An Opportunity for In-Game Ad Placement

Author(s):  
Heather M. Schulz ◽  
Matthew S. Eastin

It is argued here that the potential connections video game advertisers can build with consumers makes this new medium a strong force in the digital media world. A meaning-based model is introduced to explain the fluctuation of meaning over time, which is caused by the individual and social interpretation and integration of signs and symbols. The history of video games will be comprehensively interpreted through this model to explain the active identification going on between consumers and video games.

Author(s):  
Dan W. Lawrence

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the intersection where digital media studies meet rhetoric and rhetoric is re-introduced to musicology. In the recent academic excitement surrounding game studies, the music of games has been overshadowed. The author would like to call attention to the significance of game music and to consider a rhetorical method to approaching it that calls upon a rekindling of the history of coupling rhetoric with music. The author builds on this history by suggesting the foundation of a rhetorical framework for understanding the argumentative power of video game songs. He then moves to offer an approach for evaluating the ethos of game music that consists of assessing worlds and how they are carried through, and by, music. While 17th century baroque composers thought music to be fundamentally an issue of affections—and especially played off of emotional binaries such as joy/sadness as a rhetorical approach—the author hope to here revive this lost art of applying rhetoric to music through broadening the discussion beyond the matter of human emotion. This rhetorical approach allows the individual a framework with which to evaluate the ethos of game music as it now appears through numerous mobile operating systems, online environments, and as remediated forms manifesting in/as cultural artifacts. As games become ubiquitous, so do their songs.


Author(s):  
Bonnie ‘Bo’ Ruberg ◽  
Daniel Lark

This article looks at the appearance of domestic spaces on the popular livestreaming platform Twitch.tv, with a focus on livestreams that appear to be shot in streamers’ bedrooms. Many Twitch streamers broadcast from their homes, making domestic space central to questions of placemaking for this rapidly growing digital media form. Within the home, bedrooms merit particular attention because they carry particular cultural connotations; they are associated with intimacy, embodiment, and erotics. Drawing from observations of gaming and nongaming streams, we map where bedrooms do and do not appear on Twitch. We locate the majority of bedrooms in categories that foreground connections between streamers and viewers, like Just Chatting, Music & Performing Arts, and autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). By contrast, across a wide range of video game genres, bedrooms remain largely absent from gaming streams. The presence of bedrooms on Twitch also breaks down along gender lines, with women streaming being far more likely to broadcast from their bedrooms than men. Here, we build from existing research on both livestreaming and digital placemaking to argue for an understanding of place on Twitch as fundamentally performative. This performance is inherently gendered and bound up with the affective labor of streaming. In addition, we demonstrate how the bedroom, even when it does not appear on screen, can be understood as a ‘structuring logic’ of placemaking on Twitch. Given the history of livestreaming, which grows out of women’s experiments with online ‘lifecasting’, the bedroom sets expectations for the type of spatial and emotional access a stream is imagined to offer viewers. In this sense, the absence of bedrooms in gaming streams can be understood as a disavowal of intimate domestic space: an attempt by predominantly male streamers to distance themselves from the implicit parallels between livestreaming and practices like webcam modeling.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
A. Khalemsky ◽  
R. Gelbard

In dynamic and big data environments the visualization of a segmentation process over time often does not enable the user to simultaneously track entire pieces. The key points are sometimes incomparable, and the user is limited to a static visual presentation of a certain point. The proposed visualization concept, called ExpanDrogram, is designed to support dynamic classifiers that run in a big data environment subject to changes in data characteristics. It offers a wide range of features that seek to maximize the customization of a segmentation problem. The main goal of the ExpanDrogram visualization is to improve comprehensiveness by combining both the individual and segment levels, illustrating the dynamics of the segmentation process over time, providing “version control” that enables the user to observe the history of changes, and more. The method is illustrated using different datasets, with which we demonstrate multiple segmentation parameters, as well as multiple display layers, to highlight points such as new trend detection, outlier detection, tracking changes in original segments, and zoom in/out for more/less detail. The datasets vary in size from a small one to one of more than 12 million records.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 742-762
Author(s):  
Michael Ryan Skolnik ◽  
Steven Conway

Alongside their material dimensions, video game arcades were simultaneously metaphysical spaces where participants negotiated social and cultural convention, thus contributing to identity formation and performance within game culture. While physical arcade spaces have receded in number, the metaphysical elements of the arcades persist. We examine the historical conditions around the establishment of so-called arcade culture, taking into account the history of public entertainment spaces, such as pool halls, coin-operated entertainment technologies, video games, and the demographic and economic conditions during the arcade’s peak popularity, which are historically connected to the advent of bachelor subculture. Drawing on these complementary histories, we examine the social and historical movement of arcades and arcade culture, focusing upon the Street Fighter series and the fighting game community (FGC). Through this case study, we argue that moral panics concerning arcades, processes of cultural norm selection, technological shifts, and the demographic peculiarities of arcade culture all contributed to its current decline and discuss how they affect the contemporary FGC.


Author(s):  
Zeynep Tanes

Video games and gamified applications have been used for various purposes including helping businesses (in commercial marketing), or helping the individual, community or society (in social marketing). Video games are systems with rules, play structures, and narratives; while gamified applications utilize game elements, mechanics, and ways of thinking to generate meaningful, playful and fun experiences. Both video games and gamified applications require a learning process including learning to play, and learning through the game. This chapter advocates that learning is an inherent component of video games and gamified applications. The main purpose of this chapter is to examine the concept of ‘game learning' from three major theoretical positions, namely Behaviorism, Cognitivism, and Constructivism. In doing so, this chapter first explains, compares, and contrasts these three positions, then elaborates on how learning takes place in specific games designed for commercial and social marketing with the lens of these three positions.


