21st Century Soul Guides: Leveraging Myth and Ritual for Game Design


Rusch Doris C.
2018 DiGRA Nordic '18: Proceedings of 2018 International DiGRA Nordic Conference

This paper takes its departure from the observation that myth and ritual once served the important psychological function of helping us come to grips with the Givens of Existence: death, isolation, freedom of choice, and meaninglessness. It explains the transformational and meaning-generating power of myth from an existential, archetypal and depth psychology perspective and proposes games as potent vehicles for myth in the 21st century. It provides suggestions on how game designers can become modern Soul Guides by accessing their unconscious to birth viable symbols and create emotionally resonating experiences for others, and how they can glean inspiration from different types of rituals to inform mythic gameplay experiences that can contribute to a meaningful life.

 

Playability and its Absence – A post-ludological critique


Leino Olli
2014 DiGRA '13 - Proceedings of the 2013 DiGRA International Conference: DeFragging Game Studies

This essay concerns with the overlap of interactive art and computer games. In order to arrive at a critique of the feasibility of using playability’s absence as a strategy in the design of ‘art games’, the essay contextualizes contemporary non-playable ‘art games’ in the discourses of both interactive art and computer games. For this purpose, a notion of ‘playability’ is derived from notions of freedom and responsibility. In the ‘cross-exposure’ of traditions, questions arise about authorship, and, the aesthetics and ethics of the relationship between the artworks and its audience.