Detention, a Game More Than Just Games

This paper's main topic is how Taiwan's self-made video game Detention affects Taiwanese young people's understanding of their history and how this will affect the promotion of transitional justice in Taiwan. First, it summarizes its features and achievements of the international video game industry. Moreover, after briefing the story content, it explains its strategies for interpreting the White Terror, the performance of trauma, and how the Taiwanese learn more about their history while playing games. Finally, it demonstrates the uniqueness of games from other traditional media, which provides another possibility and imagination for young people to understand history.

New Consumers of the Digital Age: Game Players

The game market has become one of the fastest growing industries of the digital age. The availability of internet access from anywhere, the diversification of game platforms, the increase in game options and the increase in application stores especially for mobile devices have accelerated this growth in the sector. The purpose of this study was to determine who the new consumers in the developing game industry are, their various demographics, characteristics and purchasing behaviors. Data which were collected by the survey method from 490 game players who participated in Gamescom, the world's largest game fair held in Cologne, Germany between 20-24 August 2019, were analyzed by descriptive statistics, t-test and one-way anova. As a result of the findings, it has been determined that majority of the participants were female, young adults and students. Almost half of the participants have more than 12 years of gaming experience, play games for an average of 3.76 hours a day and an average of 5.16 days per week, prefer to play at home and on their personal computers the most, majority were core gamers, and the favorite game category was action.

Balancing Ethics, Art and Economics: A Qualitative Analysis of Game Designer Perspectives on Monetisation

This article explores the relationship between monetisation models, game design and ethical considerations from the perspective of three different small-scale Norwegian game companies: an indie company, a freemium company and a premium company. The aim is to explore critically how small-scale game companies reason and act in the current economy. Interviews with game designers and CEOs form the empirical basis of the analysis. The motives and practices of the informants are categorised according to three ethical schools, namely, deontology, virtue ethics, and utilitarianism. The informants believe that freemium models and free games have made the computer game industry markedly more challenging to monetise. Their views on what is considered ethical monetisation varies between companies, most distinctly between the freemium company and the two others. Informants from the freemium company downplay ethical responsibilities, with reference to the huge number of existing free games and costumers unwilling to pay for games.

Video Game Art Styles

The article examines the graphic styles that have arisen in the video game industry due to the technical features and development of this media. These styles are widely used and starting to go beyond the industry into the field of contemporary art. Despite the fact that pixel art is mainly used in the creation of video games, it has already become an independent form of visual style. Contemporary artists such as the Russian digital artist and designer under the pseudonym Uno Morales and the artist Natalya Struchkova turn to the pixel style when creating their works. Like the pixel art, voxel graphics has moved into the category of the game visual style, which employs an impressive community of digital artists. Low рoly graphics have modified from the main graphics of three-dimensional games, which look technically imperfect, into the category of an artistic style that forms a recognizable, attractive and unique geometric aesthetics of the image. We can trace the transformation of video game graphics, which have arisen as a result of technical constraints, into separate art styles: pixel art, voxel art, low рoly style, the minimalist style of the first classic video games. These styles are gradually becoming an independent visual unit that does not depend on the video game product as a whole.

Transnational Politics in Video Games

Political claims about the real world are abundant in video games, and the medium persuades uniquely through procedural rhetoric, the rules of behavior contained in computational code. The transnational scope of the video game industry makes it productive ground for interrogating how a game’s persuasion might influence international audiences with nationally situated politics. The 2012 third-person shooter Spec Ops: The Line, produced by the German studio Yager Development, depicts the international concern of a fictional conflict in the Middle East and the atrocities of failed military intervention. The game’s core procedural rhetoric, which tasks players to push ahead at all costs, cautions an international audience about the futility of deploying military power abroad, a warning that mirrors particularly German political anxieties. The game’s depiction of extreme violence—and the player’s participation in it—raises further questions about the cultural status of the medium in the country and abroad.

ALONE OR IN COOPERATION: WHAT IS THE BEST STRATEGY FOR THE PERFORMANCE OF RADICAL PRODUCT INNOVATION IN THE VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY?

The aim of this research is to study the impact of inter-organisational strategies on performance of radical product innovation. We distinguish three kinds of strategies: (1) individual strategy, (2) cooperation with non-rivals strategy, and (3) coopetition strategy. We study innovation at the product level, and we analyse the market performance. We develop and test the hypotheses comparing the effects of these three strategies on the market performance of radical product innovation. An empirical research is carried out to study the video game publishing industry. We perform a quantitative analysis on a sample of 100 video games that involve radical innovations, identified among 822 video games launched between 2006 and 2011. The main results show that coopetition is the most fruitful strategy for developing a radical innovation. In this process, a direct competitor becomes the best and the most viable partner for that type of innovation.

Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of an Immersive Virtual Reality-Based Educational Game for Learning Topology Relations at Schools: A Case Study

Education has always been modified by employing different technologies to enhance the knowledge acquisition and performance of students. Virtual Reality (VR) along with the Game Industry is among those evolving technologies for educational applications. This study aimed to design, implement, and evaluate an immersive VR-based Educational Game (IVREG) for learning topology relations. Topology relations are one of the fundamental topics which exist in Geospatial Information Science (GIS); due to the great capabilities offered by GIS, learning these basic topis is of great importance. A total of thirty-seven male middle-school students participated in this study. A total of four questionnaires were designed to evaluate the suitability of the proposed learning environment and its components at schools, particularly for learning geospatial topics. In conclusion, students found the IVREG useful and effective in classrooms. Additionally, the results showed that the components, namely the integrated pedagogical approach, gamification, and VR technology, were all suitable for being used at schools. On a final note, however, the study indicated that the immersion aspect of such learning environments should be enhanced in future studies.

Towards a “Filipino” Video Game: Teaching Filipino Culture and Identity for Video Game Development

This paper uses the author’s experiences of teaching the Filipino module of a multidisciplinary video game development class as a case study in teaching Filipino culture and identity as an element of video game development. A preliminary definition of “Filipino video game” as having Filipino narratives and subject matter, made by Filipino video game developers, and catering to a Filipino audience, is proposed. The realities and limitations of video game development and the video game market in the Philippines is also discussed to show how the dominance of Western video game industry, in terms of the dominance of outsource work for Filipino video game developers and the dominance of non-Filipino video games played by Filipino players, has hindered the development of original Filipino video games. Using four Filipino video games as primary texts discussed in class, students were exposed to Filipinomade video games, and shown how these games use Filipino history, culture, and politics as source material for their narrative and design. Issues of how video games can be used to selfexoticization, and the use of propaganda is discussed, and also how video games can be used to confront and reimagine Filipinoness. The paper ends with a discussion of a student-made game titled Alibatas, a game that aims to teach baybayin, a neglected native writing system in the Philippines as a demonstration of how students can make a Filipino video game. The paper then shows the importance of student-made games, and the role that the academe plays in the critical understanding of Filipino video games, and in defining Filipino culture and identity.