From Generative to Conventional Play: MOBA and League of Legends

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Ferrari Simon
2014 DiGRA '13 - Proceedings of the 2013 DiGRA International Conference: DeFragging Game Studies

Despite its vast enthusiast community and influence on contemporary game designers, the MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) remains under-explored by academics. This paper considers many meanings of “well played” reflected in the design, community, and aesthetics of the genre's most popular member, League of Legends. Originating as modifications of commercial RTS (real-time strategy) games, MOBAs present a rare study of the “rhetoric of the imaginary” in play theory applied to popular game design. The genre's reification in commercial forms such as League show how the attitudes of distributed design projects manifest themselves as values of play. A close reading of the phases in a match of League of Legends exposes one possible aesthetic framework for the consideration of eSports. Greg Costikyan's theory of uncertainty in play serves here as a backbone for the study of conventions, tension, strategy, and tactics in a team-based competitive videogame.

 

In Defense of Cutscenes

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Klevjer Rune
2002 Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings

The technique of cutscenes, as typically found in story-based action games, is placed within a wider discursive problematic, focusing on the role of pre-written narratives in general. Within a theoretical framework raised by Espen Aarseth, Markku Eskelinen and Marie-Laure Ryan, I discuss the relations between the ergodic and the representational, and between play and narration. I argue that any game event is also a representational event, a part of a typical and familiar symbolic action, in which cutscenes often play a crucial part. Through cutscenes, the ergodic effort acquires typical meanings from the generic worlds of popular culture.

 

Vertigo and verticality in Super Monkey Ball

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Johansson Troels Degn
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

The vertical dimension is crucial to Super Monkey Ball on all levels1, and invites us to meditate on vertigo and verticality, falling and failing in the construction of space and game-play in this game and in computer- games as such. In Super Monkey Ball, the vertical dimension should be mastered (landing on tiny islands with the ball glider), avoided (off golf courses, off race tracks, or off fight arenas elevated almost astronomically above the ground), although it may also invite to dangerous downslide acceleration or short-cuts that will give your baby monkey ball a lead in the race (descending tilting planes, falling from one level to another while staying on the course). But most notably, verticality is emphasized by falling and failing. Slipping off the race-track or shooting oneself off the golf course by mistake always means dropping into a spectacular free fall; losing the poor baby monkey in dark swamps, sparkling oceans, or void, endless desertlike spaces. Meditating on this aesthetization of falling and failing in Super Monkey Ball, this brief study outlines the peculiar allegorical, albeit funny and social character of this game, which seems just as important as the playing of the game as such.

 

The Rise and Fall of CTS: Kenneth Burke Identifying with the World of Warcraft

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Paul Christopher A. Philpott Jeffrey S.
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Guilds in online games often have a tumultuous life. In this essay we examine the rise and fall of the Cardboard Tube Samurai, a World of Warcraft guild, and explain three key phases in the guild’s existence using the ideas of Kenneth Burke. We argue that rhetorical theory can offer substantive insights into the events of online games, in this case focusing on the roles of identification, division, and consubstantiality in explaining how a guild can build for two years to their greatest triumph and fall apart two weeks later.

 

Game Prototyping – The Negotiation of an Idea

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Manker Jon
2011 DiGRA '11 - Proceedings of the 2011 DiGRA International Conference: Think Design Play

This is a study on the function of the prototyping process in game design. It is based on interviews with 27 game designers in leading positions at companies of various sizes. Prototyping is an important part of game design with which design ideas are explored. One central purpose of prototypes is to serve as a communicational tool. As such it is used to negotiate design problems. Rhetoric has a long tradition of analyzing communication and negotiation. In this paper a number of concepts from rhetoric, (topos, hodos, pistis, partes and to some extent synecdoche) are applied to game prototyping based on data collected as interviews. The results indicate that rhetoric concepts are useful when talking about the prototypes as they grasp the qualities of a prototyping in a good way. By applying the findings using negotiation theory to real practice the game prototyping process would likely become clearer without diminishing its creative qualities. As presented here negotiation theory could serve as a conceptual framework for game prototyping, which the design team can make use of in their design process.