Towards Genre as a Game Design Research Approach


Goddard William Muscat Alexander
2017 DiGRA '17 - Proceedings of the 2017 DiGRA International Conference

Game design research is a growing field within game studies. Design in research, however, raises new questions. What should game design research investigate? How generalizable should its claims be? Considering the ‘ultimate particular’ of design, this paper explores how design research should investigate particular demarcations of works. This paper suggests genre as an approach in game design research, arguing that genres meaningfully, albeit reflexively, demarcate ‘likenesses’ worth investigation. Genre demarcations can be used to ground and orient research; lists of genre-games and informal descriptions suggest, what to, and how to, investigate genre, respectively. However, scholarly propositions of genres are necessary to support research. These propositions must make explicit, contestable, and substantive designerly claims about that genre, such as design values, structural patterns, and aesthetics, laying a scholarly foundation for future claims. These foundations support scholarly tradition in game design research by providing a context to ground, situate and disseminate findings.

 

A Typology of Players in the Game Physics Playground


Slater Stefan Bowers Alex Kai Shimin Shute Valerie
2017 DiGRA '17 - Proceedings of the 2017 DiGRA International Conference

Educators are increasingly using games as a method for enabling engagement and learning in students, but research has suggested potentially inconsistent outcomes for the use of these digital tools. One explanation for these mixed findings may be different preferred playstyles of game players, such as Bartle’s (1996) player taxonomies. This research uses latent class analysis (LCA) as a means of examining similarities across student play interactions, using log data obtained from student actions in a game environment. Our research identified at least three groups of players who play the educational physics game Physics Playground – achievers, who obtain a higher number of awards in the game; explorers, who focused on constructing and tinkering with elaborate machines and contraptions; and disengaged players, who seemed to find little content in the game that attracted their attention. Improvements to the existing research methodology and future directions for research are discussed.

 

The Space Between Debord and Pikachu


Davies Hugh Innocent Troy
2017 DiGRA '17 - Proceedings of the 2017 DiGRA International Conference

In the heady discourse following the launch of Pokémon Go, many of the game’s influences, histories and precursors were forgotten or over-looked. Against the newness in which Pokémon Go is often framed, this article re-contextualises its history examining comparable practices and recalling the games evolution from earlier locative applications developed by Google to the experimental games of the modernist Avant Garde to which it has been compared. Central to this paper is discussion of the opportunities in the pervasive game development process for encoding and recoding the city by balancing in-game content with the nuances of the urban landscape in which it is played. While Pokémon Go has been revelatory in bringing awareness of pervasive gaming into the mainstream, this discussion of location-based games, public art projects, and playful approaches to urban exploration aims to fill gaps in the history of the field, and offer new possibilities for future game design and analysis.

 

Making it Unfamiliar in the “Right” Way: An Empirical Study of Poetic Gameplay


Mitchell Alex Sim Yuin Theng Kway Liting
2017 DiGRA '17 - Proceedings of the 2017 DiGRA International Conference

There has been much discussion of whether games can be considered art. Regardless of the outcome of these discussions, some games stand out as clearly different in a way that can be considered “poetic”. Much work has been done to discuss how these games achieve their effects, and how they differ from mainstream games. There have not, however, been any empirical studies of how players respond to the techniques used in these games, and whether these techniques result in poetic gameplay. This paper describes an empirical study of poetic gameplay in three games: The Graveyard, Thirty Flights of Loving, and The Stanley Parable. Using retrospective protocol analysis and semi-structured interviews with 21 participants, we observed that although these games did encourage participants to reflect upon issues beyond the immediate game experience, this tended to happen when the gameplay was made unfamiliar in ways that directly supported the emerging meaning of the game.

 

I Predict a Riot: Making and Breaking Rules and Norms in League of Legends


Donaldson Scott
2017 DiGRA '17 - Proceedings of the 2017 DiGRA International Conference

This paper examines the relationships between player community norms and developer-created rules of play in the competitive team game, League of Legends (Riot Games, 2009). Since the game’s release, players have established their own sets of strategic norms – much like player positioning systems in sport – which are used as a de facto baseline for play at all levels of competition. Since these norms are distinct from the game developer’s rules concerning online behaviour, however, it is unclear as to whether individual players have the ‘right’ to enact experimental game strategies that fall outside of the pre-existing framework. In November of 2016, however, it was revealed in one of the game’s online community hubs that a player had been threatened with a permanent account ban after repeatedly engaging in one such experimental strategy. A study of the following discussion as it played out within the player community shows that players are aware of larger issues concerning meaning-making in competitive League of Legends, and that they identify the game developer as a key figure in this ongoing process.

