – trailers, infographics, official websites of video games and patch notes.

Of Dickwolves and Killjoys

Gamer Trouble ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 27-65
Author(s):  
Amanda Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Feminist Epistemology ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Research Association ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
The Right

This chapter argues that gamers, including academic gamers, use the angry feminist as an abject figure to reinforce gamer identity and impose politically-motivated limitations on what constitutes an “expert” of video games. It historicizes the conversation about harassment in video game culture most recently initiated by the #GamerGate campaign of 2014 by analysing the earlier Fat Princess (2008) and Dickwolves (2010) incidents to show that these encounters rely on hypocritical standards of affective performance and an emphasis on the “right” kinds of knowledge about video games. It then goes on to demonstrate that the conflicts accompanying the formation of game studies as a discipline shares structural similarities with these fan fights. The chapter ends with an analysis of early work on the Grand Theft Auto video games to show that the exclusion of feminist and critical race perspectives in game studies resulted in racist and sexist scholarship. The similarities in fan and academic conflicts about video games demonstrate that feminist epistemology continues to exist at the fringes of acceptable discourse – no more poignantly demonstrated than when #GamerGate discovered the Digital Games Research Association and separated its members into “academic” (legitimate) and “feminist” (illegitimate) experts on video games.

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