scholarly journals THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

c i n d e r ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Interactive Narratives ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Butterfly Effect ◽  
Genre Conventions

Interactive narratives—such as story-driven, choice-based video games—provide a space for playing with tropes and genre. Players are invited to collaborate in the creation of these stories, and can thus exercise their agency to interact with and subvert, harmful tropes and genre conventions. Here I specifically explore the use—and potential subversion—of problematic conventions regarding character death, such as the conflation of queerness and tragedy commonly known as ‘Bury Your Gays’ as explored in Life is Strange (DontNod 2015), and Carol J. Clover’s concept of ‘The Final Girl’ in the horror genre as explored in Until Dawn (Supermassive 2015).

Cherry Pie Wrapped in Barbed Wire: Fire Walk With Me as a Horror Movie

2018 ◽  
pp. 27-74
Author(s):  
Lindsay Hallam
Keyword(s):  
Gain Control ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Strong Sense ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Twin Peaks ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Genre Conventions ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
The Town

This chapter discusses Twin Peaks and its engagement with and subversion of genre conventions. It discloses how the Twin Peaks television series is viewed as a work of postmodernism and a pastiche of several genres that provide references to film noir, which gives the series a cinematic feel. It also points out that the Twin Peaks series parodied television genre conventions, while David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is less interested in parody and pastiche and presents a more personal and subjective story. The chapter examines how Fire Walk With Me reveals more of the strange and unearthly realm that exists side-by-side with the town where larger forces of good and evil fight to gain control of Laura's soul. It describes the strong sense of the supernatural in Fire Walk With Me; an element that situates the film in the horror genre through the creation of mythical and mystical spaces.

Believable and Effective AI Agents in Virtual Worlds

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iskander Umarov ◽  
Maxim Mozgovoy
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Virtual Agents ◽  
High Ability ◽  
Topic Area ◽  
Human Likeness ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
The Creation

The rapid development of complex virtual worlds (most notably, in 3D computer and video games) introduces new challenges for the creation of virtual agents, controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Two important subproblems in this topic area which need to be addressed are (a) believability and (b) effectiveness of agents’ behavior, i.e., human-likeness of the characters and high ability to achieving their own goals. In this paper, the authors study current approaches to believability and effectiveness of AI behavior in virtual worlds. They examine the concepts of believability and effectiveness, and analyze several successful attempts to address these challenges.

Architextuality and Video Games

2016 ◽  
pp. 253-272
Author(s):  
Maria Katsaridou ◽  
Mattia Thibault
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Genre Theory ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Horror Genre

Even though literary genres are instrumental for the study and analysis of video games, we should also take into consideration that, nowadays, the boundaries of literature have been crossed and we have to deal with a broader transmedia reality. Approaching it can be quite challenging and, in addition to the already existing genre theory, it requires the implementation of appropriate analytic tools, both adaptable to different languages and media and able to reconstruct and motivate the isotopies woven into the net. In the authors' opinion, semiotics is particularly suitable for this task, for many reasons. The aim of this chapter, then, is to propose a semiotic methodology, oriented toward the analysis of the architextual aspects of video games. Two case studies will be taken into consideration, in order to shed some light on the inner working of architexts featuring video games, as one of their most relevant components: the horror genre and the high fantasy genre.

Rearing Children of the Market in the “You” Decade: Choose Your Own Adventure Books and the Ascent of Free Choice in 1980s America

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
ELI COOK
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Technological Change ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Free Choice ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Previous Literature ◽  
Interactive Narratives ◽  
Market Choice ◽  
Individual Market

Exploring some of the key tenets of neoliberal American culture, this article examines the historical forces behind the meteoric rise of interactive “Choose Your Own Adventure” (CYOA) children's books in the 1980s. Despite selling over 250 million copies worldwide and becoming the fourth most popular children's series of all time, the CYOA phenomenon has yet to be placed in its larger social, economic, historical or cultural context. When explaining the rise of interactive narratives, previous literature has mostly focussed on technological change – namely the invention of video games, computer consoles and hypertext narratives. Moving away from such claims, this article demonstrates how the incredible success of solely text-based CYOA books stemmed largely from the cultural ascent of individual market choice to the heart of American notions of agency, liberty, subjectivity and selfhood in the 1970s and 1980s.

