From the Magic Circle to Identity: A Case Study on Becoming a Videogame Designer in Singapore


Puay Ru Chua Victoria Williams J. Patrick
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

We discuss how instructors and game-design students, for whom playing games for fun makes up a significant part of their self-definitions, made sense of transformations in perceptions of games, play and work during socialization into professional games-related careers. Our data come from 6 weeks of field research and 14 semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted at a local tertiary institution (LTI) offering bachelor’s degrees in game design in Singapore. We interviewed 10 students—3 female, 7 male— ranging from freshman to seniors as well as 4 male game design instructors with the intent of comparing the perspectives and experiences of both novices and veterans. While games scholars have investigated the boundaries between play and work through structural concepts such as “the magic circle” and through political-economic concepts such as “playbor,” we explore how the social- psychological concepts of “social identity” and “role identity” together provide unique insights into the meanings of play and work for game-design students, and the consequences of those meanings. We found that instructors spent significant time and effort not only teaching students how to design games, but how to become designers. We also found that game-design students learned to construct social and role identities which enabled them to renegotiate their relationship to games and to function within the expectations of the professional game-designer role.

 

The Critical Role of Media Representations, Reduced Stigma and Increased Access in D&D’s Resurgence


Sidhu Premeet Carter Marcus
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

Over the last five years Dungeons and Dragons [D&D] (Arneson & Gygax, 1974) has risen in prominence and popularity with a broadening of its player demographic. Though the game’s resurgence has been widely discussed in non-academic outlets, it has been neglected in academic literature. While there are many factors motivating renewed and engaged play of D&D, in this paper we draw on our 2019 study of contemporary D&D players to present key contextual factors of the game’s resurgence. Through discussion of our results, we argue that the influence of representations and trends in popular media, reduction of associated stigma, and impact of convergence culture (Jenkins, 2006) on increased game access, have led to the resurgence of D&D according to our participants and shed light on some key reasons for its success in recent years.

 

Design Bleed: A Standpoint Methodology for Game Design


Toft Ida Harrer Sabine
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

In this paper we develop the concept of design bleed, a standpoint approach to game design. We adopt the terminology of bleed from the Nordic community around live- action role-playing games and use it as a lens on game development. Based on our own experiences in developing two game jam games, Lovebirds and Get Your Rocks On, we identify four ‘ingredients’ for bleed-inspired game design. We develop design bleed as a community affirming design practice which can be used as a tool for carving out shared standpoints. We suggest that this is particularly productive for game designers at the margins, as it has potential to be creatively and emotionally healing but can also invite expressions for political resistance to normative game culture.

 

Flow It, Show It, Play It: Hair in Digital Games


Ivănescu Andra
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

This paper proposes digital hair as a lens through which to explore a number of issues surrounding culture and representation in videogames. While the difficulty of creating hair which looks and moves in a photorealistic manner is notorious in both animation and digital games, the effortless ability to create hair which carries with it social and cultural meaning has not been examined with the same fine-tooth comb. Sociologists and anthropologists from Sir Edmund Leach to Emma Dabiri emphasise how hair can carry a multitude of social, cultural and political meanings, and this paper argues that many of these are carried over into digital worlds. These meanings are examined here in terms of the colour, length, and texture of digital game characters’ hair in relation to culture, gender, and race, providing further avenues for the exploration of representation in digital games.

 

Playing as Travelling: At the Border of Leisure and Learning


Bjarnason Nökkvi Jarl
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

The aim of this article is to develop an interpretive framework based on the concept of travel, exploring the limits of play as a meaningful activity. By comparing how the concept of travel has been applied to literature and cinema, it becomes possible to discern how the interest of gameplay and travel can be said to align in novel ways, reconceptualising relatively immobile players as moving travellers and assigning them stake in the transformative properties often attributed to travel. It will be held that modern perspectives on travel share an affinity with the medium of games as a venue for action and that this element of games, in turn, generates a sense of presence relative to travel. Examining this intersection, situates the study of games at the borders of leisure and learning, challenging traditional divisions between leisure and selfcultivation, all the while engaging with games as a part of wide-ranging cultural phenomena.