Gaming for All: Discourse and Identity amongst Difabel Gamers in Indonesia


Jiwandono Haryo Pambuko Purwandi Edeliya Relanika
2022 DiGRA ’22 – Proceedings of the 2022 DiGRA International Conference: Bringing Worlds Together

This article aims to study the use of digital games as interactive media among "difabel"; Indonesianized portmanteau of differently abled, gamers in Indonesia, including but not limited to the use of digital games as a platform for socialization, as sociotechnical artefacts to gain collective support and provide better access to community and social interaction, in addition to involvements in digital gaming competitions. This article aims to explain developments of "difabel" individuals’ discourse and their construction of identities during social interaction with digital games.

 

The Death of Gamers: How Do We Address The Gamer Stereotype?


Houe Nina P.
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

The clash of identities expressed in the Gamergate incident of 2014 was arguably intensified by the discourse of the “Gamers Are Dead” articles, which declared an end to gamers, meaning the prevalence of the gamer stereotype. This paper seeks to illuminate a novel angle of the Gamergate conflict by investigating how the gamer identity has been addressed through imagery in eight of the “Gamers Are Dead” articles of 2014. To do so, it discusses how the discourse of gamer identity, which is part of a larger ecology in game culture, may contribute to continued strife. To learn from the Gamergate crisis as a scholarly community, we unquestionably need to look at how discourse has been used to harm minorities, academics, and critics voicing their concerns about game culture. However, we also need to reflect on how critics affect the discourse of the gamer identity.

 

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


Puay Ru Chua Victoria Williams J. Patrick
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

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.

 

Polygonal Modeling: The Aestheticization of Identity


Kerich Chris
2019 DiGRA '19 - Proceedings of the 2019 DiGRA International Conference: Game, Play and the Emerging Ludo-Mix

Starting from the assumption that the skin is a complex organ that carries with it a depth and cultural history that cannot be easily understood, it follows that one must also come to reckon with the technologies that are used to represent skin in digital formats. By far, the dominant computational paradigm for representing 3D objects of any kind is “polygonal modeling”, a system which represents 3D objects as the combination of two things: a mesh and a texture, also known as a “skin”. You can also read articles which may contain 3d rendering meaning to deepen your knowledge about 3D. This seemingly innocuous technological paradigm carries with it important ideological, political messages about identity and visual representation. I approach the analysis of these messages in three ways. First, I briefly examine the history of computer graphics, and polygonal modeling in particular, to show how the engineering values of efficiency and functionality ultimately drove and determined the development of polygonal modeling, and emphasize the cultural and critical reflection absent from that development. Next, I examine cultural practices surrounding 3D models in video games, specifically players skinning characters and the economy of skins, to show how the affordances of polygonal modeling as a paradigm lend themselves to the aestheticization and commodification of identity in digital spheres, advancing a neoliberal ideology that holds identity as an aesthetic commodity to be bought and sold. While it’s unlikely that this technology will radically transform in the near future, it’s important to identify, and reflect on, the assumptions that underlie it and the ideological effects it has. In doing so one can start to imagine new ways of interacting with it, or even start to imagine new technologies with new paradigms that govern them.