Visual Analyses of the Creation of Avatars

2011 ◽  
pp. 284-300
Author(s):  
Erik W. Black ◽  
Richard E. Ferdig ◽  
Joseph C. DiPietro ◽  
Feng Liu ◽  
Baird Whalen
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Second Life ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Ideal Self ◽  
Quantitative Review ◽  
The Real ◽  
Data Analyses ◽  
Temporal Aspects ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Real Person

Video games are becoming more popular; there has been a particular rise in interest and use of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs). These games utilize avatar creation; avatars can be seen as the technological instantiation of the real person in the virtual world. Little research has been conducted on avatar creation. Although it is has been anecdotally postulated that you can be anything you want online, there is a dearth of research on what happens when participants are told to create avatars, particularly avatars within given contexts. In this study, we used the Second Life avatar creation tool to examine what would happen when participants were told to create avatars as heroes, villains, their ideal self, and their actual self. Data analyses reveal that characters often refuse to change permanent aspects of their features, instead modifying only temporal aspects. This research has provided support for the quantitative review of avatar characteristics as predictors of vignette groupings.

Interaction, narrative, and drama

2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magy Seif El-Nasr
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Educational Games ◽  
Interactive Narrative ◽  
Interactive Environments ◽  
Adaptive Techniques ◽  
Interactive Narratives ◽  
Performance Arts ◽  
Interactive Experience ◽  
And Training

Interactive narratives have been used in a variety of applications, including video games, educational games, and training simulations. Maintaining engagement within such environments is an important problem, because it affects entertainment, motivation, and presence. Performance arts theorists have discussed and formalized many techniques that increase engagement and enhance dramatic content of art productions. While constructing a narrative manually, using these techniques, is acceptable for linear media, using this approach for interactive environments results in inflexible experiences due to the unpredictability of users’ actions. Few researchers attempted to develop adaptive interactive narrative experiences. However, developing a quality interactive experience is largely an art process, and many of these adaptive techniques do not encode artistic principles. This paper presents a new interactive narrative architecture designed using a set of dramatic techniques that have been formulated based on several years of training in film and theatre.

scholarly journals Narrative ludology: intermediality in adventure games

Em Tese ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 96
Author(s):  
Pedro Groppo
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Interactive Narratives ◽  
Adventure Games

<p>This paper proposes to discuss how adventure games, a subgenre of video games, have become a new medium that manages to combine elements from literature, comics, and movies in order to present highly complex interactive narratives of their own. The phenomenon of intermediality within this plurimedial medium is discussed using Irina Rajewsky’s definitions of medial transposition, media combination and intermedial reference.</p>

scholarly journals Using the Roblox Video Game Engine for Creating Virtual tours and Learning about the Sculptural Heritage

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (20) ◽  
pp. 268
Author(s):  
Cecile Meier ◽  
Jose Luis Saorín ◽  
Alejandro Bonnet de León ◽  
Alberto Guerrero Cobos
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
3D Models ◽  
Game Engine ◽  
Santa Cruz ◽  
School Students ◽  
Final Questionnaire ◽  
Game Engines ◽  
The Creation

This paper describes an experience to incorporate the realization of virtual routes about the sculptural heritage of a city in the classroom by developing a simulation of the urban environment using a video game engine. Video game engines not only allow the creation of video games but also the creation and navigation of in-teractive three-dimensional worlds. For this research, Roblox Studio has been used, a simple and intuitive program in which no previous programming skills are required. During the 2018/2019 academic year, a pilot experience was carried out with 53 secondary school students who were given the task of designing a virtual environment in which they had to include 3D models of the sculptural her-itage of the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Before starting the experience, the par-ticipants answered a questionnaire to obtain a previous idea of the students' knowledge about the creation of video games. Once the activity was finished and in order to evaluate the result of the activity, the participants answered a final questionnaire. The students emphasized that after the activity they are more aware of the sculptural heritage of Santa Cruz and that they consider themselves capable of creating their own interactive worlds with Roblox.

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