The Implied Designer and the Experience of Gameworlds

As artefacts, gameworlds are designed and developed to fulfil certain functional and creative objectives. Players infer these purposes and aspirations from various aspects of their engagement with games. Based on their socio-cultural background, their sensitivities, gameplay preferences, and game literacy, they construct a subjective interpretation of the intentions of the creators of the game. In analogy to Wayne C. Booth’s notion of the implied author, we will call the figure to which players ascribe those intentions ‘the implied designer’. In this paper, we introduce the notion of the implied (game) designer and present an initial account of the way players ascribe meaning to gameworlds and act within them based on what they perceive to be the intentions of the designer of the game.

Deployment mechanics in analog and digital strategic games: A historical and theoretical framework

This paper presents a historical and theoretical analysis of deployment in analog and digital military-themed strategic games. Deployment can be described as the phase in which players place their forces on the board or in the simulated world of a digital game, thus making them active. We argue that approaching a genre via a close reading of one of the genre’s constituting phases may help us discuss wider historical and theoretical issues regarding these games. More specifically, we use deployment metonymically to discuss the modifications in game design and gameplay that military-themed games underwent with their digitization. Furthermore, we discuss deployment within the framework of en-roling, that is the act of assuming a role in a specific context, including a simulated digital or analog ludic environment.

Processes of Roling: Mechanisms for Adopting Subjectivities in the Gameworld

On the de-familiarizing and re-ontologizing effects of glitches and glitch-alikes

Interactive digital experiences are understood as disclosing possibilities of being that can extend beyond the actual. The ways in which those experiences prompt their audiences to interactively apply and repurpose their cognitive faculties are constrained by the technical possibilities of the digital medium. This entails that the transformative activities invited and upheld by the computer depend on the functional affordances of digital technology as well as on the specific ways in which it errs and malfunctions. In this paper, I discuss non-catastrophic computer malfunctions (i.e. glitches) as potentially introducing aspects of surprise, ambiguity, and humor in the interactive experience of a virtual world. Computer glitches can also be intentionally designed to be a constitutive part of a virtual world and triggered deliberately; these types of glitches are used as expressive tools that can stimulate critical thought and make us suspicious of the stability and the validity of our world-views.

How to Reference a Digital Game

The question of what constitutes a game as a social object is famously problematic. The alleged impossibility of formulating a complete analytical definition for what constitutes a game is perhaps the most evident symptom of that difficulty. One expression of this problem that has been entirely overlooked by academia is the scholarly practice of referencing games. This paper addresses game referencing as a practice that is implicated with- and constitutive for- the ways in which we conceptualize and assign cultural value to games. Focusing on the conceptual framing of games, on game authorship, and on the historical dimensions of both, we will discuss referencing games as an act that is inevitably political. On these premises, we will provide foundational guidelines for thinking about one’s decisions concerning referencing and about the meaning and relevance of those decisions.

Projectuality in Digital Gameworlds