Cinema of the Gun

Author(s):  
Sam Hinton

Games, like other technological artifacts, do not fall mysteriously from orbit. They are constructed by humans within a matrix of social, economic and cultural conditions of production and consumption. Technologies including the refrigerator, the M16 machine gun and the bicycle have famously been the subject of so-called science and technology studies (STS) analyses, following MacKenzie and Wajcman, Pinch and Bijker and Latour and Callon, among others. Aside from a few initial forays, games have largely escaped this kind of in-depth and sustained analysis. This chapter argues for the use of STS in games research and uses an STS approach to explore the evolution of a ’genre’ of computer games – the first person shooter, or FPS – and in particular the cinematic turn that has taken place within this genre over the past decade.

Leonardo ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie Schleiner

The subject matter of this article emerged in part out of research for the author's thesis project and first game patch, Madame Polly, a “first-person shooter gender hack.” Since the time it was written, there has been an upsurge of interest and research in computer games among artists and media theoreticians. Considerable shifts in gaming culture at large have taken place, most notably a shift toward on-line games, as well as an increase in the number of female players. The multidirectional information space of the network offers increasing possibilities for interventions and gender reconfigurations such as those discussed at the end of the article.


Author(s):  
Chuck Huff ◽  
Deborah G. Johnson ◽  
Keith W. Miller

In traditional communities, some actions are widely regarded as bad and unethical. But in online “communities,” the virtual analog of those actions may not be regarded with the same clarity. Since “virtual” behaviors are distinct from ordinary acts, they require further analysis to determine whether they are right or wrong. In this chapter we consider an incident on the Internet that illustrates this confusion. The incident centered on a virtual act of sexual violence. This “rape in cyberspace,” reported by Julian Dibbell in 1993, has generated questions about the significance of behaviors in virtual reality environments. We use the case to explore the moral nature of actions in virtual environments, emphasizing the themes of harm and responsibility. We then offer some tentative lessons to be learned and, finally, apply the lessons to virtual sex and to first-person shooter computer games.


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 96
Author(s):  
Paulina K. Ariningsih ◽  
Yun P. Mulyani ◽  
Kristianto A. Nugroho ◽  
Chandra S. Rahardjo

<p>Computer games, especially First Person Shooter (FPS) have become one of the fastest growing and most economically sucessful software in Indonesia. Given the potential economic benefits of the FPS games, it is important to design its user interface as usable as possible to win the market. In accordance, it is crucial to find out what user interface factors should be considered in designing an FPS game. These factors can be used as a designing guide for game developers in Indonesia. The purpose of this paper is to discover the main user interface factors that should be considered in designing an FPS game especially from usability point of view and to suggest improvement of the user interface in current FPS game.</p><span>Fourty (40) usabilty attributes from literature review are qualitatively grouped into 5 factors. Those factors are: Basic FPS Feature (BFF), Basic Game Feature (BGF), Display &amp; Sounds (D&amp;S), Help &amp; Hints (H&amp;H), and Enjoyment (E). Usability testing on the factors is conducted in three different groups of players: Novice, Experienced, and Expert. Mann-Withney Test are conducted to understand performance difference for each group. The result shows that BGF and H&amp;H are not significantly difference for all groups. While for BFF, the novice group tend to have different preference rather than other groups since there is not enough time duration given on novice users accessing the FPS feature. For D&amp;S, expert tend to have different preference rather than other groups. Some future research potentials are also proposed in this paper.</span>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shengmei Liu ◽  
Atsuo Kuwahara ◽  
James Scovell ◽  
Jamie Sherman ◽  
Mark Claypool

Competitive gamers, and especially esports gamers, want lower latency to improve their chances of winning. There are two main sources of latency in competitive computer games: local system latency and network latency. While researchers have studied the effects of both, a direct comparison has not been done, especially for competitive gamers and low-end latencies. This paper assesses the effects of local latency and network latency on experienced {\em Counter-strike: Global Offensive} players comparing data from two user studies. Analysis of the results shows that local latency has about a 2x higher impact on player performance (accuracy and score) and Quality of Experience (QoE) than does the same amount of network latency.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 72-89
Author(s):  
Valérie Baisnée

This article examines how some contemporary autobiographies avoid narratives told from a first person viewpoint. Rejecting a philosophy of the subject that favors the first person pronoun over the other persons in language, Annie Ernaux’s impersonal autobiography The Years (2008) favors a mode of remembering that is collective rather than individual. But the narrator’s memories fall prey to a capitalist production system that denies the body while technology takes over the past, eliminating the subject as the owner of her memories.


