Digital Gaming During the Early COVID-19 Pandemic: Healthy Escapism and Social Connectedness

The aim of the current study was to study and understand changes in digital gaming in response to the early COVID-19 pandemic and the related restrictions. A sample of 146 gamers from the US, Europe, and India participated in an online survey probing their gaming both quantitatively and qualitatively during the period of two months preceding any COVID-19 restrictions and during the first months of coronavirus restrictions. An increase in weekly gaming times was reported during the pandemic in overall gaming, online gaming, co-located gaming, gaming alone, and gaming on computers, consoles, and mobiles. The genres played significantly more included (action) adventures, role-playing games (RPGs), shooters, and puzzle/board/card/tabletop games. Qualitatively, the results suggested that much of the increased gaming during the pandemic was related to different forms of healthy escapism, for example, managing boredom and loneliness, coping from stress, seeking mental distraction, and fulfilling the need for social connectedness.

Identities, Genre and Design in Game-Making

Memory and Meaning in Analogue: A Hate Story and Nier: Automata

Towards Genre as a Game Design Research Approach

Game design research is a growing field within game studies. Design in research, however, raises new questions. What should game design research investigate? How generalizable should its claims be? Considering the ‘ultimate particular’ of design, this paper explores how design research should investigate particular demarcations of works. This paper suggests genre as an approach in game design research, arguing that genres meaningfully, albeit reflexively, demarcate ‘likenesses’ worth investigation. Genre demarcations can be used to ground and orient research; lists of genre-games and informal descriptions suggest, what to, and how to, investigate genre, respectively. However, scholarly propositions of genres are necessary to support research. These propositions must make explicit, contestable, and substantive designerly claims about that genre, such as design values, structural patterns, and aesthetics, laying a scholarly foundation for future claims. These foundations support scholarly tradition in game design research by providing a context to ground, situate and disseminate findings.

Early Computer Game Genre Preferences (1980-1984)

This paper addresses the lack of solid historical information concerning early computer game sales and preferences. Two consistent data series from the magazines Softalk and Computer Gaming World (CGW) are analyzed to give an overview of the best selling and best rated games by players for the period of 1980-1984. A “genre palette” is inferred from the sources, giving a snapshot of how contemporaries framed and interpreted the offer in computer games. A comparison of the series reveals the CGW readership constitutes a distinct “hardcore” play community amongst general computer game players. It is also observed that genre preferences vary in time: arcade games peak in 1982 and then recede in favor of computer-native genres. A brief comparison with Atari 2600 best sellers reveal the inadequacy of the computer game genre palette to describe home console games. The historical and constructed nature of genres as “horizons of expectations” is discussed.

Game Fiction: Playing the Interface in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Asheron’s Call

Videogame play requires the negotiation of multiple synchronic points-of-view enabled through the use of cameras, avatars, interfaces, and vignettes (the cut-scenes, dialogue, and other attributes normally attributed to the “story”). Concurrent mastery of these points-of-view contributes to the game field of play and enables a greater possibility to complete the game’s goals. Using Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Asheron’s Call as examples, this paper examines the interface as one of the various mechanisms that establish and control the player’s point-of-view in videogames. By understanding the use of point-of-view as one of many components that establish game fiction, we can theorize the imaginary inventions that shape games, even those that do not resemble more traditional narrative forms.

In Defense of Cutscenes

The technique of cutscenes, as typically found in story-based action games, is placed within a wider discursive problematic, focusing on the role of pre-written narratives in general. Within a theoretical framework raised by Espen Aarseth, Markku Eskelinen and Marie-Laure Ryan, I discuss the relations between the ergodic and the representational, and between play and narration. I argue that any game event is also a representational event, a part of a typical and familiar symbolic action, in which cutscenes often play a crucial part. Through cutscenes, the ergodic effort acquires typical meanings from the generic worlds of popular culture.

