What Is a Videogame Movie?

Cinematic adaptations of videogames are an increasingly common feature of film culture, and the adaptive relationship between these mediums is an increasingly common subject of film and videogame studies. However, our ability to historicize and theorize that relationship is hampered by a failure to fully define the generic character of our object of study. This essay asks, what is a videogame movie? It argues that film scholars (1) have not considered the full range of ways videogames have been represented in film; (2) have not attended fully to the historical, technological, figurative, and social dimensions of videogames; and therefore (3) have limited the set of possible texts that comprise the genre “videogame cinema.” The essay recommends a tropological approach to the problem, defining six tropes that comprise the “videogame movie” as a genre, and applying them to two films, Her and 1917, neither of them a direct adaptation of a videogame, the latter not “about” or referencing videogames in any way, yet both exemplary of a broadened concept of “videogame cinema”.

Fictionally Flipping Tetrominoes? Defining the Fictionality of a Videogame Player’s Actions

In this paper, I use the case of player actions in Tetris to explore possible problems in existing descriptions of videogame actions as fictional actions. Both in the philosophy of computer games and videogame studies, authors often make use of Kendall Walton’s make-believe theory to describe videogame actions as fictional. According to the Waltonian description of fictional actions, however, the actions players perform when playing Tetris, such as flipping tetrominoes, would also be fictional. This is a counterintuitive idea, as players of Tetris seem to be really manipulating the graphical shapes in this game. I will thus discuss two other possible descriptions of fictional actions hinted at by Grant Tavinor (2009). Firstly, the (non-)fictional status of videogame actions might depend on the nature of the affordances to which they are reactions. Secondly, it might be the case that the player must take on a role in the fictional world for her action to be fictional. In the end, I will combine this second idea with a Waltonian description of fictional actions to form a new description of fictional actions that corresponds to and explains videogame players’ experiences.

Gender Differences and Consumer Videogame Engagement

This paper intends to examine the gender differences on the engagement states of consumer videogame engagement through comparing the male group vs. female group. To meet this objective, the authors aim to utilize the causal-comparative study to analyse the gender differences on consumer videogame engagement. Data were collected from a sample of 235 teen videogame consumers whose aged were between 16-19years and studying in the private and public universities. Out of 235, the only 219 teen videogame consumers were valid and able to further use for data analysis. Using SPSS 22.0, we examined the valid data through independent t-test and also calculated the effect size for the significant hypotheses. The study findings reported that male teen videogame consumers are significantly different from female teen videogame consumers on the three engagement states of consumer videogame engagement such as cognitive, affective, and behavioural engagement. This paper is first among the videogame studies that has investigated the gender differences on the engagement states of consumer videogame engagement.