Video Games: A Significant Cognitive Artifact of Contemporary Youth Culture


Henderson Lyn
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

Video games are not just an important cultural artifact of youth culture but have considerable cognitive worth. Centered within an information processing theory and mediating processes’ framework, the empirical qualitative study investigated, via stimulated recall methods, the thinking skills and strategies of five teenagers while playing an action-adventure video game. Sixteen types and 600 instances of cognitive skills and 11 types and 155 instances of cognitive strategies were identified. The thinking skills included high engagement with school valued cognitive skills, such as metacognition, and deduction and induction strategies. The findings support the informal educative value of playing recreation video games and their inclusion in schools.

 

Mise-en-scène Applied to Level Design: Adapting a Holistic Approach to Level Design


Logas Heather Muller Daniel
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

As game developers strive to introduce a stronger sense of emotion into their games, new opportunities are presented to the level designer to imbue their virtual spaces with deeper symbols and meaning. Since the very beginning of film, the exploration of the concept of mise-en-scéne (literally “put in the scene”) has allowed filmmakers to convey sub-text to the viewer by the careful consideration of how each frame looks. A definition of mise-en-scéne is given; its connections to level design are explained and then illustrated by an analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Konami’s Silent Hill 4: The Room.

 

Making Right(s) Decision: Artificial Life and Rights Reconsidered


Kim Juyun
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

With the proliferation of robotics in industry, education and entertainment, artificial intelligent robots challenge the way we think about relationships between humans and machines. This study examines critical issues in artificial life and rights, which are an emergent but, as yet, little understood area of educational inquiry through one of the most popular video game, The Sims. Since The Sims deals with simulated people and relationships, this game introduces important issues about ethics and morals [12, 13]. Drawing from examples through The Sims discussion forums, I will discuss our very notion of rights and what this means for artificial life in order to raise moral questions about social simulation and gaming.

 

A Cognitive Psychological Approach to Gameplay Emotions


Perron Bernard
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

Although emotions elicited by the fictional world or the artefact play a part in story-driven video games, they are certainly not the focus of the experience. From a cognitive psychological perspective, this paper studies the appraisal and action dimensions of emotions arising from gameplay. As it relies on cognitive film theories about popular narrative movies, it also revisits their conceptual sources in order to better reflect on the specificity of those gameplay emotions.

 

socio-ec(h)o: Ambient Intelligence and Gameplay


Wakkary Ron Hatala Marek Lovell Robb Droumeva Milena Antle Alissa Evernden Dale Bizzocchi Jim
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

This paper describes the preliminary research of an ambient intelligent system known as socio-ec(h)o. socio-ec(h)o explores the design and implementation of an ambient intelligent system for sensing and display, user modeling, and interaction models based on game structures. Our interaction model is based on a game structure including levels, body states, goals and game skills. Body states are the body movements and positions that players must discover in order to complete a level and in turn represent a learned game skill. The paper provides an overview of background concepts and related research. We describe the game structure and prototype of our environment. We discuss games research concepts we utilized and our approach to group user models based on Richard Bartle’s game types. We explain the role of embodied cognition within our design and elaborate on what we chose to encode as embodied actions, cognition and communication. We describe how we utilized selective responses that were real-time, gradient, provided rewards and were unique to different group user models. We introduce our approach to designing ambient intelligent systems that is ecologically inspired. We stress the empirical nature of the design work and the role of participatory design in developing our system.

 

Feel It, Don’t Think: the Significance of Affect in the Study of Digital Games


Shinkle Eugénie
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

Game studies methodologies which focus on the visual, narrative, and semiotic content of digital games overlook the way that embodied perception and physiological response contribute to the meaningfulness of games. Gameplay also needs to be understood in terms of affective response: the embodied, multisensory perception of the game environment. Distinguishing between affect and emotion, this paper frames the former in terms of the unquantifiable bodily dimensions of gameplay – the ‘feel’ of a game. It argues that affective response incorporates physiological and temporal dimensions that lie outside the domain of linear time and conscious choice, using examples of games like Rez that link positive player experience to bodily awareness and uncontrollable biological responses. It then proposes some ways that a theory of affect can further our understanding of what digital games are and why people play them.

 

End of story? Quest, narrative and enactment in computer games


Løvlie Anders Sundnes
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

Espen Aarseth recently claimed that all games referred to as ’narrative games’ could better be described as ’quest games’. The writer of this paper suggests that Max Payne is a possible counter-example to this hypothesis; i.e. a game with a strong focus on narrative which is not easily understood as a quest game. The writer suggests that this, and other similar games, could better be understood in terms of a theory of ’enactment’, which is seen as related to, but not similar to theatrical acting. Extending this idea, the concept of ’the estrangement effect’ in theatre theory is used to analyze a collection of small computer games from the perspective of theory about ”serious games”.

 

Baldur’s Gate and History: Race and Alignment in Digital Role Playing Games


Warnes Christopher
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

Games studies today are characterised by both the novelty of interpreting the unfolding digital revolution, and insecurity about where the discipline stands in terms of other academic fields of inquiry. The ludology/narratology debate exhibits two important features: anxiety about the proximity of the discipline to the games industry, and a formalist bias that dominates the field. Focussing on race and alignment in role playing games, this paper addresses this bias by asserting the relevance of cultural materialist and postcolonial modes of critique to commercially-produced computer games. It is argued that games like Baldur’s Gate I and II cannot be properly understood without reference to the fantasy novels that inform them. When historicised, the genre of fantasy reveals an implicit reliance on notions of race and moral alignment. The ways these notions re-appear in digital role playing games is shown to be relevant to current political and social realities of the West.

 

Designing Goals for Online Role-Players


Montola Markus
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

The increasing popularity of persistent worlds and the predicted rise of pervasive gaming, both having a strong inherent potential for role-playing, stress a classical challenge of persistent world industry: in addition to the regular gamer audience, the role-player audience is growing. Catering to role-players requires re-thinking in the design of game structures and narrative structures. The most fundamental conceptual differences between role-player and regular gamer playing styles regard goals, game worlds and the idea of meaningful play.

 

Game Fiction: Playing the Interface in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Asheron’s Call


Rhody Jason
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

Videogame play requires the negotiation of multiple synchronic points-of-view enabled through the use of cameras, avatars, interfaces, and vignettes (the cut-scenes, dialogue, and other attributes normally attributed to the “story”). Concurrent mastery of these points-of-view contributes to the game field of play and enables a greater possibility to complete the game’s goals. Using Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Asheron’s Call as examples, this paper examines the interface as one of the various mechanisms that establish and control the player’s point-of-view in videogames. By understanding the use of point-of-view as one of many components that establish game fiction, we can theorize the imaginary inventions that shape games, even those that do not resemble more traditional narrative forms.