scholarly journals Modding a free and open source software video game: "Play testing is hard work"

2013 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giacomo Poderi ◽  
David James Hakken
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Participatory Culture ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Game Play ◽  
Video Game Play ◽  
Software Strategy

Video game modding is a form of fan productivity in contemporary participatory culture. We see modding as an important way in which modders experience and conceptualize their work. By focusing on modding in a free and open source software video game, we analyze the practice of modding and the way it changes modders' relationship with their object of interest. The modders' involvement is not always associated with fun and creativity. Indeed, activities such as play testing often undermine these dimensions of modding. We present a case study of modding that is based on ethnographic research done for The Battle for Wesnoth, a free and open source software strategy video game entirely developed by a community of volunteers.

Social surveillance and Let’s Play: A regional case study of gaming in Manila slum communities

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (10) ◽  
pp. 2119-2139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryll Ruth R Soriano ◽  
Hugh Davies ◽  
Larissa Hjorth
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Video Game Play ◽  
Private Practices ◽  
Broadcast Video

This article examines the use of Let’s Play (LP) in Manila, Philippines. LP is an emerging genre in which players record, narrate, and broadcast video game play online. While in Western contexts LP is predominantly viewed in domestic settings, our focus is on the distinct manner in which LP is viewed in the Philippines, resulting in unique social architectures of play that coalesce public and private practices. In particular, the arcade-style vending machine, pisonet (a conflation between the Filipino piso [currency] + inter[net]), plays a key role in shaping net cultures within everyday life. Through the pisonet, unique forms of performative play happen in and around the watching play of LP. These types of performativity around LP see intergenerational and public forms of play, spectatorship, and surveillance entangle. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Metropolitan Manila, this study aims to conceptualize how public spaces, screens, and play—through the LP on pisonets—bring about unique modes of sociality and surveillance of care. In doing so, this paper complicates established viewership models of LP, exploring how their manifestation in Manila gives rise to a particular type of Filipino sense of play.

scholarly journals NOSTALGIA AND THE BACKLOG: /R/PATIENTGAMERS AND THE TRANSACTIONAL NATURE OF LEISURE

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rainforest Scully-Blaker
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Leisure Time ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Game Play ◽  
Video Game Play ◽  
Game Players ◽  
Efficiency And Productivity ◽  
Do So

This paper uses the findings of an investigation into the /r/patientgamers subreddit to account for the ways that our leisure time and our play have been assimilated by the logics of neoliberal, late capitalism. I do this by tracing classed experiences of slowness as experienced by video game players. The figure of the patientgamer was selected not just because of their protracted approach to video game consumption, but because the grows out of a frustration with the financial and temporal costs to access leisure. Through Foucauldian discourse analysis, two major themes were detected across a number of posts which traced how many players tried, and often failed, to slow down their lives in restful ways through their play and the conversations that emerged from the impulse to treat their leisure time as work. Specifically, users’ nostalgia for their childhoods and their anxieties around possessing a video game backlog are both emblematic of the way that video game play has been made legible to capitalist logics such that any distinction between labour and leisure becomes moot and attempt to lift from the patientgamer ethos some potential ways that the work of play may be reframed to undercut logics of efficiency and productivity. The case study of /r/patientgamers holds relevance not just for the study of games and/as culture, but of how technocapitalism instrumentalizes all leisure and the consequences felt by those who try to slow their rhythms of consumption but do so without proper attention to issues of class and power.

Relationships between video game play factors and frequency of lucid and control dreaming experiences.

Dreaming ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Sestir ◽  
Ming Tai ◽  
Jennifer Peszka
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Game Play ◽  
Video Game Play ◽  
And Control
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