Digital Library Keyword Archives

immersion

- 16 articles or papers

 

Levels of Sound: On the Principles of Interactivity in Music Video Games

Pichlmair Martin Kayali Fares
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

This paper gives an introduction into the principles of interactivity in music video games. Music video games are an old but small genre of games. The earliest direct ancestors emerged in the 1970ies. Some recent music video games were hugely successful. Until today, there are only a few different approaches to their design. The purpose of this article is to shed light on what these design principles are, and how the player is immersed. By analysing several games qualitatively, we extracted certain typical features of games of this genre: active scores, rhythm action, quantisation, synaesthesia, play as performance, free-form play, and sound agents. All these aspects of music video games are discussed in this paper with the aim of describing how they affect the interactivity of the games. The result is a grammar of the language of music video games. Linked to adequate metaphors, this grammar can build a veritable repository for rhythm based, melodically interactive games and digital electronic instruments.

 

‘Can’t Stop The Signal?’ The Design of the Dutch Firefly LARP

Lamerichs Nicolle
2011 DiGRA '11 - Proceedings of the 2011 DiGRA International Conference: Think Design Play

In this paper, I analyze the design of a Dutch live-action role-playing game (LARP), based on the television series Firefly. I discuss it as part of the recent participatory culture in which fans mediate existing fiction into other products such as games. Game studies have often bypassed types of gaming that are initiated by players themselves by taking professional and digital games as their starting points. By focussing on a local example of a fan game, I hope to provide new insights in game design and play. After disseminating between fan and game practices, and sketching some of the previous research thereof, I shall elaborate upon the design of the game in four ways by focussing on the designer, the context, the participants and its construction of meaningful play. I argue that the fan LARP displays a particular design perspective based on the co-creative ethos of role-playing and fandom itself. Whereas existing research isolates the actors that are relevant in game practices, designer, player and fan modes clearly interrelate here.

 

Kairotopos: A reflection on Greek space/time concepts as design implications in Minecraft

Lenhart Isaac
2011 DiGRA '11 - Proceedings of the 2011 DiGRA International Conference: Think Design Play

The game of Minecraft provides an open virtual environment which is somewhere between game and pseudo-game framework (at the current level of development) in which the player is free to explore, investigate and change the world around them. The “virtual environment” of Minecraft naturally involves a description and participation of a spatial and temporal framework in which the player is placed, and presents a unique set of qualities that cross into several categories of Greek notions of the meaning of space and time This paper first describes the historical concepts that the ancient Greeks used for space and time and discusses their links to the concepts of theoretical and technical skills. These concepts are then examined in combination and individually. Finally, this paper describes the mechanics and affordances within the Minecraft environment that are either affected by these spatiotemporal terms or which have impact on the spatiotemporal experiences of the player.

 

Evaluating Interactive Entertainment using Breakdown: Understanding Embodied Learning in Video Games

Ryan William Siegel Martin A.
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

This paper describes evaluating interactive entertainment by understanding embodied learning in games, which is a perspective that situates the learning that a player must go through to play a game in a skill-based environment. Our goal was to arrive at a tool for designers to improve learnability from this perspective. To study embodied learning, we use the concept of breakdown, which happens when our experience fails to aid our everyday actions and decision-making. We conducted a study to investigate learning in games from which we constructed a framework of 17 patterns of breakdown and a set of guidelines to aid heuristic evaluation of video games and to help designers support breakdown in interactions, which support players’ learning, so that they do not become breakdowns in illusion, which break players’ immersion.

 

Exploring Game Aesthetics

Sommerseth Hanna
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

This paper explores an approach to understanding player experience and immersion through aesthetic theory. It should be noted that the paper limits itself to a consideration of singleplayer, avatarbased games with a narrative element. This paper will argue that the experience of immersion is intrinsically tied in with the body and its spatiotemporal positioning within a fictional or constructed space. Seeing immersion from the point of view of the body makes it possible to see a dichotomous relationship between textbased and audiovisual media. When a reader is immersed in fiction, the 'transportation' from one space to another is purely cognitive the readers body is still and the construction of the fictional world takes place in the readers mind. For a player of games to experience immersion, various technologies exist that act directly upon the player's perceptive systems in order to create an experience.

 

Feelies: The Lost Art of Immersing the Narrative

Karhulahti Veli-Matti
2012 DiGRA Nordic '12: Proceedings of 2012 International DiGRA Nordic Conference

This paper discusses the materializations of story world entities that are distributed with game packaging, here referred to as feelies, as props that support narrative elements in story-driven digital games. The narrative support is suggested to function on global and local levels, where the first one refers to the immersive effects concerning the story world, and the latter to the immersive effects concerning the situation in which the player is accommodated to via a player character. Additionally, analog feelies are suggested to possess a tactile aspect that has the potential to enhance their immersive impact at both effective levels. These concepts will be explored through early text adventures Deadline (Infocom 1982) and Witness (Infocom 1983).