scholarly journals Skilled play : positioning the player at the centre of the digital game

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Clemens
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Contemporary Problem ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Digital Game ◽  
Skill Sets ◽  
Game Controller ◽  
Essential Components ◽  
Female Voices ◽  
Player Skill

This thesis argues that a focus on the player and the skill sets required to play video games - a player-skill perspective - provides a productive framework from which to examine and address many contemporary 'problem areas' within game studies. Familiarity, social performativity, and material mastery form three crucial, interlocking junctures where skill and mastery are framed as essential components for undertanding games. The game controller is positioned as a 'gatekeeper' between player and game; a precluding factor in engaging with the medium. Participant responses from original qualitative research, which places a primacy on female voices, are framed within a gaming climate of historically increasing complexification of game genres and material components, and point to several trends in how women can (and do) contend with gendered technology.

scholarly journals Skilled play : positioning the player at the centre of the digital game

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Clemens
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Contemporary Problem ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Digital Game ◽  
Skill Sets ◽  
Game Controller ◽  
Essential Components ◽  
Female Voices ◽  
Player Skill

This thesis argues that a focus on the player and the skill sets required to play video games - a player-skill perspective - provides a productive framework from which to examine and address many contemporary 'problem areas' within game studies. Familiarity, social performativity, and material mastery form three crucial, interlocking junctures where skill and mastery are framed as essential components for undertanding games. The game controller is positioned as a 'gatekeeper' between player and game; a precluding factor in engaging with the medium. Participant responses from original qualitative research, which places a primacy on female voices, are framed within a gaming climate of historically increasing complexification of game genres and material components, and point to several trends in how women can (and do) contend with gendered technology.

The older player of digital games: A classification based on perceived need satisfaction

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bob De Schutter ◽  
Steven Malliet
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Need Satisfaction ◽  
Digital Game ◽  
Game Play ◽  
Perceived Need ◽  
Freedom Fighters ◽  
Larger Sample

AbstractThe current study aims to integrate the findings of previous research on the use of video games by older adults by applying the Uses & Gratifications (U&GT) paradigm (Blumler and Katz, 1974). A qualitative study was performed with 35 participants aged between 50 and 74, who were selected from a larger sample of 213. Based upon their primary playing motives and the gratifications they obtain from digital game play, a classification was developed, resulting in five categories of older adults who actively play games: “time wasters”, “freedom fighters”, “compensators”, “value seekers” and “ludophiles”.

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 Bodies That Count: Augmentation, Community, and Disability in a Science Fiction Game

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Carr
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Digital Game ◽  
Game Play ◽  
Disability Theory ◽  
The Grotesque

The article examines the overlaps between disability studies and digital game studies through an analysis of the science fiction digital game Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Using an adaptation of Mitchell and Snyder’s work on disability and narrative prosthesis in literature, the power implied by erasure-by-metaphor is considered, as are issues of migration, appropriation, and the grotesque. By examining ability, disability, and tangibility in relation to the game’s rules, game-play, and narrative elements, this analysis demonstrates the relevance of disability theory to science fiction games.

scholarly journals On the Publishing Methods of Our Time: Mobilizing Knowledge in Game Studies

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Wilcox
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
First Person ◽  
Academic Interest ◽  
Middle State ◽  
The University

There is a considerable amount of academic and non-academic interest in the production and reception of video games. At the same time game scholars encounter questions such as, “are video game academics irrelevant?” In this article I connect questions of relevancy in game studies with the need to develop forms of publishing capable of asserting that relevancy more broadly. As the co-founder and editor-in-chief of First Person Scholar (FPS), a middle-state publication based in the Games Institute at the University of Waterloo, I detail how FPS has attempted to reach beyond the traditional scope of game studies to engage a wider audience and assert a new degree of relevancy for the game scholar.

West of the Magic Circle

The Race Card ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 113-137
Author(s):  
Tara Fickle
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Times ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
Japan And China ◽  
Magic Circle

This chapter radically revises our understanding of game studies’ conceptual foundations by revealing the Orientalist assumptions embedded in Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) and Roger Caillois’s Man, Play, and Games (1958). These founding fathers’ discussions of play as a liberating “magic circle” have been endlessly cited, excerpted, and romanticized, most recently by popular and academic rhetoric extolling video games as the cure for a “broken” and alienating twenty-first-century reality. Unsurprisingly, contemporary scholars have regarded the patronizing and exotifying references to Japan and China which crop up nearly from the very first pages of these tomes as embarrassing but irrelevant signs of the times. Recontextualizing these early chapters within the longer and rarely read remainders of both monographs, however, reveals that those initial ludic schemas were in fact the raison d’être for an elaborate ethnocentric sociology that rationalized the cognitive and cultural inferiority of nonwhites by ranking them according to the “primitivity” of their play. Showing how these theorists legitimized their taxonomies by naturalizing fantasies of a ritualized, stagnant East and an innovative, rational West, this chapter demonstrates that Orientalist discourse was not tangential but essential to the seemingly global theories of play that form the basis of modern game studies.

The Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Video Game Consumption in Turkey

2022 ◽  
pp. 151-167
Author(s):  
Yasemin Özkent
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Social Distance ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Online Video ◽  
Digital Game ◽  
Leisure Education ◽  
Daily Work ◽  
The World ◽  
Online Video Games

Different precautions such as quarantine, social distance, and hygiene applications have been taken around the world to prevent the spreading of the virus during the COVID-19 pandemic. While these precautions brought many sectors to a halt, digital-based platforms have been used more actively. The pandemic changed daily work, leisure, education, and the time spent with families and how people distribute their time on these items. The interest toward digital games increased as the result of COVID-19 quarantine. As people spent more time at home, they tended to play games to socialize. This study aims to evaluate the changes and tendencies in the consumption of video games during the pandemic period in Turkey. Accordingly, the consumption of online video games in 2020 was analyzed through comparing with 2019. As a result, it was detected that more time and money was spent during the pandemic period on the digital game sector which was also important before.

Game Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shira Chess
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Specific Approach ◽  
Emerging Media ◽  
Video Game Studies ◽  
Media Objects

As a nascent form of screen culture, video games provide a challenging new lens to think about emerging media. Because video games do not abide by traditional narrative structure and because many different kinds of media objects fall under the purview of video games, they provide particular complications for researchers. In turn, within video game studies, which has been a growing field since the early 2000s, researchers often focus on a specific approach to understanding video games: studying the industry, studying audiences, or studying games as texts. Additionally, many researchers have found it useful to consider “assemblage”-type approaches that look holistically at several aspects of a video game object in order to understand the game from a broader context.

The Contributions of Perceived Graphic and Enactive Realism to Enjoyment and Engagement in Active Video Games

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jih-Hsuan Lin ◽  
Wei Peng
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Perceived Realism ◽  
Active Video Games ◽  
Video Game Playing ◽  
Active Video Game ◽  
Active Video ◽  
Movement Intensity ◽  
Practical Implications

How perceived realism in a video game contributes to game enjoyment and engagement is a theoretically important and practically significant question. The conceptualization and operationalization of perceived realism in previous video game studies vary greatly, particularly regarding the dimensions of perceived graphic realism and perceived external realism. The authors argue that it is important to examine perceived enactive realism, particularly for interactive and participatory media such as video games. This study examines the contribution of two types of perceived realism—perceived graphic realism and perceived enactive realism—to enjoyment and engagement as manifested by the level of physical movement intensity in an active video game playing context. It was found that perceived enactive realism was a significant predictor of enjoyment and engagement in playing active video games. However, perceived graphic realism was not found to be a significant predictor of enjoyment or engagement. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

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