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Search results for: http://www.digra.org/dl/db/09287.17255.pdf

- 1506 articles or papers

 

How Videogames Express Ideas

Weise Matthew
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

What are the exact aspects of the videogame medium, the precise features or combinations of features that lend themselves to expressing ideas and meaning? To chart this out, I begin with an American legal case that serves as a foundation for the basic issues involved and then move on to show how this relates to some of the broader attitudes the world of videogame discourse. Based on this, I break down the expressive strategies of videogames into three aspects—non-playable sequences, rule-based systems, and the relationship between the two—which I then illustrate with examples proving that videogames can indeed be an expressive medium.

 

Family Values: Ideology, Computer Games & Sims

Sicart Miguel
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

This article discusses some ideological issues related with the simulation of social systems in The Sims, proposing an interpretation of The Sims as an ideological game. This paper will focus on describing The Sims as a social simulator of a postcapitalist society: what The Sims proposes as an ideological game is a simulation of a specific set of values linked with a capitalist culture. Therefore, it can be considered not as a social simulator, but as a simulator of an ideology of modern capitalist societies. The last goal of this article is, then, to propose an analysis of the relation between rules, gameplay and ideology in certain computer game simulations.

 

This is not a game: play in cultural environments

Salen Katie Zimmerman Eric
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

Games have a particular set of relationships to the contexts in which they are played. Although games have clearly delineated boundaries in time and space that set them apart from the “real world”, some games are designed to blur that boundary. This essay, comprised of several selections from the authors’ book Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, investigates the complex ways in which games interact with their cultural environment. Focusing on these questions from a game design viewpoint, the essay begins by identifying key concepts related to these questions and ends with detailed design analyses of three games that play with the cultural environments in which the games take place.

 

WADs, Bots and Mods: Multiplayer FPS Games as Co-creative Media

Morris Sue
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

This paper will focus on the inter-relationships between media, technology and culture as demonstrated by the online multiplayer FPS scene, and will make explicit the degree to which game texts and associated technology facilitate culture and the formation of community, and how in turn such social structures inflect and determine the development of computer games, related Internet technologies and subsequent models for software development and distribution. Beyond the idea of “participatory media”, I argue that multiplayer FPS games have become “co-creative media”; neither developers nor players can be solely responsible for production of the final assemblage regarded as “the game”, it requires the input of both.

 

“This isn’t a computer game you know!”: revisiting the computer games/televised war analogy

Swalwell Melanie
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

During the Gulf War of 1991, the television coverage was frequently observed to be ‘just like a video game’. This analogy primarily derived from the specific, ‘bombs-eye’ perspective of camera-equipped weapons, approaching their targets. The troubling nature of this coverage was said to derive from the viewer’s sense of direct involvement: the argument was that viewers were able to marvel at the ‘high tech’ nature of the weapons, at a remove from the bloody reality on the ground. These criticisms of a vicarious aesthetic (dis)engagement were taken to also characterise the playing of computer games. At a time when we have once again been confronted by TV coverage of war in the Gulf, this paper revisits the TV war/computer games nexus, informed by research on players’ engagements with games. It argues that comparisons between televised war and games have little to offer to those concerned with theorising games, at least in their current form. Research with players of games is, however, able to provide insights useful for theorising the fraughtness of watching televised war. Considered in this way, the analogy can be revealing. Drawing on previous research on players’ aesthetic engagements with games, as well as a range of other sources, this paper re-considers televisual war spectatorship, in terms of the figures of proximity/distance; here and there; negotiations between different materialities and realities; and virtuality. It proposes these figures as bases around which a more productive dialogue on computer games and televisual war might be conducted.

