Final Fantasies: Final Fantasy III/VI Authenticity Hacks

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Iantorno Michael
2022 DiGRA ’22 – Proceedings of the 2022 DiGRA International Conference: Bringing Worlds Together

 

The Early Micro User: Games writing, hardware hacking, and the will to mod

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Swalwell Melanie
2012 DiGRA Nordic '12: Proceedings of 2012 International DiGRA Nordic Conference

Historical perspectives are largely absent from contemporary debates about user-making. In this paper, I approach the question of user and player making, historically. I consider what microcomputer users and players did in the 1980s, when digital games first became available to play. Excavating the practices of early users through historical research into game coding, hardware building and hacking places not only places practices such as game modification into a longer arc of cultural history of user activity. Exploring what early users did with computers also provides new perspectives on contemporary debates about users’ productivity. The high degree of interest that contemporary users’ productivity is generating in academic circles provides a wider context for such inquiries.

 

The Primordial Economics of Cheating: Trading Skill for Glory or Vital Steps to Evolved Play?

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MacBride Robert
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

In a period marked by cultural, industrial and technological convergences of new media platforms globally, what constitutes ‘Situated play’? One of the key aspects of the global digital industries has been the increasing importance of locality in determining modes of game play. Far from homogenising game play, globalisation has resulted in “disjuncture” and “difference” at the level of the local. Take, for example, the considerable successes of the Massively Multiplayer Online scene; despite its movement towards the idea of the connected gaming civilisation model, many MMO are not global but, rather, played by certain communities that share linguistic, socio-cultural or political economy similarities. A considerably poignant example would be the way in which different aesthetics appeal to cultural contexts. The formulation of these distinctive taste cultures are marked by what Pierre Bourdieu noted as modes of cultural (productions of knowledges), social and economic capital. These types of knowledges effect and impact modes of game play as well as “appreciation” of types of skills and knowledges. So how can we conceptualise these productions of localised game play? One way to understand some of the nuances of the local and how it impacts certain modes of game play is through the rubric of “ethics”. Can we speak of right or wrong behaviour? Who determines it? Is it the companies, the producers, the gaming community, or the socio-political context that governs and moderates modes of behaviour? In this paper, I will explore the role of ethics in gaming and how it relates to cultural relativity and situated play. The paper will outline a compact historical account of the definitions of “cheating” within the realm of the digital and how online gaming has revolutionised some of these precepts. In order to do so I will explore the evolution of cheating and its newfound degrees of acceptance within the contemporary global online gaming community. I will firstly outline some of the ways in which ethics have been conceptualised in game play, following this; a look at a case study of Melbourne MMO players and their definitions of the “ethics” in games through the rubric of cheating. The case study of MMO users in Melbourne will consist of users from over 10 ethnic backgrounds. The sample study will ask users about their definition of cheating and right or wrong game play so that we may mediate on some of saliencies and nascent socio-cultural dimensions of play and locality.

 

From Rule-Breaking to ROM-Hacking: Theorizing the Computer Game-as-Commodity

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Jordan Will
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

This paper develops a theory of the game as a commodity form by looking at the unique practices of console hackers and videogame emulation comment gagner au keno communities. This theory argues for the necessity of understanding a game's system of rules in relation to the material conditions and constraints of the media within which it is constructed and distributed. After deriving the computer game-as-commodity from a combination of institutional and material restrictions and protections on the free-play of the execution of game rules, I provide an account of emulation and ROM-hacking communities as a cultural critique and playful resistance of such commodification within the rigid legal and technological infrastructures of autonomous, executable, and copyrighted machine code. Rather than asking whether videogame emulation is “right or wrong” in the abstract, I examine the legal, economic, and aesthetic implications of emulation practices, asking what the efforts of the emulation and ROM-hacking community have to contribute to the study of console videogames. Finally, I argue that analyzing and embracing the efforts of a variety of practices within the emulation and ROM-hacking communities is helpful and essential to both mapping past struggles and tracing future paradigms of the computer game's contradictory status as a commodity to be consumed and an algorithm to be uncovered.