 

Heritage Destruction and Videogames: A Perverse Relation


González José Antonio Chapman Adam Jayemanne Darshana
2017 DiGRA '17 - Proceedings of the 2017 DiGRA International Conference

This paper examines the history of the National and University Library in Sarajevo, and particularly the destruction of the site and how it has been represented with different meanings across various media. The second part of the paper will analyse the representation of the library (post-reconstruction) in the videogame Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2’s Act 2 (called ‘Ghost of Sarajevo’), in order to raise issues about the ethical representation of a heritage site that has not only been destroyed and reconstructed, but that it is part of a national heritage.

 

Playing with(out) Power: Negotiated conventions of high performance networked play practices


Witkowski Emma Manning James
2017 DiGRA '17 - Proceedings of the 2017 DiGRA International Conference

In this paper, we explore how videogame ownership and notions of co-creation in videogames intersect with “high performance play” practices. From speedrunning communities to esports leagues, expert play cultures offer rich examples to consider the ongoing negotiations on the conventions of play itself, made through assemblages of creative forces, from performances (on and off screen, by players and spectators), ownership/governance (of the game, of third-party organisations and products), and through the expression of player rights. Via two cases, we look at how two veteran franchises (Counter-Strike and Super Mario) have engaged with the moving foundations and expressions of co-creation practices made by those engaged in high performance careers of play, specifically speedrunner GrandPOOBear and Counter-Strike esports Major tournament players, teams, and leagues.

 

Love, Lust, Courtship and Affection as Evolution in Digital Play


Grace Lindsay D
2017 DiGRA '17 - Proceedings of the 2017 DiGRA International Conference

This paper outlines two models for framing affection games as a contribution to the evolution of courtship rituals or as a matriculation through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It then frames the design of these games through two distinct lenses. The first is a game verb based framing, focusing on the affectionate actions designed to meet game goals. The second is an interaction dynamic framing, which describes digitally contained affection (affections remaining within the game), digitally facilitated affection (affections facilitated by the game) and digitally communicated affections (affection shared through the game). Continued research into affection games offers a peek into the softer side of digital play and gendered play. Its study unearths an intersection between sociological and psychological tendencies and technology. The work provides an update to previous published work in the domain of affection games by providing new data on affection games and the case study game.

 

‘If you are feeling bold, ask for $3’: Value Crafting and Indie Game Developers


Consalvo Mia Paul Christopher A.
2017 DiGRA '17 - Proceedings of the 2017 DiGRA International Conference

This paper explores the practices that indie developers deploy to manage the risks they encounter while making, marketing, and selling games. Building on concepts such as indie labour (Browne 2015) and theory-crafting (Paul 2011), this paper explicates the concept of value crafting as a better way to understand indie game developer practices. Indie developers engage in value crafting as a way to construct the value of their game and to sell it to a wide audience. This is reflected in debates about the pricing of indie games - there is no agreed upon standard for contemporary indie games, with price points now ranging from free (with or without in-app purchases) through $30 for individual games. Alongside the uncertainty of how to price a game, developers formulate elaborate marketing plans for various stages of their work, which can include running a Kickstarter campaign, promoting their game via social media, creating, moderating and participating in fan forums, gaining Steam Greenlight access, whether or not to release their game on Early Access, releasing demos, pitching their game to game journalists and local media, finding YouTube and Twitch personalities to play and promote their game, and many other activities. Indies who do all of these things also engage in lengthy discussions with one another to share information, usually incorporating detailed charts, graphs and statistical analyses. These post-mortems of their activities attempt to explain a game’s success or failure, as well as to rhetorically construct a particular activity as successful in some way even if sales figures are low- so it might lay the groundwork for future games, it builds a fan base, it teaches valuable lessons learned, and so on.

 

Playing with Patriarchy: Fatherhood in BioShock: Infinite, The Last of Us, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt


Lucat Bertrand
2017 DiGRA '17 - Proceedings of the 2017 DiGRA International Conference

A number of prominent digital games have in recent years featured fathers as protagonists. The ideological implications of those games’ different representations of fatherhood and masculinity appear as important axes of investigation into the roles digital games can play in contemporary ideological discourse. Through a close comparative analysis and reading of BioShock: Infinite (Irrational Games 2013), The Last of Us (Naughty Dog 2013), and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (CD Projekt RED 2015), this paper examines the narrative, representational, and procedural elements which frame fatherhood in these three popular games. Relying upon the foundations of procedural rhetoric and the concept of hegemonic masculinities, this paper focuses on three key themes: paternal violence, anti-fathers, and exceptional daughters. The different ways these themes are represented in the three games highlights how they respectively reinforce, restore, and challenge notions of patriarchal authority, the role of the father, and contemporary gender ideologies.