Digital Library Keyword Archives

Video Games

- 55 articles or papers

 

Assassin’s Creed III and the Aesthetics of Disappointment

Church Jonathan Klein Michael
2014 DiGRA '13 - Proceedings of the 2013 DiGRA International Conference: DeFragging Game Studies

Using a case example of the cycle of prerelease, release, and post-release commentary, criticism and reviews of Assassin’s Creed III from June 2012-January 2013, this paper examines how video game players produce a “culture of history” about the game they play through their commitment to commentary and critique mainly found in user reviews in gaming enthusiast press websites. This paper examines how an aesthetic of disappointment generates a comparative sense of gamers’ cultural present by framing aspects that should have been improved upon from the series’ past as well as in terms of expectations for the future of gaming. This paper concludes by suggesting that part of the pleasure of contemporary gaming for many self-identified “core” gamers is being able to both play games and aesthetically discuss the game being played as part of a culture of history with other gamers, a form of paidiaic play for “gaming capital”.

 

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

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.

 

Video Games: A Significant Cognitive Artifact of Contemporary Youth Culture

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

Video games are not just an important cultural artifact of youth culture but have considerable cognitive worth. Centered within an information processing theory and mediating processes’ framework, the empirical qualitative study investigated, via stimulated recall methods, the thinking skills and strategies of five teenagers while playing an action-adventure video game. Sixteen types and 600 instances of cognitive skills and 11 types and 155 instances of cognitive strategies were identified. The thinking skills included high engagement with school valued cognitive skills, such as metacognition, and deduction and induction strategies. The findings support the informal educative value of playing recreation video games and their inclusion in schools.

 

Canadian Content in Video Games

Paul Leonard J.
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

This paper investigates the culture being reflected in video games produced in Canada, from the perspective of Canada being one of the world's leading producers of video games. It examines the how Canadian culture is represented in current new media artistic output against the culture, or lack of culture, being represented in video games currently being produced. With the shift of television viewers away from culture-regulated television and onto "culture neutral" video games, is our culture being eroded or expanding to fill a new culture shared with others across borders in virtual space? Canada is one of the fastest-growing countries in broadband usage, so do our rapidly expanding virtual online gaming cultures share our real-world culture? Should we attempt to find our "national identity" in video games, or does culture travel differently through interactive media? In short, this paper a preliminary examination of the impact of the transmission and direction of our national culture through the video games we produce and consume as a cultural product.

 

Women just want to have fun – a study of adult female players of digital games

Kerr Aphra
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

In the past twenty-five years, the production of digital games has become a global media industry stretching from Japan, to the UK, France and the US. Despite this growth playing digital games, particularly computer games, is still seen by many as a boy’s pastime and part of boy’s bedroom culture. While these perceptions may serve to exclude, this paper set out to explore the experiences of women who game despite these perceptions. This paper addresses the topic of gender and games from two perspectives: the producer’s and the consumer’s. The first part of the paper explores how Sony represented the PS2 in advertisements in Ireland and how adult female game players interpreted these representations. The second part goes on to chart the gaming biographies of these women and how this leisure activity is incorporated into their adult everyday life. It also discuses their views about the gendered nature of game culture, public game spaces and game content; and how these influence their enjoyment of game playing and their views of themselves as women. These research findings are based on semi-structured interviews with two marketing professionals and ten female game players aged 18 and over. The paper concludes that the construction of both gender and digital games are highly contested and even when access is difficult, and representations in the media, in console design and in games are strongly masculine these interviewees were able to contest and appropriate the technology for their own means. Indeed ‘social networks’ were important in relation to their recruitment into, and sustained playing of, digital games. At the same time, the paper found that these interviewees were largely ‘invisible’ to the wider gaming community and producers, an issue raised by Bryce and Rutter (2002:244) in an earlier paper, which has important implications for the development of the games industry.

