Loop

2020 ◽  
pp. 194-231
Author(s):  
Christopher B. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Social World ◽  
Open World ◽  
Violent Acts

This chapter explores how the open world shooter video games in the Far Cry series engage players in repetitive “game loops” (jump, run, aim, shoot). Set in the tourist and war-torn destinations of Southeast Asia, these games see violent acts of stabbing, shooting, and throwing grenades at an island’s locals not as heroic or imperial but as merely “something to do,” a quick three seconds of fun made dynamic and different enough to build into thirty seconds of fun. This chapter analyzes the game loops of Far Cry through Roland Barthes’s theories of “pleasure” and “bliss,” forms of erotic play that secure and unsettle the player’s identity and social world. Whereas game loops most often facilitate a drifting pleasure that normalizes the violence of empire, loops can also create the queer and unsettling feeling of bliss that disrupts imperial discourses.

Waltzing on Rooftops and Cobblestones

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 34-55
Author(s):  
Ailbhe Warde-Brown
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Real World ◽  
World History ◽  
Interaction Model ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
Open World ◽  
Integrated Approaches ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between music, sound, space, and time plays a crucial role in attempts to define the concept of “immersion” in video games. Isabella van Elferen’s ALI (affect-literacy-interaction) model for video game musical immersion offers one of the most integrated approaches to reading connections between sonic cues and the “magic circle” of gameplay. There are challenges, however, in systematically applying this primarily event-focused model to particular aspects of the “open-world” genre. Most notable is the dampening of narrative and ludic restrictions afforded by more intricately layered textual elements, alongside open-ended in-game environments that allow for instances of more nonlinear, exploratory gameplay. This article addresses these challenges through synthesizing the ALI model with more spatially focused elements of Gordon Calleja’s player involvement model, exploring sonic immersion in greater depth via the notion of spatiotemporal involvement. This presents a theoretical framework that broadens analysis beyond a simple focus on the immediate narrative or ludic sequence. Ubisoft’s open-world action-adventure franchise Assassin’s Creed is a particularly useful case study for the application of this concept. This is primarily because of its characteristic focus on blending elements of the historical game and the open-world game through its use of real-world history and geography. Together, the series’s various diegetic and nondiegetic sonic elements invite variable degrees of participation in “historical experiences of virtual space.” The outcome of this research intends to put such intermingled expressions of space, place, and time at the forefront of a ludomusicological approach to immersion in the open-world genre.

scholarly journals The right to the virtual city: Rural retreatism in open-world video games

2020 ◽  
pp. 146144482091711
Author(s):  
Jack Denham ◽  
Matthew Spokes
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Virtual Spaces ◽  
Open World ◽  
Virtual City ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

This article uses Lefebvre’s spatial triad and his concept of The Right to the City to categorise open-world video games as contested virtual spatial experiences, interconnected with the non-virtual spaces in which they are produced and played and replete with the same spatial, capital forces of alienation to be negotiated and maintained. We use qualitative gameplay data ( n = 15), unpacking players’ journeys through Lefebvre’s conceived, lived and perceived spaces, to show, respectively, how open-world games can be (1) fundamentally about space, (2) spaces interconnected with the non-virtual world and (3) disruptive spatial experiences. In utilising The Right to the Virtual City and our players’ tendency to retreat into the wild spaces of our case study game, Red Dead Redemption 2, we evoke the same alienating forces of commodification and capitalism to which Lefebvre spoke, positioning open-world video games as both contested spatial experiences and opportunities to challenge spatialised inequalities.

scholarly journals From Scorching Desert to Tropical Paradise: New Form of Video Game Orientalism in Far Cry 3

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
Angga Prawadika Aji
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
World System ◽  
Construction Process ◽  
The Third ◽  
Open World ◽  
New Form ◽  
Game Developers

This paper provides an analysis of different form of orientalism found in the third title of the popular Far Cry game series.  The open world system offered by Far Cry 3 brings a new nuance in the discourse of orientalism in video games, especially within the context of military shooter game. It provides both opportunities and challenges for developers to build ‘world’ as real as possible for players to explore. This construction process often reflects the orientalism practices shown by game developers in describing Eastern society and culture. Through a variety of activities such as hunting, exploring, sailing, and killing enemy forces, the player acts as a 'western mediator' who intepret the simulated Eastern world as a strange and mysterious territory.

