(Un)Playful player responses to exclusive video game publishing

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Piittinen Sari
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

This paper analyses playful and serious player responses to Remedy Entertainment’s announcement to publish their new game Control’s PC version exclusively in the Epic Games Store. Through discourse analysis of player tweets, it produces new understanding about player expectations and responses prior to a game’s release and how players express their criticism in (un)playful ways. The findings show that through creative use of humour and complaints players retake power from game companies and construct meanings in a way that is only understandable to fellow players. They discursively and morally take an expert stance while underlining the incompetence of the company.

 

Platforms in the Cloud: On the Messy Ephemerality of Platforms

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O'Donnell Casey
2016 DiGRA/FDG '16 - Abstract Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG

 

Transforming Game Narrative through Social Media: Studying the Mass Effect Universe of Twitter

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Ryan William Gilson Zach
2014 DiGRA '13 - Proceedings of the 2013 DiGRA International Conference: DeFragging Game Studies

This paper explores the world of social media as a tool for interactive narrative in video games. From the perspective of fan fiction, this paper looks at ways games can be transformed through Twitter as a narrative tool. We perform a textual analysis on selected characters’ Twitter accounts drawn from the Mass Effect series. We show a number of findings having to do with how authors balance their character’s identities, Twitter as a narrative tool despite its unique constraints, the mutability of narrative time in this medium, and the ways authors create and navigate impossible situations created because of the conflict between their authorial intent and what occurs in the games. We argue this participatory and interactive form of narrative is a factor game designers must acknowledge and understand as social media continues to evolve and the boundary between consumer and producer deteriorates.