On the Maintenance of Meaning: A Deleuzian View on Proceduralism

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Zhou Hongwei Gonzalez Kyle Altice Nathan Wardrip-Fruin Noah Forbes Angus G.
2022 DiGRA ’22 – Proceedings of the 2022 DiGRA International Conference: Bringing Worlds Together

How do games create meaning? In pursuing this question, proceduralists have formulated a range of theories about the communicative potential of rule-based systems. In this paper, we closely examine and critique a specific aspect of proceduralism as described by Mike Treanor in order to provide insights into a broader array of issues about meaning in games. We suggest that the nature of meaning production is both selective and poly-directional: selective because meaning production relies on context and saliency, and poly-directional because meaning itself can influence subsequent interpretations. We make an initial step in formulating a post-structuralist interpretation of proceduralism influenced by the work of Gilles Deleuze. Within this Deleuzian picture, meaning is conceived as fundamentally unstable and requires constant maintenance.

 

“Azeroth the homeland”- World of Warcraft and the Sense of Belonging

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Ruotsalainen Maria
2016 DiGRA/FDG '16 - Abstract Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG

 

Press X for Meaning: Interaction Leads to Identification in Heavy Rain

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Nixon Michael Bizzocchi Jim
2014 DiGRA '13 - Proceedings of the 2013 DiGRA International Conference: DeFragging Game Studies

Our phenomenological study of Heavy Rain reveals the pleasure found in the discovery of the game’s interaction schema and the immersion into each character that this somewhat paradoxically enables. This schema is presented through diegetic quick time events presented in a way that is faithful to the conditions the game characters find themselves in. The match between player action and character action contributes to the process of identification and serves to make the choices feel more real to the player. A new type of “interaction-image” is theorized as a hybrid of game action and controller options that invites the contemplation of the virtual, further reinforcing the process of identification with the game’s characters. The interaction-image evolves from Deleuze’s categorization of cinema images and their relationship to space and time.

 

‘Remembering How You Died’: Memory, Death and Temporality in Videogames [Extended Abstract]

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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.