Asian Americans and Digital Games

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher B. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Video Game ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Online Forums ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Open World

Asian Americans have frequently been associated with video games. As designers they are considered overrepresented, and specific groups appear to dominate depictions of the game designer, from South Asian and Chinese immigrants working for Microsoft and Silicon Valley to auteur designers from Japan, Taiwan, and Iran, who often find themselves with celebrity status in both America and Asia. As players, Asian Americans have been depicted as e-sports fanatics whose association with video game expertise—particularly in games like Starcraft, League of Legends, and Counter-Strike—is similar to sport-driven associations of racial minorities: African Americans and basketball or Latin Americans and soccer. This immediate association of Asian Americans with gaming cultures breeds a particular form of techno-orientalism, defined by Greta A. Niu, David S. Roh, and Betsy Huang as “the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hypertechnological terms in cultural productions and political discourse.” In sociology, Asian American Studies scholars have considered how these gaming cultures respond to a lack of acceptance in “real sports” and how Asian American youth have fostered alternative communities in PC rooms, arcades, and online forums. For still others, this association also acts as a gateway for non-Asians to enter a “digital Asia,” a space whose aesthetics and forms are firmly intertwined with Japanese gaming industries, thus allowing non-Asian subjects to inhabit “Asianness” as a form of virtual identity tourism. From a game studies point of view, video games as transnational products using game-centered (ludic) forms of expression push scholars to think beyond the limits of Asian American Studies and subjectivity. Unlike films and novels, games do not rely upon representations of minority figures for players to identify with, but instead offer avatars to play with through styles of parody, burlesque, and drag. Games do not communicate through plot and narrative so much as through procedures, rules, and boundaries so that the “open world” of the game expresses political and social attitudes. Games are also not nationalized in the same way as films and literature, making “Asian American” themes nearly indecipherable. Games like Tetris carry no obvious national origins (Russian), while games like Call of Duty and Counter-Strike do not explicitly reveal or rely upon the ethnic identities of their Asian North American designers. Games challenge Asian American Studies as transnational products whose authors do not identify explicitly as Asian American, and as a form of artistic expression that cannot be analyzed with the same reliance on stereotypes, tropes, and narrative. It is difficult to think of “Asian American” in the traditional sense with digital games. Games provide ways of understanding the Asian American experience that challenge traditional meanings of being Asian American, while also offering alternative forms of community through transethnic (not simply Asian) and transnational (not simply American) modes of belonging.

Media Violence

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 95 (6) ◽  
pp. 949-951 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Young People ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Media Violence ◽  
High Price ◽  
Saturday Morning ◽  
Violent Acts ◽  
Television Violence ◽  
American Society

American children and adolescents are being exposed to increasing amounts of media violence, especially in television, movies, video games, and youth-oriented music. By age 18, the average young person will have viewed an estimated 200 000 acts of violence on television alone.1 Video game violence, children's cartoons, and music lyrics have become increasingly graphic. In movies, action films depict anatomically precise murders, rapes, and assaults; with each sequel, the number of deaths increase dramatically.2 Although media violence is not the only cause of violence in American society, it is the single most easily remediable contributing factor.3 According to recent Nielsen data, the average American child views 21 to 23 hours of television per week.4 By the time today's children reach age 70, they will have spent 7 to 10 years of their lives watching television.5 Although movies and video games are more graphic in depictions of violence, television is the single most important medium in the lives of young people (98% of all American house-holds have at least one television set).4 Despite public concern about television violence, the amount of television violence has not changed appreciably in the past two decades: the level of prime-time violence has remained at three to five violent acts per hour, and violence in Saturday morning children's programming ranges between 20 to 25 violent acts per hour.6-8 American media are the most violent in the world, and American society is now paying a high price in terms of real-life violence.9,10 Some people in the entertainment industry maintain that: 1) violent programming is harmless because no studies exist that prove a connection between violence in the media and aggressive behavior in children and 2) young people know that television, movies, and video games are simply fantasy.11

scholarly journals Violent acts ((Online)Games)

10.34778/3d ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Wulf ◽  
Daniel Possler ◽  
Johannes Breuer
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Video Recording ◽  
First Person ◽  
Cohen’S Kappa ◽  
Cohen's Kappa ◽  
Violent Content ◽  
Content Analyses ◽  
Violent Acts ◽  
First Person Shooter

