Playful Experiments

This study investigates the conditions to aesthetic experience in games for touchscreen devices from a non-hermeneutic perspective. For that reason, the body and the technical devices are taken as fundamental dimensions in the process of having “an experience”, in which their material aspects are not indifferent. In other words, what is of interest is to analyze game situations and the mutual influence between player and game, in the sense of identifying elements that could lead to “an experience”, taking as objects the games Mountain and Monument Valley. Moreover, concerns to understand how such titles contribute to the broadening of the technoludic experience. The article is sustained in the induction that from the moment in which characteristics of traditional games are tensioned, it seems that they assume an air of experimentation in their ways of calling to action. We argue that “an experience” can emerge from the articulation between “effects of presence” and “effects of meaning”, so that the material constitution of the medium is not indifferent.

Affordances and Constraints of Analog Games for Ethics Education

Today's students face a wide range of complex moral dilemmas, and games have the potential to represent these dilemmas, thereby supporting formal ethics education. The potential of digital games to contribute in this way is being increasingly recognized, but the author argues that those interested in the convergence of games, ethics, and education should more fully consider analog games (i.e., games without a digital component). This argument draws from a qualitative study that focused on the use of an analog roleplaying game in an undergraduate activity that explored ethical issues related to politics, society, and culture. The results of this study are examined through an educational technology lens, which suggests that games (like other educational resources) afford and constrain learning and teaching in certain ways. These results demonstrate that this game afforded and constrained ethics education in both ways similar to digital games and ways unique to analog games.

Apportioned Commodity Fetishism and the Transformative Power of Game Studies

This chapter explores the ways in which the field of Game Studies helps shape popular understandings of player, play, and game, and specifically how the field alters the conceptual, linguistic, and discursive apparatuses that gamers use to contextualize, describe, and make sense of their experiences. The chapter deploys the concept of apportioned commodity fetishism to analyze the phenomena of discourse as practice, persona, the vagaries of game design, recursion, lexical formation, institutionalization, systems of self-effectiveness, theory as anti-theory, and commodification.

Telling Tales with Technology

This chapter analyses the 2010 videogame Alan Wake, a narrative based videogame that makes frequent use of intertextuality. As well as using contemporary examples, the game also uses traditional international folklore in its narrative, with the antagonist Barbara Jagger being recognisable as the Russian folk tale character Baba Yaga, for example. Using the concepts proposed and elucidated by Vladimir Propp, Joseph Campbell, the chapter will first establish that the videogame offers a remediation of several traditional mythical narratives in one contemporary videogame, before going on to use the classifications found in The Morphology of the Folktale and The Hero with a Thousand Faces to place this videogame within the folklore and mythical tradition. It will also serve to establish whether these classifications are suitable for the narratives found in videogames, and if they depart from them, where the scholar needs to establish new concepts and definitions for these traditional classifications.

Toward Broader Definitions of “Video Games”

As video games grow in popularity, ambition, scope, and technological prowess, they also mature as an art form, shedding old definitions tethered to video games as simple, competitive exercises. Greater technological capabilities, in addition to years of experimentation and maturation, have expanded the ability of games to tell different kinds of stories, offering branching paths. The question of “what makes a game a game?” looms larger than ever in this era of video game storytelling. As plots and characters grow, branch, and develop, so, too, do the boundaries of what a game actually is. In traditional definitions of gaming, a set of rules and a victory condition were essential elements to a game. As game narratives and game mechanics grow in increasingly complex and experimental directions, new player goals have emerged. Now, gamers socialize, customize, nurture, kill, build, destroy, break, glitch, and explore as much as they work to win and accrue points. This chapter surveys the current landscape of video games, highlighting examples and trends that challenge more traditional notions and definitions of what it means to be a “video game.” The broader definition presented here takes into account play, narrative, digital environments, and more, acknowledging the expanse of the video game experience.

Games People Play

The study of various choices made while producing and playing games allows little opportunity for interrogating video games as a transcultural convergence of multiple subjectivities and institutions. This chapter speaks to this topic by presenting the Computer Games Across Cultures (CGAC) project. CGAC involved humanities researchers from West Virginia University (USA), Bangor University (Wales), and Jawaharlal Nehru University (India) who over a two-year period sought to understand creative and cultural aspects of gaming. CGAC's researchers employed both qualitative and quantitative methodologies to bridge the gap between the academic explorations of gaming in tandem with industry-specific practices within such spaces. This chapter provides an overview of the resultant work through its analysis of a cross-section of games. Examining both Western mainstream games and lesser known games from places like India and Ghana helped interrogate representational politics in videogames and provide a broader view of the relationship between gaming and game making, in a socio-cultural context.

Gaming before E-Sports

Discussions of competitive gaming often begin and end with the development of professional E-Sports. However, competitive gaming has a history that stretches back to the first days of networked play with first generation games like Doom, Warcraft II and Multi-User Dungeons (Henceforth MUDs). Within these games, digital communities became a prominent means of discourse and discussion, heavily reliant on gender as a habit of thought to describe inequality and disparities between players. Using an archive of Warcraft II histories, and forum threads for the game, this chapter describes a social history of this digital community with specific emphasis on the ways that gender was used.

Co-Creation and the Distributed Authorship of Video Games

This chapter reconceptualizes the authorship of video games through the development of a theory of distributed authorship. It defines distributed authorship as the interplay of negotiated capacities of a number of actors (including but not limited to developers, publishers, and players) to create the content, structures, form, and affordances of video game works. However, the theory does not assume that these actors always work together collaboratively or that capacities for authorship are shared equally among them. Rather, distributed authorship understands the authorship of video games as a relationship of power—the power to create, shape, and influence video game works.

The Game Space of Dear Esther and Beyond

This chapter argues that the spaces created by video games are central to the formulation of player agency in the game. More precisely, this chapter analyzes several recent independent and experimental games—Dear Esther, Menagerie, and the work of games collective Arcane Kids—to argue that the dislocation or alienation of player agency through the formal category of game space has political and aesthetic significance. The dislocation of player agency sees ‘agency' taken away from the player and granted instead to the game space itself; players are placed at the mercy of the game space in such a way that their lack of agency is emphasized. The effect of this emphasis is to enable these games to critique the atomized, neoliberal undercurrents of contemporary cultural production.

Games Beyond the Screen

This chapter introduces a phenomenon that has gone largely unaddressed in research since its emergence in western countries in the last decade: festivals of games and play. The bulk of the chapter is drawn from interviews with people involved in these festivals, including founders, current organizers and game designers, using this data to build on the work of researchers on play and playfulness. Taking an autoethnographic stance, the author speaks from personal experience as a participant and game designer in order to convey these festivals' unique qualities and potential as sites for public play.