Liminality, Embodiment and Metamorphosis: Applying The Transformative Power of Ceremonial Magic to Mixed Reality Games Design

In this extended abstract we borrow components of ceremonial magic design, with centuries of empirical practice of altering normality, consciousness, and sense of self, momentarily or with more lingering effects, with the aim to explore how they can be used to design meaningful, immersive game experiences.

Dwelling in Digital Game Worlds

Failure in Videogames: Similarities and Differences to Textile Craft

Processes of Roling: Mechanisms for Adopting Subjectivities in the Gameworld

Revision of Queer Bodies: Modifications of Sexual Affordances in World of Warcraft

Instantaneously Punctuated Picture-Music: Pilgrim in the Microworld and an Alternative Evaluation of Videogame Expression

Beer & Pixels: Embodiment, drinking, and gaming in Australia

Virtual Reality is ‘Finally Here’: A Qualitative Exploration of Formal Determinants of Player Experience in VR

It is already a truism that consumer virtual reality (VR) systems offer sensorially immersive first-person experiences that differ markedly from those begat by traditional screen displays. But what are the implications of this for player experience? It is well-documented that VR can induce illusions of non-mediation; of spatial presence; of embodiment in avatars. This paper asks—and reports on—what common features of digital games are liable to be experienced as stressors (that is, as beyond optimally affective or intense) when the player perceives her avatar–self egocentrically as a ‘life-sized’, spatially present, and potentially vulnerable entity within the gameworld. The present paper describes and discusses findings from a qualitative content analysis of immersive virtual environments (IVEs) experienced via head-mounted display-based VR systems akin to those now commercially available. A purposive sample comprising video, photographic, and written documentation of IVEs (n = 124) from historical clinical VR and telepresence research is interrogated through the lens of cognitive media theory. Effecting a novel approach inspired by systematic review, the present study's observations and inferences regarding players' subjective experience of IVEs are presented alongside relevant findings from the research literature sampled. This produces a preliminary formal framework for discussing VR player experience as significantly structured by patiency (cf. agency), with VR experiences eliciting self-directed affect, and thereby somewhat unintentionally engaging the player's body as a site for feedback.

Spatial Presence, Psychophysiology, and Game(play) Emotions

“Who Am ‘I’ in the Game?”: A Typology of the Modes of Ludic Subjectivity

In order to arrive at an understanding of the formal structures by which an ‘I’ is established for the player towards the gameworld, this paper proposes a typology of the various modes of ludic subject-positioning. It highlights the ways in which each mode of ludic subject-positioning uses specific formal mechanisms to structure the player’s experience of the gameworld around a particular subjective , presenting relevant examples in each case.