God is a Game Designer – Accelerating ‘Existential Ludology’

Meaningful Transformation: Intra-activity and Video Games

On the de-familiarizing and re-ontologizing effects of glitches and glitch-alikes

Interactive digital experiences are understood as disclosing possibilities of being that can extend beyond the actual. The ways in which those experiences prompt their audiences to interactively apply and repurpose their cognitive faculties are constrained by the technical possibilities of the digital medium. This entails that the transformative activities invited and upheld by the computer depend on the functional affordances of digital technology as well as on the specific ways in which it errs and malfunctions. In this paper, I discuss non-catastrophic computer malfunctions (i.e. glitches) as potentially introducing aspects of surprise, ambiguity, and humor in the interactive experience of a virtual world. Computer glitches can also be intentionally designed to be a constitutive part of a virtual world and triggered deliberately; these types of glitches are used as expressive tools that can stimulate critical thought and make us suspicious of the stability and the validity of our world-views.

Glitch Horror: BEN Drowned and the Fallibility of Technology in Game Fan Fiction

This paper seeks to define a burgeoning genre of transmedia narratives — “glitch horror” — using a popular “creepypasta” (a work of online horror fiction) entitled BEN Drowned as a primary source. The horror of BEN Drowned is rooted in the rhetoric of glitches, those infuriating moments when the failures of technology interrupt gameplay and otherwise distort the world of a game. The emergence of the glitch horror genre and the popularity of narratives like BEN Drowned are manifestations of collective anxieties surrounding the fallibility and restrictions of digital technology; it is fiction about the fear of glitchy games, corrupted files, and bad coding. The paper explores glitch horror through the lenses of fan fiction and participatory culture, metafiction, the Freudian uncanny, the fallibility of technology, and fundamental rules of gaming and play.

A Game Within a Bio-Object(s): Redefining a Moment of the Gameplay

Peep-boxes to Pixels: An Alternative History of Video Game Space

“Peep-boxes to Pixels” offers an alternative cross-section of gaming history. Focusing on the dichotomous profiles of the video game arcade in the US and in Japan, the paper traces various cultural and technological planes as they scroll amongst each other in forming the collective zone we call an arcade today. This metaphor I extend by appropriating into my discourse a term that video games appropriated from astronomy: parallax. Of particular interest in this alternative history are the Dutch peep-boxes which, when introduced to Japan and given a pay-per-play cost, can be thought of as protoarcade games. However, these objects are generally mentioned in regards to a history of cinema. Why not a history of games? Certainly, peep-boxes, pointillism, penny arcades, pinball machines, pachinko and the pixels of Pac-man begin to interrelate as parallax once one weaves together the pedigree of their respective spaces. This paper asks a lot of questions. What does the respawning of fetishistic game historians leave behind? What cultural remnants have been blasted right past? What framework(s) made their debut in Japan so successful, and why should or shouldn't we be surprised that the Japanese arcade scene is so much more informed and vibrant than ours? (It is.) In looking at a history somewhat glitched and incongruent with the common offerings, I hope a more cosmopolitan cerebration may produce more interesting game content and more compelling places to play. The future of play may lie in the past.