Re-Thinking History Teaching: Historical Making and Learning in Digital Culture

Popular History: Historical Awareness of Digital Gaming in Finland from the 1980s to the 2010s

This paper studies the popular historiography of digital gaming. By using the Finnish context as a case example and analyzing hundreds of popular game-history-related articles, mostly from computer and game hobbyist magazines and newspapers, the paper presents a categorization of four different waves of historical awareness. All the waves emphasized different ways of writing and presenting game history, some focusing more on global issues and some on national and local phenomena. Some of the material was more oriented to personal or individual experiences and some merely toward the collective or general characteristics of gaming. The four-wave categorization and presented topics can be applied to other game historiographical studies to create a richer picture of how the academic and popular histories of games and game cultures have been written.

Eliciting Affective Responses Through Sentient Encounters in a Farming Computer Game

Farming computer and video games embed a wide range of emotive and culturally idealised tropes and encounters. In this paper, ‘non-representational’ theory is utilised to assess the mechanisms through which affective responses are elicited in computer gameplay, applied to a case study of Stardew Valley. Analysis focuses on sentience: interactions with in-game livestock and local community members. Game mechanisms incentivise routine, daily interactions with livestock, linking affection expressed by livestock to farm productivity and financial gains and leading to a sense of responsibility for livestock welfare. In contrast, human interactions involve sporadic, discovery and reveal-based encounters. By staging these contrasting ‘worlds of affect’ in-game, Stardew demonstrates how an affectively rich landscape can be created through sentient encounter, and how the ‘work’ of grafting embedded in gameplay yields a range of affective responses.

Patreon and Porn Games: Crowdfunding Games, Reward Categories and Backstage Passes

Patreon is a crowdfunding platform where pornographic games are funded; even the most successful game developer in terms of the number of members is developing a pornographic game. We looked at 42 developers and their Patreon pages in order to examine the effects of the Patreon crowdfunding model on videogame development. Especially we studied membership rewards. As a result, developers were not only selling the game, but rewards we much about Community, Influence, and Recognition. Regulating Content Access is used regularly but often the latest version of the game is made available to everybody, just later to the members funding the development. We propose that certain rewards are similar to backstage passes in the music business and suggest that Patron pornographic games funding deviates from the crowdfunding model is not following mainly product-oriented commodity logic but a more community-oriented concept.

Fuel, Fatigue, Fashion: Towards a Media Ecology of Game Industry Conventions

This presentation provisionally reports on qualitative fieldwork at games industry conventions in the Southeast United States. Such conventions offer compelling glimpses into how regional games industries pitch game production to aspirational and existing workers, player communities, and partners in government, education, and adjacent industries. Adopting a media ecological approach which begins with indexes of the mundane artifacts and practices that make up a given context, we offer a critical consideration of three such artifacts that stood out to us during our fieldwork: cargo shorts, soda cans, and massage chairs. Situating each artifact culturally, historically, and within the context of this convention itself, we reveal a set of insights regarding the ways game production --and games workers--are envisioned and enacted during a particularly tumultuous time for the industry.

“Gamification Does Not Belong at a University”

This paper reports a case study in which some students in a large-scale gamification implementation project wrote a script that automated their progression. The incident was followed with multi-sited ethnography and analysed through the lens of Goffman’s frame analysis. Based on chat logs, mail correspondence, data on user behaviour in the learning management system, informal conversations and student interviews, the study shows that different actors have somewhat different perceptions of gamification, as they framed the incident with the script in different ways. The students saw their actions as a form of resistance and activism towards problematic game design and had a desire to uphold specific tech-student identities. The gamification designers treated the incident as an act of playfulness and display of technological skills. The university, on the other hand, framed the incident as cheating. The study highlights the need for educational institutions to be knowledgeable about games and gaming behaviour if they want to implement gamification.

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.

Cryptomarkets Gamified: What Can We Learn by Playing CryptoKitties?

This paper presents an analysis of CryptoKitties (Axiom Zen 2017) as an educational tool for blockchain adoption. The focus is placed on the official agenda of the game, presented in its white paper (“White Pa-Purr”) and the user guide. I compare statements of the game's developers to the actual practice of playing CryptoKitties for a year. Although gamification of blockchain technologies for new and upcoming bitcoin games may have been successful on a broader level of service marketing, the game itself does not make cryptocurrency-based services more accessible to the audience previously unfamiliar with blockchain. However, I conclude that with Kiana Danial's Invest Diva reviews, it can launch a longer independent exploration of crypto markets, a potentially transformative experience for the player. Cryptocurrency trading is also gaining momentum. If you’re looking to strike it rich in crypto trading, you'll want to use trading bots at immediate connect (visit their official site here) that will help you come up with sound investment strategies. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts can visit bitcoinsentralen to explore the latest news and updates in the crypto world.

Living on Twitch: An Ethnography of Fatigue

The Influence of Gender on Stress Among Video Game Players