Characteristically Tensive: The Unreal in Poetic Gaming

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Stone Jon
2018 DiGRA ’18 – Abstract Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message

 

Preliminary Poetics of Procedural Generation in Games

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Karth Isaac
2018 DiGRA '18 - Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) is deeply embedded in many games. While there are many taxonomies of the applications of PCG, less attention has been given to the poetics of PCG. In this paper we present a poetics for generative systems, including a descriptive framework that introduces terms for complex systems (Apollonian order and Dionysian chaos), the form that describes the shape of the generated output (formal gestalt, individual, and repetition), the locus of the generative process (structure, surface, or locus gestalt), the kind of variation the generator uses (style, multiplicity, and cohesion) and the relationship between coherence and the content used as input for the generator. Rather than being mutually exclusive categories, generators can be considered to exhibit aspects of all of these at once.

 

Harvester of Desires: Gaming Amazon Echo through John Cayley’s The Listeners

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Okkema Laura
2018 DiGRA '18 - Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message

Over the past two years, smart speakers such as Amazon Echo have become popular entertainment technologies and, increasingly, game platforms in households across the globe. These systems are controlled through voice-interactive Artificial Intelligences such as Amazon’s Alexa. The present work seeks to open a conversation about voice-interactive games on smart speaker systems in game studies. While these platforms open exciting new creative spaces for gamers and game developers alike, they also raise ethical concerns: Smart speakers are powerful twenty-first century surveillance capable of interpreting, recording and synthesizing human speech. Through the lens of a case study on John Cayley’s ludic Alexa skill The Listeners, this paper interrogates how Amazon Echo’s technological affordances enable new forms of surveillance while also giving rise to a new poetics of voice interaction. Illuminating aesthetic and ethical dimensions can help scholars in game studies assess the risks and perks of this new ludic platform.