scholarly journals Material windows and working stations. The discourse networks behind skeuomorphic interface in Pathfinder: Kingmaker

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (38) ◽  
pp. 73-94
Author(s):  
Michał Dawid Żmuda
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Interface Design ◽  
Working Environment ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Narrative Spaces

The article probes the intermedial structure of the skeuomorphic interface in Pathfinder: Kingmaker. The author indicates that intermedia research in game studies is often diachronically limited, focusing on material and semiotic interactions between “old” and “new” media. He proposes to open the field onto historically aware discoursive analysis and bases his method on Friedrich Kittler’s notion of “discourse networks”. This allows him to inspect the game in relation to technologically-founded networks that embody or bring into life specific modes of though and experience. During his analysis, he discovers that the interface design is involved with navigation devices in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance periods, Alberti’s windows as objects through with narrative spaces become visible, isometric modes of objective thinking, industrial and cybernetic notions of control, and the Xerox invention of the computer as a working environment.

Virtual Identities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zara Dinnen
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Visual Culture Studies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality Studies ◽  
Nonhuman Agency

Virtual identities stand in for a user or player in a virtual environment; they are social media profiles; digital subjects—of human and nonhuman agency. Virtual identities are often imagined as something distinct from the “self” of the user of digital media but technically and existentially they determine the ways a user navigates life online. Virtual identities, then, might also be a category that captures the ways identity itself is virtual; a force of existence that determines how subjects can orient themselves in the world. The questions of what virtual identities are, how they operate, and the kinds of material expression of personhood they afford and signify has been taken up in scholarship across the last thirty years from a variety of disciplines including computer sciences, critical race studies, game studies, gender and sexuality studies, literary studies, new media studies, social sciences, science and technology studies, and visual culture studies. As an imminent figure in early 21st-century life, virtual identities might describe subjects who exist in global digital media networks but who do not necessarily profit from their participation and labor, or who are not always visible. Despite the virtuality of virtual identities, their partial and fragmentary status, they exist as a technology by which to fix identity to an embodied subject—via facial recognition, or biometric scanning, or the coaxing and collection of personal data. The study of virtual identities remains an ongoing and significant task.

Human-Computer Interaction

2009 ◽  
pp. 488-494
Author(s):  
Benet Campderrich
Keyword(s):  
Resource Management ◽  
Human Computer Interaction ◽  
Human Resource Management ◽  
Human Resource ◽  
Interface Design ◽  
Working Environment ◽  
Human Errors ◽  
Input And Output ◽  
Command Input ◽  
Computer Interaction

In order to get information from the computers people must give them information and commands, therefore human-computer interaction (HCI) consists of information input and output and command input through the so-called user interface (UI). In accordance with its very name HCI concerns both humans—hereinafter called users—and computers, so it is strongly related to ergonomics and human resource management on one hand, and computer technology on the other. Every domain of ergonomics is concerned, that is, physical (working environment, workstation layout), cognitive (perception, memory, learning, human errors), and organizational. Some points of contact between HCI and human resource management are employee profiles (as a basis to look for the interface design best fitted to the future users), task and workflow design, productivity, and learning period minimization.

GAMES OF EMPIRE TEN YEARS ON

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Pelletier ◽  
Paolo Ruffino ◽  
Jamie Woodcock ◽  
Ergin Bulut ◽  
David Nieborg ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Internet Studies ◽  
Gender And Race ◽  
Textual Practices ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Military Systems ◽  
New Distribution

The panel will retrospectively evaluate the significance of the seminal text Games of Empire (2009) for new media and game studies, reflecting on the contribution of autonomous Marxism to the study of digital culture today, as well as the methodological move it performed in tracing continuities and discontinuities between sites of production and play. Each paper will take one or two key concepts from the original book, including Empire, multitude, ideology, and cognitive capitalism, and apply them to the contemporary moment in the games sector. Our aim is to explore the strengths and limitations of these concepts, as well as identify the salient ways in which the sector has evolved over the last ten years. For example, we will examine efforts at unionisation in the sector; how gender and race have emerged as key concerns in the last few years in sites of game work; how apps are affecting the representation of capitalist and military systems; and how ‘multitude’ in the sector has assumed new forms in the wake of new distribution platforms. The panel will make a case for integrating social theory with the analysis of production cultures and textual practices, as well as situating the analysis of games within the field of new media and internet studies more broadly.

