Play’s the Thing: A Framework to Study Videogames as Performance


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

Performance studies deals with human action in context, as well as the process of making meaning between the performers and the audience. This paper presents a framework to study videogames as a performative medium, applying terms from performance studies to videogames both as software and as games. This performance framework for videogames allows us to understand how videogames relate to other performance activities, as well as understand how they are a structured experience that can be designed. Theatrical performance is the basis of the framework, because it is the activity that has the most in common with games. Rather than explaining games in terms of ‘interactive drama,’ the parallels with theatre help us understand the role of players both as performers and as audience, as well as how the game design shapes the experience. The theatrical model also accounts for how videogames can have a spectatorship, and how the audience may have an effect on gameplay.

 

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.

 

Encoding liveness: Performance and real-time rendering in machinima


Cameron David Carroll John
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Machinima is the appropriation of software-generated 3D virtual environments, typically video games, for filmmaking and dramatic productions. The creation and distribution technology of machinima tends to hide the nature of the performer, provoking consideration of a definition of ‘liveness’ that can accommodate the real-time rendering of screen content by game software in response to human input, or – at the extreme – as if there is human input in accordance with performance parameters coded by humans. This paper considers the continuum of creative modes that machinima makers work on, and the differing aesthetic/technical decisions affecting the level of liveness in the finished production. Machinima films derive from captured gameplay, puppet-like live improvisational work, cinematic or televisual on-camera performances, and totally scripted performances produced using coded commands. Often, the real-time rendering capability of the game software is only critical at the point of image capture, but once the footage has been saved as a video file it is editing and post-production that becomes the focus of much machinima production. Even live improvisational pieces – whether performed in a real or virtual venue - are generally better known via their capture and distribution as video clips to a wider post-performance audience. This paper also explores machinima making as a community of practice, that is a specific group with a local culture, operating through shared practices, linked to each other through a shared repertoire of resources. Digital performance communities of practice emerging from video games and machinima production can be seen as having levels of engagement with a range of other communities, most obviously the gameplaying, game modifying, CGI animation and filmmaking communities. Consideration is given to how, from a dramatic viewpoint, the performers within a machinima production are also operating in much the same way as in-role improvisation occurs within the community of practice associated with process drama - a strongly framed environment defined by a ‘digital pre-text’ - the common digital environment that provides the agreed fictional context for the dramatic action to unfold in.

 

Connecting Worlds. Fantasy Role-Playing Games, Ritual Acts and the Magic Circle


Copier Marinka
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

From a cultural history and game theoretical perspective my work focuses on the relationship between the fantasy subculture, fantasy role-playing games and the daily life of their participants in the Netherlands. Main research themes are the construction of game/play space and identities. Within this context I elaborate in this paper on the usefulness of the term magic circle (Johan Huizinga). I will argue why in game research the current use of the term magic circle is problematic. We can understand the term differently when returning to the context in which Huizinga introduced the magic circle as ritual play-ground. According to him ritual is play and play is ritual. Referring back to his work Homo Ludens (1938) I will discuss the various relationships between role-play and ritual performance. I will argue that fantasy role-playing consists of collections of performances or ritual acts, in which players construct the game/play space, identities and meaning.

 

Domesticating Play, Designing Everyday Life: The Practice and Performance of Family Gender, and Gaming


Enevold Jessica
2012 DiGRA Nordic '12: Proceedings of 2012 International DiGRA Nordic Conference

Playing digital games is now a common everyday practice in many homes. This paper deals with the constitution of such practices by taking a closer look at the material objects essential to play and their role in the “design of everyday life” (Shove et al 2007). It uses ethnographic method and anthropological practice theory to attend to the domestic spaces of leisure and play, the home environments, in which the large part of today’s practices of playing digital games takes place. It focuses on the stagings of material, not virtual, artifacts of gaming: screens, consoles, hand-held-devices essential to play and their locations and movements around the home. It demonstrates how everyday practices, seemingly mundane scenographies and choreographies, practically, aesthetically and technologically determined, order everyday space-time and artifacts, domesticate play and condition performances of family, gender and gaming. In the process, a history of the domestication of play unfolds.