Body Count

Delicate Subjects: Vulnerability and validation in action adventure games

Players, Diverse Bodies and Embodied Interpretation: Issues in Research Design

Textuality in video games

In this article the participants report on a two year research project titled Textuality and Videogames; Interactivity, Narrative Space and Role Play that ran from September 2001, until late 2003 at the Institute of Education, University of London. After presenting an overview of the project, including the methodologies we have adopted, and the questions we have sought to address, we outline two sample case studies, one that relates to player agency, the other that considers role-play, social semiotics and sign making in an MMORPG.

Textual Analysis, Digital Games, Zombies

This paper is a contribution to ongoing debates about the value and limitations of textual analysis in digital games research. It is argued that due to the particular nature of digital games, both structural analysis and textual analysis are relevant to game studies. Unfortunately they tend to be conflated. Neither structural nor textual factors will fully determine meaning, but they are aspects of the cycle through which meaning is produced during play. Meaning in games is emergent, and play is a situated practice. Undertaking the textual analysis of a game does not necessarily involve ignoring these points. Textual analysis, like any methodology, does have limitations. The specifics of these limitations, however, will depend on the particular model of textuality employed. These issues are explored through an analysis of the survival horror game, Resident Evil 4.

Contexts, Pleasures and Preferences: Girls Playing Computer Games

In this paper, issues of girls and their gaming preferences are explored through observations of computer games sessions at an all-girl state school. What emerged is that preferences are alterable, and site specific. Gaming selections relate to the attributes of particular games – but they also depend on a player’s recognition of these attributes and the pleasures they entail. Players accumulate these competencies according to the patterns of access and peer culture they encounter. Thus preferences are an assemblage, made up of past experiences, and subject to situation and context. The constituents of preference, such as access, are certainly shaped by gender. As a result, gaming preferences may manifest along gendered lines. It is not difficult to generate data indicating that gendered tastes exist, but it is short sighted to divorce these outcomes from the various practices that contribute to their formation.