Video Games, Learning, and the Shifting Educational Landscape


Wu Hong-An
2018 DiGRA '18 - Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message

Video games are changing our imagination of what constitutes as learning, what we should learn, and how we learn. In this paper, I describe the ways in which video games mediating our realities are reshaping parts of United States’ educational landscape. Specifically, I focus my review on three slices of this larger educational landscape, including the discourses on literacy learning, informal learning, and gamebased pedagogies. Here, video game playing is seen and argued as a form of literacy learning where players are learning to encode and decode meaning through this medium for active cultural participation in both societies at large and the specific video game cultures. However, when these cultural practices are situated within a stratified and hegemonic society operating under neoliberal logics, it is unclear who are we serving with these interpretations of learning.

 

Good Game Feel: An Empirically Grounded Framework for Juicy Design


Hicks Kieran Dickinson Patrick Holopainen Jussi Gerling Kathrin
2018 DiGRA '18 - Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message

Juicy design refers to the idea that large amounts of audiovisual feedback contribute to a positive player experience. While the concept is popular in the game design community, definitions of the concept remain vague, and it is difficult to analyze which elements contribute to whether a game is perceived as juicy. In this paper, we address this issue through a combination of industry perspectives and academic analysis to provide a more detailed understanding of contributors to juicy design. We present results from an online survey that received responses from 17 game developers, and create an affinity diagram to derive a framework that facilitates the analysis of juicy design rooted in developers’ perspectives. Through application to two commercially available games, we refine the framework, and contribute a tool that makes the idea of juiciness actionable for researchers and designers.

 

Stasis and Stillness: Moments of Inaction in Videogames


Scully-Blaker Rainforest
2018 DiGRA '18 - Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message

This paper represents an initiatory investigation into moments of inaction in games. Two particular types of inaction are defined and discussed: stasis, which is inaction brought on by or through a game’s mechanics and stillness which is brought on by or through a game’s aesthetics. Moments of stasis and stillness are shown to either be designed features of a game that produce a variety of affective experiences or playful subversions that are injected into a game by the player. Through describing stasis and stillness as either designed or injected, these two modes of inaction are compared and contrasted as part of a broader project that interrogates whether play can be a form of critique.

 

On Striated Wilderness and Prospect Pacing: Rural Open World Games as Liminal Spaces of the Man-Nature Dichotomy


Bonner Marc
2018 DiGRA '18 - Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message

From colonization to (post)industrial era, recreation guised as preservation of wilderness is a concept and ongoing topic in arts and media. This paper defines the distinct staging of untamed and pristine environment in open world games as striated wilderness which is constituted by aesthetics and gazing regimes of Western culture as well as by modularity and variability of computer games as data bases. Merging the wilderness discourse with concepts of tourist gaze and prospect-refuge theory, rural open world games can be analyzed as rhythmized liminal spaces of the man-nature dichotomy. Thus, they stand in the tradition of landscape gardens and nature parks where former survival instincts and urges for exploration are experienced for recreation and entertainment. Striated wilderness has to be differentiated between place (wilderness) and practice (wildness). How do open world games regulate our understanding of landscape and longing for nature?

 

Is My Avatar MY Avatar? Character Autonomy and Automated Avatar Actions in Digital Games


Willumsen Ea Christina
2018 DiGRA '18 - Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message

This paper will explore the borders between the avatar and character dimensions of the player figure, as outlined by Vella (2015), particularly in cases where this line is blurred. Through investigation of five different examples, I suggest we use the measures of avatar control and character complexity to study the relationship between avatar and character in a given instance. Avatar control refers to the amount of agency the player has in a given instance in a game compared to the default mode of agency, whereas character complexity builds on transmedia and literary theory approaches to characters, to explore what constitutes complexity of the character in question. The analysis allows us to assess whether the instance can be considered representing either character autonomy or automated avatar actions, and in turn may help us understand the relationship between the player, the avatar, and the character.