The depiction of violence is the focus of many content analyses of video games. Typically, the occurrence and nature of acts of violence or aggression are coded to quantify the amount of violent content in a particular game.   Field of application/theoretical foundation: Quantifying the amount of violence in video games can inform media effects research that looks at the relationship between the exposure to violent video game content and aggression. This allows for more precise measures and hypotheses than simply coding a game as violent or nonviolent which is often done in experimental research in this area. What is commonly coded in content analyses of violent content in video games is the number and nature of aggressive or violent actions. Specific attributes of these acts, such as their realism, graphicness or (narrative) justification (Tamborini et al., 2013) are only considered in a few studies (e.g., Lachlan et al., 2005). While the focus in most studies is on acts of physical aggression/violence in interactions with/between game characters, there are also studies that have investigated verbal aggression between players (Holz Ivory et al., 2017).   References/combination with other methods of data collection: Content analysis of violence in video games can be complemented by survey data asking players about the games they play and their rating of the degree of violence they contain and/or age rating from institutions like ESRB or PEGI (see Busching et al., 2015).   Example studies Coding material Measure Operationalization Unit(s) of analysis Source(s) (reported reliability of coding) Video recording of playing session Number and duration of violent interactions (attacking and being attacked) (a) combat: “periods of playing time in which a player [i.e., the character controlled by the player] fires his gun” (p. 1021) (b) “under attack–the player is attacked by an opponent before or after using his own weapon” (p. 1022)  Distinct phases/events in up to 12 minutes of solo play of the first-person shooter game Tactical Ops: Assault on Terror Weber et al., 2009 (Cohen’s kappa = 0.81) Video recording of the whole game Depictions of injury (present/not present) “An injured or dead character lying on the ground or remnants of blood from a known violent act” (p. 403) 1-second intervals of the game recordings Thompson, Tepichin, & Haninger, 2006 (Cohen’s kappa = 0.93) Video recording of the whole game Depictions of violent acts (present/not present) “Intentional acts in which the aggressor causes or attempts to cause physical injury or death to another character” (p. 403) 1-second intervals of the game recordings Thompson, Tepichin, & Haninger, 2006 (Cohen’s kappa = 0.93) Video recording of the first 10 minutes of gameplay Depicted harm/pain (none, mild, moderate, extreme) in aggressive exchanges between in-game characters “physical injury or incapacitation of the victim” (p. 64) “an aggressive exchange that occurs between a perpetrator (P) engaging in a particular type of act (A) against a target (T)” (p. 63) Smith, Lachlan, & Tamborini, 2003 (coefficient according to “Potter and Levine-Donnerstein's (1 999) reliability formula for multiple coders”, p. 65: 0.87)   References Busching, R., Gentile, D. A., Krahé, B., Möller, I., Khoo, A., Walsh, D. A., & Anderson, C. A. (2015). Testing the reliability and validity of different measures of violent video game use in the United States, Singapore, and Germany. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 4(2), 97–111. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000004 Holz Ivory, A., Ivory, J. D., & Wu, W. (2017). Harsh Words and Deeds: Systematic Content Analyses of Offensive User Behavior in the Virtual Environments of Online First-Person Shooter Games. Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 10(2), 19. Lachlan, K. A., Smith, S. L., & Tamborini, R. (2005). Models for aggressive behavior: The attributes of violent characters in popular video games. Communication Studies, 56(4), 313–329. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970500319377 Smith, S. L., Lachlan, K. A., & Tamborini, R. (2003). Popular video games: Quantifying the presentation of violence and its context. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 47(1), 58–76. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15506878jobem4701_4 Tamborini, R., Weber, R., Bowman, N. D., Eden, A., & Skalski, P. (2013). “Violence is a many-splintered thing”: The importance of realism, justification, and graphicness in understanding perceptions of and preferences for violent films and video games. Projections, 7(1), 100–118. https://doi.org/10.3167/proj.2013.070108 Thompson, K. M., Tepichin, K., & Haninger, K. (2006). Content and ratings of mature-rated video games. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 160(4), 402–410. https://doi.org/10.1001/archpedi.160.4.402 Weber, R., Behr, K.-M., Tamborini, R., Ritterfeld, U., & Mathiak, K. (2009). What Do We Really Know About First-Person-Shooter Games? An Event-Related, High-Resolution Content Analysis. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14(4), 1016–1037. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2009.01479.x

scholarly journals El villano es hoy el héroe. Apuntes iconográficos sobre el protagonismo del mal en los medios audiovisuales actuales / Villains are heroes today:
iconographic notes on the prominence of evil in current media