 

Using an RFID game to phenomenologically test a theoretical systemic model for describing ambient games

Eyles Mark Eglin Roger
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Imagine what Brian Eno’s genre defining 1978 album Music for Airports (Eno, 1978) would be if it were a game. The game might produce a mood in an environment; the player able to dip in and out of play, which could be facilitated by not having to carry gaming devices, allowing periods of disengagement from the game. The player’s everyday actions would generate data to move the game forward, causing game events. However, it should also be possible for the player to change their behaviour in order to participate more actively in the game, varying their involvement with the game from intense engagement to forgetting they are even playing. The proposed game would span both real and virtual worlds, with player actions in the real world affecting events in the virtual world. We have named this imagined game genre ‘ambient games’ (M. Eyles & Eglin, 2007a). Ambient games may be considered a type of pervasive game (‘a radically new game form that extends gaming experiences out into the physical world’ (Waern, 2006)) in which the game is embedded in the environment and the player may not need to carry digital equipment around with them and, crucially, can continue to actively play while ignoring the game. This paper proposes a systemic domain (Eglin, Eyles, & Dansey, 2007) theoretical model for understanding the underlying properties of ambient games, comparing and contrasting them with computer and video games. The theoretical models of both computer and video games and ambient games are used to generate player activity gameflow diagrams, in which the progress a player makes through the domains in the systemic models while playing a game are clearly shown. A game design research methodology (M. Eyles, Eglin, R., 2008) is used to investigate the ambient game systemic domain model and player activity gameflows. Ambient games, using RFID technology and pedometers, allow players to experience a game in which they are able to vary their involvement while engaged in other everyday activities. In order to discover the lived experience of players of ambient games existential phenomenological methods and in particular template analysis (King, 2008) are used. Studies and observations are described in which ambient games are used within the overarching game design research methodological framework.

 

Researching player experiences through the use of different qualitative methods

Ribbens Wannes Poels Yorick
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Since gameplay is only realized when the player and game interact, studying player experiences is complicated. Most research designs often emphasise either the structure of the game or the player in isolation of the game itself. In this study an attempt was made to test three different qualitative methods to study playing styles and by extension player experiences, while trying to take into account both the player and the game. An analysis scheme was developed to serve as a framework within the three methods and to direct respondents’ attention to the interaction with the game. 42 university students (casual and hardcore gamers) participated in the study during three months after which they wrote a paper on their playing style. During the first three weeks respondents had to fill in a diary every time they had played the videogame. Four weeks later, respondents participated in the video commentary model (VCM). In a game experience lab, a researcher observed the respondent playing the game he had played during the diary study. Afterwards, the researcher interviewed the player on different aspects of his playing style, with the aid of the gameplay session video. Finally, respondents that played the same game participated in a focus group interview (FGI), discussing the topics that stemmed from the diary and the video commentary model. Based on theoretical arguments and participants’ evaluation of the methods, we contend that all three methods are suitable to study player experiences. However, methodological triangulation provides the researcher with more accurate data, allowing to study gamers both in context (diary), through gameplay activities (VCM) and by interaction with other players (FGI).

 

Through the Looking Glass: Weavings between the Magic Circle and Immersive Processes in Video Games

Ferreira Emmanoel Falcão Thiago
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

This paper proposes a critical discussion about the magic circle concept, through a debate with prior works on the issue, as those elaborated by Johan Huizinga and Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman, as well as with cognitive psychology studies regarding attention. We shall argue that the magic circle, instead of separating fiction and reality, would work as a cognitive mediation structure with graded “boundaries”, which existence occurs in diverse forms, depending on variables like player immersion and attention. Thus, these boundaries get defined and “solid” as the immersive process is developed and one reality seems to change into another: as the player “gets into the looking glass”.

 

Using microgenetic methods to investigate problem solving in video games

Anderson Alice Brunner Cornelia Culp Katie McMillan Diamond James Lewis Ashley Martin Wendy
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

As formative research for the development of a suite of middle school life science video games, we are adapting microgenetic research methods [15] that use repeated, small-scale task-based sessions with participants to document how reasoning and understanding can develop and change in short periods of time. In this study, we are working with students between the ages of 9 and 12, examining the development of their strategic thinking as they play commercial games that focus on problem solving tasks (World of Goo, Auditorium, Crayon Physics, Portal). The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the methods we are using and to discuss how they may help to illuminate how game mechanics, narrative context and instructional design can be utilized to create developmentally appropriate games.

 

A Method For Discovering Values in Digital Games

Flanagan Mary Belman Jonathan Nissenbaum Helen Diamond Jim
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

In this paper, our research team demonstrates how groups of game designers can open the discussion on human principles in game design by using a tool we call “Values Cards.” Drawing on prior play experiences, participants identify examples of games or game segments that express the value represented on one of the values cards. This sparks deep analysis of how values are expressed through particular game mechanics and representational elements. The analysis can be posted to a collective wiki and shared amongst other designers who are interested in examining game mechanics and representational elements from a values perspective. These exercises can be considered first steps in a broader attempt to produce and implement a systematic methodology to better integrate human principles into the design process.