Priscilla Wordsworth’s Pocketbook Diaries and Interfaces of Subjectivity

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (300) ◽  
pp. 508-527
Author(s):  
Lindsey Eckert
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Interface Design ◽  
Book History ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Cultural Expectations ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Day By Day

Abstract Pocketbook diaries were one of the most pervasive platforms for autobiography in Britain throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The relative standardization of the genre’s bibliographic and textual elements encouraged users to record their lives in discrete day-by-day blocks and their finances in neat columns. As culturally ubiquitous interfaces, pocketbooks had the potential to shape the records that users wrote in them as well as, this article argues, users themselves. I draw on the case study of Priscilla Wordsworth’s pocketbooks from the early 1800s, contextualizing them alongside other largely unknown female diarists from the period. I show that, in addition to the content of diary entries, the way Wordsworth and others interact with the material and cultural expectations of their pocketbooks reveals much about pocketbooks’ affordances and their potential to influence their users. This article suggests that the interfaces that people used might affect not only their interactions with a particular interface—such as a pocketbook—but also their sense of self. Employing theories of interface design often applied to digital media, this article offers connections between old and new media and within scholarship on media studies, book history, and material culture.

Aboriginal history, narration and new media

1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 134-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Goodall
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
New Media ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Interface Design ◽  
Public History ◽  
Oral Narrative ◽  
The Political ◽  
Aboriginal Community ◽  
Cd Rom ◽  
Aboriginal History

‘Angledool Stories’ is an ongoing collaboration in public history between an academic and a community historian in a rural Australian indigenous community. The goal has been to investigate whether interactive multi-media offered a means to make oral history recordings, family photos and research materials more accessible to the communities within which such research had been originally undertaken. The research and drafting process has already demonstrated that decisions about the design of the CD-ROM cannot be limited to technical or aesthetic considerations. This paper analyses three aspects of that design process: interface design; oral narrative selection and editing; and image selection and contextualisation. Each of these has required a sensitivity to the continuing tensions arising from colonialism and racial conflict over land and civil rights in Australia. The design decisions have had to be taken at the intersection of the technical, the political and the analytical. An essential and creative ingredient in the design process has proven to be close and continuing consultation with the rural Aboriginal community, which has allowed the political aspects of design questions to become apparent andhas generated options for constructive approaches to their solution.

Film Narrative and Computer-Interface Design

2011 ◽  
pp. 941-943
Author(s):  
Gary A. Berg
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Interface Design ◽  
Interactive Multimedia ◽  
Computer Interface ◽  
Instructional Designers ◽  
Educational Effectiveness ◽  
Computer Based ◽  
Ready Access ◽  
Narrative Language ◽  
Narrative Conventions

Some scholars have noted the link between film narrative and computer-interface design (Berg, 2003; Plowman, 1994). Similarities between early film and interactive multimedia in the establishment of narrative conventions such as intertitles and narration are clear. Burch (1981) describes the transition from early film involving a linearization of the narrative for viewers. Early film emphasized spectacle and the documentation of unrelated events. Events and individual shots were not woven into a coherent narrative until D. W. Griffith and others led to the development of montage and a cinematic narrative language. Some suggest that this same process of creating new media conventions needs to occur to increase the educational effectiveness of computer-based programs (Berg, 2003). Instructional designers working in computer environments do not have ready access to an established narrative language and consequently need to be more explicit in their structure. The user’s knowledge of film conventions allows the authors to feel confident that their narrative can be quickly and simply understood. Consequently, instructional designers need to spend time developing narrative conventions and making narrative elements clear to the learners.

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