Genre in Genre: The Role of Music in Music Games

The first academic researchers of music and dance games focused their primary attentions on ethnographic observations of game play, how the shift from arcade to console play affects game play strategies, defining embodied aesthetics, and analyzing the rise of a competitive play circuit in Dance Dance Revolution fan culture [Chan; Demers, 2006; Smith, 2004; Behrenshausen, 2007]. The Dance Dance Revolution franchise has attracted the attention of both academic researchers and members of the education and medical establishments, who wish to harness the power of exergaming in physical education classes to combat rising levels of childhood obesity. Less attention has been by academic researchers to the economics of the production of these games or the ways that the management of track lists, genres, and artists in music games affects gamers’ opinions of these titles and their evaluation of the relationship between a game’s core mechanics and in-game outcomes. This paper analyzes the ways that game publishers and developers create and license the music for games such as Flow: Urban Dance Uprising, Band Mashups, the Guitar Hero, Rock Band and Dance Dance Revolution franchises, and the forthcoming titles Scratch and DJ Hero. Critics’ and gamers’ complaints about the use of “soundalikes” to replace the master recordings by original artists along with recent attempts from Warner Music to push for increased licensing fees point to ongoing controversies over in-game music and the industrial relationships between the gaming industry, the recording industry, and performance rights organizations such as ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. This paper also examines how particular genres of music create difficulties for game design, constructing the relationship between on-screen content, the player, and game peripherals, and for players working to make sense of the relationship between their musical and gaming tastes. Examples I discuss include blog reactions to the introduction of country music as downloadable content in Rock Band, the lukewarm reception given THQ’s Band Mashups, fan and critical ruminations over the potential success or failure of the turntable peripheral in Scratch and DJ Hero, and the difficulties of mapping hip hop into the dance game in Flow! Urban Dance Uprising. Reactions to the introduction of country music in Rock Band ran the gamut, with many bloggers and online fans expressing frustration that the visual culture of the game and its embrace of rock culture militated against the inclusion of country music. Likewise, many gamers and critics were bewildered by Band Mashups, a game that simulated a battle of the bands and a battle of musical genres. Even the deceptively simple Dance Dance Revolution franchise illustrates the difficulty of managing the track list for each title. The need for genre diversity and for a range of songs with varying numbers of beats per minute to satisfy inexperienced, intermediate, and advanced players illustrates the need for designers to have at least an elementary knowledge of musicology and/or musical form. Perhaps the most interesting example of a music game’s failure is Flow! Urban Dance Uprising. This game, developed by Artificial Mind and Movement and published by Ubisoft, illustrates the difficulty of mapping hip hop onto a DDR style game. The biggest problem with Flow wasn’t the paucity of A-list artists and a track list that privileged lesser known songs that were hard to groove to, but the ways that game designers made few significant modifications to the core mechanic of the dancing game. In Flow, it is a stretch to think that the diegetic operator acts of the player bear any “realistic” relationship to the “machinic embodiments” of the onscreen avatar’s breakdancing moves [Galloway, 2006]. Players seem willing to suspend disbelief that the scrolling arrows in DDR match up exactly to the movements of the player on the pad and the movements of the onscreen avatar, but the complicated breakdancing moves performed by the avatar in Flow substantively challenge the relationship of action and outcome that Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman [2004] posit as critical to designing meaningful play.

Fictive affinities in Final Fantasy XI: complicit and critical play in fantastic nations

Like many massively-multiplayer role-playing games, Final Fantasy XI is a persistent world with a heroic fantasy setting. This paper discusses fictive player identities, and describes specific visual and ludological tropes of race and nationality, and the techniques by which the game engineers the complicity of the player in the problematics it represents. Some of these are coherent with themes and structures developed in earlier (single-player) iterations of the Final Fantasy franchise; others are original to the multiplayer title. This treatment of the game-as-text is offered as an exercise in critical close-play, and as an example of a necessarily hybrid approach to the study of game genres.

Dimensions of Play: Gameplay, context, franchise and genre in player responses to Command and Conquer: Generals

An analysis of online reviews of Command and Conquer: Generals, the focus of this paper is on the various dimensions within which play is situated in the accounts of players. Starting with responses that highlight potentially contentious political associations of aspects of the game, it considers how these are balanced against or combined with concerns relating to gameplay mechanics, graphics and the situation of Generals within both the Command and Conquer franchise and the wider real-time strategy genre. The paper concludes by arguing that the evidence of player reviews supports the suggestion that game-playing is, essentially, a multi-dimensional experience.