Posthumanist Attitude Towards Animals in Digital Games

On the Maintenance of Meaning: A Deleuzian View on Proceduralism

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.

Male Gamers, Identity and Masculinity

Swiss Video Game History and the Smaky Era: Bootstrapping a Platform Archaeology Study

The “not so” Beautiful Game: a study on Brazilian players of the fantasy soccer game Cartola FC

Fantasy sports games exist for over 50 years and are popular in North America and in European countries. In Brazil, the sports fans only recently took interest in those games with Cartola FC, an online fantasy soccer game. This study aims to investigate the Brazilian players’ behavior and consumption in Cartola FC through a qualitative approach. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and the discussion was supported by Game Studies and consumer behavior theoretical approaches. The results pointed to the game boundaries’ permeability, where the actions performed by the players occur mainly outside of it. Although Cartola FC is an online game, the social ties with local friends and work colleagues are reinforced and, as in previous researches carried on in other countries, the act of playing deepened the players’ relationship with the sport. It was also found an expressive informal market of League gambling sites without registration, created to transgress the Brazilian legislation.

Describing the Game Studies Canon: A Game Citation Analysis

This article analyzes how game studies scholars cite videogames in their research. A content analysis of over 580 articles from the field’s two main journals is used to identify the currently-invisible canon of most-frequently cited games in game scholarship. We show that the canon is far more varied than previously suggested and demonstrate ways that it has changed over time. The article's research implications include explicating different functions of game citation as well as providing an empirical basis for identifying under-researched games. Our findings also identify the games with which familiarity is most important to understand existing research. Finally, we propose ways the game studies canon can help address pedagogical, technological, and legal obstacles to the development of game studies as a discipline.

Larp Typology

Developing the Developers: Education, Creativity and the Gaming Habitus

Smash Mods, Smash Creativity: Nintendo, Project M, and Enclosure

Critical Alternative Journalism from the Perspective of Game Journalists

This paper investigates from a game studies perspective the potential of alternative online game journalism for a more critical and honest coverage than established game journalism. Following the notion that journalism is defined by journalists through their practical work and discourse (Zelizer, 1993:222) the authors conducted 11 in-depth focused semi-structured interviews (Minichiello et al., 1995) with alternative game journalists and established game journalists. The results show that the social media logic of Youtube forces alternative journalists to adopt entertaining personas which undermines their authenticity unless they can afford to work for free. Alternative game journalists do not understand themselves as journalists but instead see themselves as critics or reviewers. They see established print-media game journalists as journalists. Neither do interviewees from established game journals. This means that nobody understands themselves as game journalists and takes the role of the watchdog in a democratic society (Wahl-Jorgensen and Hanitzsch, 2009:8).