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DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory
- 139 articles or papers
An affordance based model for gameplay
Pinchbeck Dan
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory
This paper presents a formal model for gameplay based upon the affordances available to the player that are linked to game objects. It has been constructed via an extensive analysis of major first-person games 1998-2008, although it is argued it may extend to all diegetic games. Gameplay can be understood as a network of allowed actions, that can be summarised as a small number of archetypal affordances mediated by a set of parameters that define their functional relationships. As well as the capacity for the model to elucidate the ludic structures of games, it is argued that an affordance based model also provides a means to understand the relationship and role of story and content within a ludological context.
Researching player experiences through the use of different qualitative methods
Ribbens Wannes Poels Yorick
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory
Since gameplay is only realized when the player and game interact, studying player experiences is complicated. Most research designs often emphasise either the structure of the game or the player in isolation of the game itself. In this study an attempt was made to test three different qualitative methods to study playing styles and by extension player experiences, while trying to take into account both the player and the game. An analysis scheme was developed to serve as a framework within the three methods and to direct respondents’ attention to the interaction with the game. 42 university students (casual and hardcore gamers) participated in the study during three months after which they wrote a paper on their playing style. During the first three weeks respondents had to fill in a diary every time they had played the videogame. Four weeks later, respondents participated in the video commentary model (VCM). In a game experience lab, a researcher observed the respondent playing the game he had played during the diary study. Afterwards, the researcher interviewed the player on different aspects of his playing style, with the aid of the gameplay session video. Finally, respondents that played the same game participated in a focus group interview (FGI), discussing the topics that stemmed from the diary and the video commentary model. Based on theoretical arguments and participants’ evaluation of the methods, we contend that all three methods are suitable to study player experiences. However, methodological triangulation provides the researcher with more accurate data, allowing to study gamers both in context (diary), through gameplay activities (VCM) and by interaction with other players (FGI).
Using an RFID game to phenomenologically test a theoretical systemic model for describing ambient games
Eyles Mark Eglin Roger
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory
Imagine what Brian Eno’s genre defining 1978 album Music for Airports (Eno, 1978) would be if it were a game. The game might produce a mood in an environment; the player able to dip in and out of play, which could be facilitated by not having to carry gaming devices, allowing periods of disengagement from the game. The player’s everyday actions would generate data to move the game forward, causing game events. However, it should also be possible for the player to change their behaviour in order to participate more actively in the game, varying their involvement with the game from intense engagement to forgetting they are even playing. The proposed game would span both real and virtual worlds, with player actions in the real world affecting events in the virtual world. We have named this imagined game genre ‘ambient games’ (M. Eyles & Eglin, 2007a). Ambient games may be considered a type of pervasive game (‘a radically new game form that extends gaming experiences out into the physical world’ (Waern, 2006)) in which the game is embedded in the environment and the player may not need to carry digital equipment around with them and, crucially, can continue to actively play while ignoring the game. This paper proposes a systemic domain (Eglin, Eyles, & Dansey, 2007) theoretical model for understanding the underlying properties of ambient games, comparing and contrasting them with computer and video games. The theoretical models of both computer and video games and ambient games are used to generate player activity gameflow diagrams, in which the progress a player makes through the domains in the systemic models while playing a game are clearly shown. A game design research methodology (M. Eyles, Eglin, R., 2008) is used to investigate the ambient game systemic domain model and player activity gameflows. Ambient games, using RFID technology and pedometers, allow players to experience a game in which they are able to vary their involvement while engaged in other everyday activities. In order to discover the lived experience of players of ambient games existential phenomenological methods and in particular template analysis (King, 2008) are used. Studies and observations are described in which ambient games are used within the overarching game design research methodological framework.
“I Like the Idea of Killing But Not the Idea of Cruelty”: How New Zealand youth negotiate the pleasures of simulated violence
Schott Gareth
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory
‘For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat … It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not’. The aim of this paper is to account for the experience of a two-year research project, funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand. This project sought to interrogate commonly articulated beliefs concerning the contribution of games to the ‘debauched innocence of our young’. Akin to the seemingly incompatible sentiments expressed in the opening quotation, the project broadly acknowledged the complexity of players’ relationship with violence as it is articulated in interactive digital games. To achieve this the project prioritized the experiences and perspectives of young people on the nature and function of what is commonly understood as ‘violent’ content within games. Despite forming the readership of popular culture, young people are commonly denied a voice by the very ‘authorities and opinion makers’ that chastise their practices. This paper highlights how players variously contested the term ‘violence’ for its expansive nature and the appropriateness of the way it is unquestioningly and legitimately employed to express what happens in games.