Comunicar ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (34) ◽  
pp. 73-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Grimshaw

This essay examines the relationship between player and diegetic sound FX in immersive computer game environments and how this relationship leads, in large part, to the contextualization of the player within the virtual world of the game. This contextualization presupposes a primarily sonically-based perception of objects and events in the world and, in a multi-player game, this ultimately leads to communication between players through the medium of diegetic sound. The players’ engagement with, and immersion in, the game’s acoustic environment is the result of a relationship with sound that is technologically mediated. The game engine, for example, produces a range of environmental or ambient sounds and almost every player action has a corresponding sound. A variety of relevant theories and disciplines are assessed for the methodological basis of the points raised, such as film sound theory and sonification, and, throughout, the First-Person Shooter sub-genre is used as an exemplar. Such games include the «Doom» and «Quake» series, the «Half-Life» series and derivatives and later games such as «Left 4 Dead». The combination of the acoustic environment, the interactive placement of the player – as embodied by his virtual, prosthetic arms – in the environment and the sonic relationships between players produces the acoustic ecology. An exposition of this multi-player communication and the resultant acoustic ecology and player immersion, is the main objective of the essay. Este ensayo examina la relación entre el jugador y los efectos de sonido diegéticos en entornos de juego inmersivos para ordenadores, y a su vez, la manera en la que esta relación, en gran parte, pone en contexto al jugador dentro del mundo virtual del juego. Esta contextualización presupone una percepción basada principalmente en los sonidos de los objetos y los acontecimientos del mundo, lo que en el entorno del juego multijugador conduce finalmente a la comunicación entre los jugadores por medio del sonido diegético. El compromiso de los jugadores con –y la inmersión en– el ambiente acústico del juego es el resultado de una relación con el sonido mediada tecnológicamente. El motor del juego, por ejemplo, produce una gama de sonidos del entorno o del medio ambiente y casi todas las acciones del jugador tienen un sonido correspondiente. Una variedad de relevantes teorías y disciplinas, como la teoría del cine sonoro y la sonificación, se usan para construir nuestra base metodológica, y nos servimos de ejemplos como el del subgénero del «First-Person Shooter». Este tipo de juegos incluye las series «Doom» y «Quake», la serie «Half-Life» y sus derivados y juegos posteriores como «Left 4 Dead». La combinación del ambiente acústico, la posición interactiva del jugador –con la encarnación virtual de sus brazos protésicos– en el medio ambiente y las relaciones sonoras entre los jugadores produce la ecología acústica. Una exposición de esta comunicación multijugador, la ecología acústica resultante y la inmersión del jugador, es el objetivo principal del ensayo.


Author(s):  
Volker Scheid

This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last half century between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical attachments to a definition of ‘medicine’ that rather narrowly refers to biomedicine as developed in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards, the medical humanities are not the most obvious starting point for such an inquiry. At the same time, they do offer one advantage over neighbouring disciplines like medical history, anthropology or science and technology studies for someone like myself, a clinician as well as a historian and anthropologist: their strong commitment to the objective of facilitating better medical practice. This promise furthermore links to the wider project of critique, which, in Max Horkheimer’s definition of the term, aims at change and emancipation in order ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. If we take the critical medical humanities as explicitly affirming this shared objective and responsibility, extending the discipline’s traditional gaze is not a burden but becomes, in fact, an obligation.


2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-187
Author(s):  
E. S. Burt

Why does writing of the death penalty demand the first-person treatment that it also excludes? The article investigates the role played by the autobiographical subject in Derrida's The Death Penalty, Volume I, where the confessing ‘I’ doubly supplements the philosophical investigation into what Derrida sees as a trend toward the worldwide abolition of the death penalty: first, to bring out the harmonies or discrepancies between the individual subject's beliefs, anxieties, desires and interests with respect to the death penalty and the state's exercise of its sovereignty in applying it; and second, to provide a new definition of the subject as haunted, as one that has been, but is no longer, subject to the death penalty, in the light of the worldwide abolition currently underway.


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