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.

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

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.

Design Bleed: A Standpoint Methodology for Game Design

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.

Lyric Games: Geneaology of an Online “Physical Games” Scene

The Implied Participants: Reflections on Prototype Design for Experimental Player Studies

Making Sense of the Gameplay Design Pattern Collection

Reflection on A Design Process for an Educational Game on Mindful Drinking

Ludo Mix as an Aesthetic Experience: Designing Games for Franchises

Fostering ethics and morality in adult learning through gameplay

God is a Game Designer – Accelerating ‘Existential Ludology’