An Epistemology of the Event for the Digital Media

2020 ◽  
pp. 115-128
Author(s):  
Juan J. Vargas-Iglesias
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
The Ideal

Since the end of the twentieth century, game studies have concentrated on epistemological positions seemingly unable to make significant distinctions between traditional games and video games. This approach has hindered the development of a post-modern ontology for decades, in a medium—video games—that is decidedly postmodern. This chapter proposes going beyond the mechanistic notion of considering observable reality as a combination of a determined state of things, which is a prevalent feature in today's game studies. To achieve this, the author argues from the Deleuzian notion of the “event.” When referring to the concept of the “ideal game,” as proposed by Deleuze, is intended to enunciate an epistemology that describes the implicit potentialities of digital media in general. The application of the epistemology would comprise memetic and viral statements, generative aesthetics and the forms of video games themselves.

scholarly journals Divergent theoretical trajectories in Game Studies: a bibliographical review

Artnodes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosa Núñez-Pacheco ◽  
Phillip Penix-Tadsen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Video Games ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Past ◽  
Unnatural Narratology ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Tools And Techniques

Video games have become important objects of study for different academic disciplines. From the birth of the medium in the mid-twentieth century to the present, video games have offered new and creative ways of approaching reality and fiction, and not only serve as entertainment, but also have significant cultural, social, and technological implications. The formal study of this medium is the purview of the field of game studies, which brings together the contributions of various disciplines. This paper presents a bibliographical review of several theoretical trajectories in game studies, reflecting on the relevance of early debates on narratology and ludology, and examining the ways these initial divisions of the field have branched beyond that debate. Over the past several years, the narratological line of critique has established links with other theories such as cognitivism, the theory of fictional worlds and the contributions of unnatural narratology to the analysis of new technologies; ludology, for its part, has grown through its adaptations to postcolonial and decolonial theories in cultural studies, as well as through its connections to critical race and gender studies. We conclude that as game studies has evolved as a discipline, its initial theoretical debates have undergone profound transformations that have brought depth to the analysis of games’ meaning and diversified to the tools and techniques we have for analysing games as digital and cultural artefacts.

Coda: The Rosetta Stone

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Digital Code ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Imagination ◽  
Origin Point

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....

scholarly journals Keeping Human Rights on the Bioethics Agenda

2001 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-226
Author(s):  
JOSEPH C. d'ORONZIO
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Moral Concept ◽  
Universal Human Rights ◽  
Nazi Era ◽  
The Ideal

The ideal of universal human rights is arguably the most potent moral concept marking the modern world. Its accelerated fruition in the last half of the twentieth century has created a powerful political force, laying the groundwork for future generations to extend and apply. Whereas anything resembling international legal status for human rights had to wait for the post-Nazi era, the bold proclamations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) loosened a revolutionary force with endless potential for application to the full range of human endeavors. The roots of this movement can be traced to each and every era in which the vulnerable and powerless sought justification to oppose arbitrary domination. Its roots are, therefore, deep and wide.

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 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 Elusive Ideal of Academic Freedom

2021 ◽  
pp. 215-240
Author(s):  
George M. Marsden
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Academic Freedom ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
American Association ◽  
World War ◽  
University Professors ◽  
Lafayette College ◽  
American Schools ◽  
The Ideal

Academic freedom arose as a prominent ideal at major American schools in the early twentieth century and with the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915. The concern was to exclude outside interests of business or religion from limiting academic freedom, as had sometimes happened. As John Dewey advocated, scientifically trained experts should be free to rule. Schools with religious heritage often had both proclaimed the freedom of professors and expected some religiously defined limits on their teaching. That was well illustrated in the controversy at Lafayette College when a conservative Presbyterian president fired a controversial professor. The ideal of academic freedom was elusive, however, because freedom always had limits as was illustrated by the controversies over national loyalty of professors during World War I. The AAUP eventually allowed religious limits on freedom if they were clearly stated in advance.

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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