Deployment mechanics in analog and digital strategic games: A historical and theoretical framework

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Fassone Riccardo Alonge Giaime Gualeni Stefano
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

This paper presents a historical and theoretical analysis of deployment in analog and digital military-themed strategic games. Deployment can be described as the phase in which players place their forces on the board or in the simulated world of a digital game, thus making them active. We argue that approaching a genre via a close reading of one of the genre’s constituting phases may help us discuss wider historical and theoretical issues regarding these games. More specifically, we use deployment metonymically to discuss the modifications in game design and gameplay that military-themed games underwent with their digitization. Furthermore, we discuss deployment within the framework of en-roling, that is the act of assuming a role in a specific context, including a simulated digital or analog ludic environment.

 

War Ethics: A Framework for Analyzing Videogames

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Zagal José P.
2017 DiGRA '17 - Proceedings of the 2017 DiGRA International Conference

While much has been done exploring how ethics and videogames can overlap in interesting ways, there is little work examining the philosophy of war and its relation to videogames. This seems unusual since videogames have a long tradition of engaging with war as its subject matter. We provide a framework for analyzing and articulating ethical issues and concerns in videogames that feature representations of war. This framework is based in traditional war ethics, more specifically the notion of the “just war” and considers the ethical concerns that include when engaging in a war is morally justified (jus ad bellum), how to wage a war ethically (jus in bello) and the ethical responsibilities of the aftermath of a war (jus post bellum). Our framework consists of five lenses consisting of the perspective offered to players, the scale and scope of war represented, the centrality of war to the game experience, the type of military that appear in the game, and the authenticity of a game’s representation. For each lens we also provide a list of questions that can be used to examine the subtleties and nuances of how war is represented in the game that hopefully lead to deeper and more insightful analyses. We conclude with thoughts on how this approach could be productive as well as outline some additional areas worth considering for future work.