Agency Reconsidered
Wardrip-Fruin Noah Mateas Michael Dow Steven Sali Serdar
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory
The concept of “agency” in games and other playable media (also referred to as “intention”) has been discussed as a player experience and a structural property of works. We shift focus, considering agency, instead, as a phenomenon involving both player and game, one that occurs when the actions players desire are among those they can take (and vice versa) as supported by an underlying computational model. This shifts attention away from questions such as whether agency is “free will” (it is not) and toward questions such as how works evoke the desires agency satisfies, employ computational models in the service of player action and ongoing dramatic probability, use interfaces and mediation to encourage appropriate audience expectation, shift from initial audience expectation to an understanding of the computational model, and can be shaped with recognition of the inherently improvisational nature of agency. We focus particularly on agency in relation to the fictional worlds of games and other playable media.
The Game Frame: Systemizing a Goffmanian Approach to Video Game Theory [Extended Abstract]
Deterding Sebastian
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory
This paper offers a review, explication and defense of Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974) as a valid contemporary sociological theory of play, games, and video games. To this end, it provides an introduction the frame analytic conception of play, games and video games. It demonstrates that this account provides an explanatory (rather than merely descriptive) model for the sociality of the game/non-game boundary or ‘magic circle’, as well as phenomena that trouble said boundary, like pervasive games or ARGs. To substantiate the timeliness of a frame analytic approach to games, the paper compares it to and partially takes issue with practice theory, specifically Thomas Malaby‘s recent “new approach to games”. The conclusion summarizes the key characteristics, advantages and limitations of a frame analytic account of video games.
Through the Looking Glass: Weavings between the Magic Circle and Immersive Processes in Video Games
Ferreira Emmanoel Falcão Thiago
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory
This paper proposes a critical discussion about the magic circle concept, through a debate with prior works on the issue, as those elaborated by Johan Huizinga and Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman, as well as with cognitive psychology studies regarding attention. We shall argue that the magic circle, instead of separating fiction and reality, would work as a cognitive mediation structure with graded “boundaries”, which existence occurs in diverse forms, depending on variables like player immersion and attention. Thus, these boundaries get defined and “solid” as the immersive process is developed and one reality seems to change into another: as the player “gets into the looking glass”.
Kingdom Hearts, Territoriality and Flow
Huber William Mandiberg Stephen
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory
This paper explores the relationship between companies Square-Enix and Disney as played out within the games of the Kingdom Hearts (キングダムハーツ) franchise. We contrast the relationship between these two transnational companies within the franchise's aesthetics and theoretical logics over the course of the various games. We are particularly interested in the games' own thematization and problematization of concepts of globalization, transnationalism and cultural flow. The games narratively and interactively foreground the collapse of membranes that separate worlds, producing legitimate and illegitimate modes of territoriality and intermixture.
‘Remembering How You Died’: Memory, Death and Temporality in Videogames [Extended Abstract]
Mukherjee Souvik
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory
Death is an intrinsic part of gameplay. On considering the role of killing, dying and negotiating the 'undead' in videogames, one cannot be faulted for noting in them an obsessive engagement with the act of dying. It is almost a prerequisite that the player's avatar has to 'die' many times in the process of unravelling the plot. Instead of the traditional tying and untying (desis and lusis) of narrative plots, held sacrosanct since Aristotle, videogame narratives are characterised by 'dying and undying'. The sense of an ending, as literary theorist Sir Frank Kermode calls it, is constantly frustrated by its absence in videogames. Western conceptions of ending, whether Hellenic or Judaeo- Christian, are based on telos and a linear temporality. In a culture where death is a grim finality and where resurrection is only possible by the divine, videogames seem to shockingly trivialise death by adding to it the perspective of multiplicity. Videogame theorist, Gonzalo Frasca, observes that from the perspective of real life, this reversibility can be seen as something that trivializes the "sacred" value of life. This paper argues against such a conception and in doing so, it shows how videogames point to a different but equally serious view of death and endings that has so far been largely ignored due to an occidental bias.
Ethically Notable Videogames: Moral Dilemmas and Gameplay
Zagal José P.
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory
In what ways can we use games to make moral demands of players and encouraging them to reflect on ethical issues? In this article we propose an ethically notable game as one that provides opportunities for encouraging ethical reasoning and reflection. Our analysis of the videogames Ultima IV, Manhunt, and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn highlights the central role that moral dilemmas can play towards creating ethically notable games. We discuss the different ways that these are implemented, such as placing players in situations in which their understanding of an ethical system is challenged, or by creating moral tension between the player’s goals and those posed by the narrative and the gameplay of a game. We conclude by noting some of the challenges of creating ethically notable games including ensuring that the ethical framework in a game is both discernable and consistent as well as ensuring that the dilemma is actually a moral one and that the player, rather than the game characters, is the one facing it.