scholarly journals Introduction: What ‘is’ Australian Game Studies?

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Carter ◽  
Thomas Apperley ◽  
Laura Crawford ◽  
Martin Gibbs ◽  
Bjorn Nansen
Keyword(s):  
Digital Games ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Research Association ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Academic Researchers

This special issue of the Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association Journal represent approaches by contemporary Australian scholars in the study of digital games. They responded to the provocation ‘What is Game Studies in Australia?’ the topic of the inaugural conference of the Digital Games Research Association Australia (DiGRAA). This event, held on 17th of June 2014, was a meeting of academic researchers, critics, designers, developers, and artists focused on developing a discussion of what game studies ‘is’ in Australia. The conference focused special attentiveness both to diversity and any particular regional issues that delegates chose to address. These articles illustrate the breadth and variety of approaches which were discussed.

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.

scholarly journals Grow Up, Level Up, and Game On; Evolving Games Research

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 56-59
Author(s):  
Julia Kneer ◽  
Ruud S. Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Active Learning ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Recreational Activity ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Cultural Shift ◽  
Digital Gaming ◽  
The World ◽  
Current Special Issue

Playing host to articles written in different disciplines and perspectives on the shared subject of digital gaming, the current special issue means to galvanise interest in and recognition of the nascent field of games research. Despite being little more than 50 years old, the medium of digital games has seen a meteoric rise to economic and cultural prominence across the globe. A cultural shift accepting games as a worthwhile recreational activity (and more) is likewise resulting in shifting attentions within game studies. Games were seen as frivolous and even harmful, and research traditionally focused on the negative effects they were perceived to have while in the end coming up with very little reliable evidence to support this position. The current wave of games research exemplified in this issue is certainly wider: games are a cultural and often highly socialised medium that has changed the way we view the world. They are used in non-entertainment settings, helping to promote active learning in players of all ages. The medium also facilitates deeper psychological and philosophical theorizing, as researchers grapple with deeper questions on what games and play mean to each of us. Put simply: games research is not just fun and games.

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.

scholarly journals Introduction

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Staffan Björk ◽  
Mathias Fuchs
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Research Association ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Open Access Publication ◽  
Conference Theme

One of the aims of the Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association (ToDiGRA) is to collect the best received work presented at the DiGRA conferences. This special issue collects some of the highlights from the 2015 edition of the DiGRA conference held in Lüneburg, Germany(May 14-17). The conference theme of “Diversity of play: Games – Cultures – Identities” invited submissions that reflected upon the diversityof games and gaming and this compilation features some of the bestwork on that. As usual, the invited keynote speeches are not an integral part of the Transactions. We did however publish the keynotes in a separate open access publication that you might want to read in parallel with the peer-reviewed articles in this issue. You can find the booklet with the title “Diversity of Play” (ed Mathias Fuchs) published by meson press in Lüneburg available for free download at: http://meson.press/books/diversity-of-play/

scholarly journals Introduction

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Annika Waern ◽  
José Zagal
Keyword(s):  
Computer Game ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Research Association ◽  
10Th Anniversary

The Digital Games Research Association - DiGRA - celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2011. Espen Aarseth declared 2001 as the “year one of computer game studies as an emerging, viable, international, academic field” (Aarseth 2001). As of this writing, the DIGRA conference has been organized five times and DiGRA is now taking the next step, to publish its own journal.

scholarly journals Introduction to the Special Issue: The Game is the Message, Selected Articles from the 2018 International DIGRA Conference

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Gibbs ◽  
Matteo Bittanti ◽  
Riccardo Fassone
Keyword(s):  
Digital Games ◽  
Research Association ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Related Research ◽  
International Conference ◽  
Conference Series ◽  
Luigi Einaudi

The 2018 Digital Games Research Association International Conference (DIGRA 2018), The Game is the Message was held at the Campus Luigi Einaudi of Turin University, Italy, 25-28 July 2018. Since it was first held in 2003, the DiGRA International Conference series provides a venue for the presentation and discussion of games-related research from multiple and diverse research disciplines.

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 Introduction to Special Issue Ludic Economies: Ludic Economics 101

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 647-651 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Giddings ◽  
Alison Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Economic Analysis ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Cultural Economy ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Mobile Games ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Creative Production

In this special issue on ludic economies, we argue that the study of digital games—their milieux of production, cultures and contexts of play, user-generated production, and spectatorship should be applied as a primary heuristic in understanding the cultural economy of neoliberal late capitalism—as well as vice versa. The articles here focus on a range of issues related to both mainstream profit models including digital distribution platforms and mobile games as well as peripheral game economies such as jams and indie production. Each of the studies share an attunement to the tensions and contradictions embedded within what are commonly approached as matter-of-fact within traditional economic analysis of games. Rather than framing industrial changes as necessarily either overdetermined exploitation (of workers in the mainstream games industry, players and their ‘free’ labour) or emancipatory and progressive (new forms of creative production, play, resistance), they address the specificity and peculiarity of game economies at both the micro- and macro-levels of industry, technology, and everyday play culture. And rather than simply countering a pessimistic picture with other, more progressive examples of contemporary game culture such as ‘games for change’, art practices and political interventions—as important as these are—the contributions to this special issue instead track the contradictions and tensions within game cultures and economies as reflections of those within the late capitalist and patriarchal cultural economy at large.

scholarly journals Playful Constructivism: Making Sense of Digital Games for Learning and Creativity Through Play, Design, and Participation

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittorio Marone
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Learning Theories ◽  
Game Based Learning ◽  
Visual Model ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities

The goal of this article is to provide a conceptual framework to better understand digital games in learning and creative contexts through the dimensions of play, design, and participation. This framework can be used as a guiding tool for the selection, implementation, and evaluation of game-based approaches in formal and informal educational settings, as well as a blueprint for making sense of playful learning and creativity in virtual worlds and technology-mediated environments. In essence, this article seeks to answer the question “What are digital games and how can we make sense of them for learning and creativity?” The proposed visual model and conceptual framework, here defined as Playful Constructivism, is grounded on the learning theories of Situated Cognition, Social Constructivism, and Constructionism, and draws from play and game studies, design-based learning, and affinity spaces research. This framework is not intended as the “ultimate” conceptualization of game-based learning, but rather as an agile tool that can guide scholars, practitioners, and students through the affordances, challenges, and opportunities of implementing and using digital games in learning and creative contexts.

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