2020 ◽  
pp. tobaccocontrol-2019-055300
Author(s):  
Susan Forsyth ◽  
Patricia A McDaniel

BackgroundSince 1972, Philip Morris (PM) has sponsored motorsports. Racing video games are a popular genre among youth and often emulate the branding of their real-life counterparts, potentially exposing youth to tobacco imagery. We examined racing video games for the presence of Marlboro imagery and explored the history of efforts to remove or regulate such imagery.MethodsWe searched the Truth Tobacco Industry documents for relevant documents and used information from video game-related websites and game play videos to identify racing video games that contained Marlboro trademarks and imagery. We also collected information on the Entertainment Software Ratings Board’s (ESRB) tobacco-specific and overall game ratings.FindingsIn 1989, negative publicity surrounding the presence of Marlboro logos in racing games led PM to threaten legal action against two game makers for copyright infringement. PM also launched a media campaign promoting this intervention as evidence of its commitment to youth smoking prevention. Nonetheless, we identified 219 video games from 1979 to 2018 that contained Marlboro trademarks and/or Marlboro-sponsored drivers and livery. Among the games in our sample with an ESRB game rating, all but one received an ‘E,’ indicating appropriateness for everyone, and all but three lacked tobacco content descriptors.ConclusionRacing video games have been and continue to be a vehicle for exposing adolescents to the Marlboro brand. Because voluntary efforts by PM and the video game industry to prevent youth exposure to tobacco brands in video games have been ineffective, USA and international policy-makers should prohibit tobacco content in video games.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-118
Author(s):  
TreaAndrea M. Russworm ◽  
Samantha Blackmon

This article, a Black feminist mixtape, blends music, interviews, and critical analysis in order to demonstrate some of the ways in which Black women have impactfully engaged with the video game industry. Organized as musical “tracks,” it uses lyrics by Black women performers as a critical and cultural frame for understanding some of the work Black women have done with video games. In prioritizing the personal as not only political but also instructive for how we might think about digital media histories and feminism, each mixtape track focuses on Black women's lived experiences with games. As it argues throughout, Black feminism as defined and experienced by the Combahee River Collective of the 1970s has been an active and meaningful part of Black women's labor and play practices with video games.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Rahmawan Jatmiko

Assassin’s Creed is a historical fiction video game developed and published by Ubisoft. This video game has been so far considered as one of the most violent video games. Assassin’s Creed III is the third sequel of which plot is set in a fictional history of real world events and follows the centuries-old conflict between the Assassins and the Templars. Based on this study, the plot, characters, characterization, and scenes in Assassin’s Creed III are deemed to be able to give positive teachings to the young generation, despite the fact that there are violent and sadistic scenes in the story. Haytham Kenway, who is “evil” protagonist in Assassin’s Creed Forsaken, is portrayed as an expert in using weapons, since he was kid. Separated from his family, Kenway was taken by mysterious mentor, who trained him to be the most deadly killer. Comparisons with classic characters such as Oedipus, Hamlet, or Indonesian legendary character Sangkuriang are intentionally made to sharpen the analysis. The finding of this study is that heroic value might be found in either protagonist or antagonistic characters, whose roles involved numerous violent actions. Comments from the official website and social media which claim that Assassin’s Creed has brought negative impacts on the consumers might not be totally true.


Loading ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (23) ◽  
pp. 15-35
Author(s):  
Jonathan Lessard ◽  
Carl Therrien

This paper looks at the emergence of video game creation in Québec prior to the industrial boom and the popularization of independent games. Built from personal archives and oral history, the paper highlights two unknown personalities from the history of video games in Québec: Christian Boutin and I-Grec. These portraits contribute to diversify the “indie” narrative and reconsider it as part of a longer history.


2021 ◽  
pp. 215-239
Author(s):  
Piotr Kubiński

The article concentrates on a specific tendency that can be observed in some video games created in recent years. This trend is that more and more video games present an intimate perspective and focus on the individual experience of the protagonist. The author of the article approaches the phenomenon in question mainly from the interpretative and genological perspective, since video games are not a media form commonly identified with the expression of intimate, formative or identitycreating experiences. The author starts with an analysis of the reasons why video games and intimistic texts are commonly perceived as very distant genre forms. Then he analyzes those video games that represent the intimistic tendency: Bury me, my Love (The Pixel Hunt, 2017), A Normal Lost Phone (Accidental Queens, 2017) and Wanderlust: Travel Stories (Different Tales, 2019). The analysis leads to the following conclusions: what is common for all the three discussed games is i.a. a particularly important role of the text as the basic semiotic material in which the game is realized. Even though Interfejsy intymności this concentration on the word is not a necessary condition of intimistic poetics – it definitely helps introducing such a dimension into the work. What is more, two of the three discussed games use the strategy of remediating a smartphone. In both cases, the creators designed new interfaces modeled on the real ones and turned navigating on the phone screen into basic game mechanics. This, in turns, means that intimistic tendencies in video games stimulate reaching for new genre forms. This process of remediation is possible mainly because modern intimacy has shifted very clearly towards the digital, and smartphones have become its basic tool. This phenomenon, which the author of the article calls ‘intimacy 2.0’, is a result of the fact that: (a) contemporary culture is deeply anchored in the digital and its interfaces, and (b) the importance of smartphones in everyday communication and media consumption has been growing enormously in recent years. The final conclusion of the paper is as follows: all the discussed games use an intimate perspective to evoke empathy, which was not a typical video game design goal. This is especially interesting, given the fact, that all the analyzed games remain primarily commercial products that are driven by the laws of the market.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document