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-74
Author(s):  
Javier González Torres
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Television Series ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Violent Acts

RESUMENEn la diegética narrativa del cine, las series televisivas o los videojuegos, asistimos en la actualidad a una masiva difusión de imágenes impactantes, acciones violentas y violaciones de paradigmáticos parámetros. Las más variadas personificaciones del mal son las protagonistas, desarrollando un extraordinario potencial para alimentar su poderoso ego, envolviendo su presencia en concretas iconografías que lo convierten en nuevo héroe. Al hilo de un elenco de conocidas producciones, pretendemos desentrañar algunos apuntes iconográficos sobre estos personajes. Sus caracterizaciones, funciones y acciones quedarán contrastadas con las influencias, constantes y contaminaciones existentes en la formulación de su imagen icónica y en el fundamento de su ‘propia lucha’. Una aproximación en la que interaccionan la historia del arte, la antropología y la sociología.ABSTRACTIt only takes a quick glance at movies, television series or video games to realize that we are being fed a massive dissemination of shocking images, violent acts and violations of classic standards. A plethora of representations of evil have become the protagonists by taking advantage of certain iconographies that make them look like heroes, thus developing an extraordinary potential for feeding their powerful egos. Our purpose is to highlight some of these archetypal features by considering a range of renowned productions. We intend to match the profles, functions and deeds of these characters to their infuences, the patterns they follow and the corruption lying behind their recognizable appearances, as well as the reasons for their personal crusades. In order to do this, we will be using the history of art, anthropology and sociology as main tools. 

scholarly journals The reification of structural violence in video games

2019 ◽  
pp. 174165901988104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Denham ◽  
Steven Hirschler ◽  
Matthew Spokes
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Structural Violence ◽  
Leading Edge ◽  
Cultural Criminology ◽  
Social Harm ◽  
The Real ◽  
Open World ◽  
Player Experience ◽  
Forms Of Violence

The Grand Theft Auto franchise features prominently within existing research exploring graphic, virtual, lawless, and damagingly realistic interpersonal violence within video games. Following a review of this literature, we empirically interrogate notions of the ‘realistic’ and the ‘violent’ during gameplay, finding that the undertones of systemic, structural, capitalistic violence are experienced by players as providing the gritty sense of the ‘real’ that the game has been criticised for. Using Galtung’s concept of ‘structural violence’ and Žižek’s notion of the ‘real’, we unpack structural violence as the forerunning violent experience in the open world game. Due to the hidden and subdued nature of this violence, often taken for granted and experienced passively, we argue that it is the most impactful player experience that simultaneously makes the game playable and contextualises violent game activities. For cultural criminology, our data suggest that embedded and discrete forms of violence should be the leading edge of concern when studying the digital economy and playable forms of social harm.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Christopher B. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Open World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Eve Sedgwick ◽  
The Erotic

The book’s introduction teases out notions of openness, play, and erotics through discussions of video games. Video games train players to perceive a transnational, capitalist, and industrial form of empire, an “Open World Empire” wherein truth, openness, and digital transparency become elastic terms deployed within networks of forgetting and red herring scandals. When not seen as progressive, militaristic, or educational, gameplay emerges as a frivolous and queer practice that resists easy incorporation into state and neoliberal attitudes, as it appears as a self-indulgent waste of time. To account for the inescapability of Asian associations in games and to trace their transpacific imperial contexts, this introduction uses Asian American critique to see games as “Asiatic”: a style or form recognized as Asian-ish but that remains adaptable, fluid, and outside the authentic/inauthentic binary. The introduction discusses openness, erotic play, and the Asiatic through the history of video games and sexuality, as well as through the erotic methods developed by the critical theorists Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Eve Sedgwick, whose erotic practices emerged by comparing Western modes of thinking with those perceived to be common across Asia.

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