 

Encounters with consumption during computer-mediated play: the development of digital games as marketing communication media

Molesworth Mike
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

This paper explores the use of digital games for marketing communications using two theoretical perspectives. Firstly, the external contexts in which video game play takes place and secondly, internal game processes that are likely to be of interest to marketers and game developers. Findings from exploratory focus groups support the use of brand placement in games. Players feel that it can increase realism and help support the costs of game development. However the repetitive nature of games may cause rapid message wear-out and players' frustrations with aspects of play may lead to negative evaluations of brands. Individuals may also use video games to explore the meaning and benefits of consumption and this raises the question of the degree to which game content supports or opposes existing consumer cultures. An agenda for further research is presented.

 

Participatory design and opposing interests in development of educational computer games

Magnussen Rikke Misfeldt Morten Buch Tasha
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

In this study we have followed a participatory design process in a class of children aged 11 and 12. The development team, a group of Danish schoolteachers, invited the children to participate in the design of a computer game for mathematics education. The objective of the participatory design process was to have the children create a game close to their own interests, experiences and fantasies, hereby insuring that they would find the game interesting enough to play it in their spare time away from school. Prior to the design workshops, the development team had a discussion with one of their classes, and decided on a game of exploration where the player travels through time and space, and the purpose of the design process described in this paper was to develop this idea further. During this process it became clear that the teachers’ ideas in some sense differed from the children’s. In the teachers’ original concept, the landscape would represent the history of mathematics (e.g. ancient Egypt, Greece, China), whereas the children’s ideas, diverse though they were, evolved around a fantasy setting and tourist experiences. In this project there arose a conflict between a pedagogical goal and an attempt to understand the end-users world through research.

 

Space, Agency, Meaning and Drama in Navigable Real-Time Virtual Environments

Roudavski Stanislav Penz François
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

Does our preoccupation with navigable space distract us from the expressive potential of interactive media? Can our understanding of spatial context in virtual environments (VEs) be expanded to incorporate social reasoning and behavior? Drawing on the theoretical foundations and practice of Architecture, this paper considers the relationship between person and environment in the real world and in navigable real-time three-dimensional digital worlds. The first part discusses the cyclical and bi-directional nature of the person _ environment relationship with interactive involvement as the basis for meaning construction and behavior guidance. The second part considers the differences brought in by the representative nature of computer-based interactive three-dimensional (3D) worlds. The examples for discussion are derived from the rich field of videogames. This is followed by an overview of the principal components of Shenmue II, a role-playing game, and a case-study examination of one interactive sequence from it. The analysis shows that navigable space always carries meaning, reiterates that interactivity is an integral part of spatial experiences and illustrates how construction of mental images is a product of mediation. When VEs are designed to utilize rich agency and expressive mediation devices, they potently overstep the systematic rule-based constraints of their design and become meaningful and engaging as situations that have real-world roots and dramatically significant consequences.

 

Balance Boards and Dance Pads: The Impact of Innovation on Gendered Access to Gaming [Abstract]

Harvey Alison
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

This paper considers the impact of innovations in game interfaces, locations, and controllers in considerations of access to gaming for female and male players. The role of gender in video game culture has been considered from the perspectives of production, culture, marketing, content, mechanics, and preferences, and several scholars have argued that we need to understand gendered preferences and play through assemblages and networks of these elements [1, 2, 3]. Access to games is argued in this paper to be a key dimension of these assemblages, as it is the factor that will determine the experiences that in turn shape play preferences that lead to particular game genre choices. This paper considers innovations in gaming, including mini-games in virtual communities and groundbreaking controllers like Dance Dance Revolution dance pads, Wii- motes, nunchucks, balance boards, rock game guitars, drums, and microphones. These innovations mark a move towards a more diverse terrain of gaming that may challenge understandings of video game play as hypermasculine.

 

MMOGs and the Ecology of Fiction: Understanding LOTRO as Transmedial World [Abstract]

Klastrup Lisbeth Tosca Susana
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

The aim of this paper is to examine the (medium-related) particular strengths and weaknesses of computer games that are part of a wider ecology of fictions previously described by us as transmedial worlds.