 

Fragmentation: between expansion packs and episodic video games


Genovesi Matteo
2018 DiGRA '18 - Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message

The contemporary video game market is more and more crowded with titles that are expanded by digital contents that can be downloaded for free or payment: from annexing additional costumes to the characters, to implementing large portions of narrative, today expansion packs represent a phenomenon potentially and concretely capable of redefining the lifespan of each 안전한 카지노사이트 video game initially sold as a standalone creation, to then prove to be partial when new contents are released. This essay will try to group the variety of these digital contents into two essential sets, and then it will try to understand if the video games expanded by future downloadable contents can be included among the canons of serial gaming, now explicitly represented by the advent of episodic video games.

 

Localization from an Indie Game Production Perspective – Why, When and How?


Toftedahl Marcus Backlund Per Engström Henrik
2018 DiGRA '18 - Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message

This paper investigates the process of game localization from an indie development perspective. The global nature of the digitally distributed game industry gives opportunities for game studios of all sizes to develop and distribute games on a global market. This poses a challenge for small independent developers with limited resources in funding and personnel, seeking to get as wide spread of their game as possible. To reach the players in other regions of the world localization needs to be done, taking language and other regional differences into consideration. In an AAA or big-budget game production, these questions are handled by separate entities focusing solely on the localization process – but how do small independent game developers handle this? Indie game developers in Sweden, China and India have been interviewed to investigate the research question of how indie game developers handle localization in the development process. The results point to a widespread use of community- and fan translation, and that only basic localization is done i.e. culturalization aspects are not considered. The results also show that the reason for localizing can be both business decisions but also to spread a specific message using games.

 

Presence at History: Toward an Expression of Authentic Historical Content as Game Rules and Play


Schott Gareth Redder Ben
2018 DiGRA '18 - Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message

This paper seeks to address the theme of the 2018 conference by examining the significant role game developers now have in mediating our understanding and engagement with history by placing players in historical events/scenarios thick with faithfully rendered artefacts, architecture, styles, and social encounters. In doing so, we argue for a new wave of historical games in which developers are no longer merely translating established scholarly perspectives on the past, but operating as historians through their practice-led research that attempts to bridge representational learning with more direct experience by historicizing the player’s experience, gameplay, and interactions. This paper principally illustrates its argument via a range of contemporary game titles that demonstrate a proclivity for creating authentic living socio-cultural systems, game mechanics, themes, and goals that invite players to learn about the past, distinct from games that employ uchronic times, alternate histories, or simply use history as window-dressing.

 

Avatars, Gender and Sexuality for Brazilian Players on Rust


Caetano Mayara
2018 DiGRA '18 - Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message

This study aims to understand what the aspects are that make players identify with and relate to avatars, including discussions on issues of gender and sexuality. To carry out this research qualitative experiments were conducted using gameplay sessions and semistructured interviews. The Massive Multiplayer Online game Rust (Facepunch Studios 2013) was chosen for empirical study because of its gender-based system, a controlled variable for the experiments. Volunteers from the study were divided into two groups: one with the gender of the participants matching the gender of the avatars they controlled; the other not matching. From the results we were able to determine: the level of identification between player and avatar was not so important and did not affect how they played; there were mixed feelings about the race of one of the avatars in the experiment; having avatars appear nude also made the participants feel uncomfortable, especially regarding the male avatar; female participants responded to gender questions more easily than males; overall, the participants were not aware that they were playing a game related to gender swapping; and even though they were not comfortable speaking about sexuality, the participants were able to recognize patterns in the representations as well as critique them and offer other suggestions.

 

Markers of Subjective Perception in Larp


Mochocki Michał
2018 DiGRA '18 - Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message

Based on J.-N. Thon's (2016) framework for analysing representations of character's subjective perception in film, video games and comic books, this paper studies representations of subjectivity in live-action role-playing. This is a direct continuation of two previous papers, one positioning larp as a narrative medium in the context of transmedia narratology, the other researching storyworld representation / interpretation by larp participants. The hereby presented text focuses on markers of subjectivity, their three types (narratorial, content, and representational) defined by Thon and the fourth (metasymbolic) by myself. The discussion is organised in three parts, corresponding with Thon's types of subjectivity: (quasi-)perceptual point of view, (quasi-)perceptual overlay, and internal worlds. The analysis confirms Thon's observations about the transmediality of some of the markers (e.g. the use of narratorial markers in larp is very similar to their use in (audio)visual media), and reveals the larp-specific nature and/or larp-specific usage of other markers.