Gaming Mind, Gaming Body: The Mind/Body Split For a New Era


Young Bryan-Mitchell
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

Drawing on the phenomenologically inspired works of drew Leder and Randy Martin, this paper examines the ways in which playing a First-Person Shooter first creates a secondary body for the player and then, because of the first-person perspective, proceeds to erase that body from the player’s consciousness. The paper explores the notion of and the ways in which First-Person Shooters complicate our conception of embodiment. Offering an ethnographically-influenced semiotic analysis of playing a FPS, the paper begins by declaring that we are typically not aware of our bodies and that playing a FPS gives us another body on which to concentrate causing an erasure of the physical body. It is then asserted that the virtual body is also rendered invisible due to the perspective and speed of the game resulting in a double erasure of the body leaving behind only the mind.

 

Designing Games to Effect Social Change


Swain Chris
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

Serious games, persuasive games, news games – these are all terms used for games which let players gain an experiential understanding of real world issues through play. Many in this growing class of games deal with social causes; recent examples include Peacemaker, about solving Middle East peace, The Redistricting Game, about congressional redistricting and redistricting reform, and the online game series published by the New York Times that includes Food Import Folly (which is about the FDA limited inspection policy on U.S. food imports). The field has a number of good examples that let users learn about social issues, however, to date, the field is short on examples of games that achieve measurable results in the real world. This paper addresses issues of design, theory, and activism pertaining to games about social causes. The author is an experienced designer and scholar who deals with all three of these issues in his work. Here is an outline of best practices for designing games to affect social change. Each is discussed in detail below: 1. Define intended outcomes 2. Integrate subject matter experts 3. Partner with like-minded organizations 4. Build sustainable community 5. Embrace “wicked problems” 6. Maintain journalistic integrity 7. Measure transference of knowledge 8. Make it fun

 

The place of mobile gaming: one history in locating mobility in the Asia-Pacific region


Hjorth Larissa
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

In media cultures of late, the synergy between two global dominant industries – mobile communication and gaming – has attracted much attention and stargazing. As part of burgeoning global media cultures, gaming and mobile media are divergent in their adaptation at the level of the local. In some locations where broadband infrastructure is strong and collectivity is emphasized (such as South Korea), online multiplayer games prevail. In locations where convergent mobile technologies govern such as Japan, mobile gaming platforms dominate. In order to address the uneven adoption and definitions of mobile gaming – that range from encompassing casual mobile games to pervasive (location aware) gaming – this paper will attempt to sketch how we can think about mobility, and mobilism, in a period marked by divergent forms of regionalism and localization. Drawing from cultural studies, anthropological and sociological accounts of mobility and emerging consumer practices in the region, this paper seeks to move beyond current conflations and futurism surrounding convergent mobile gaming.

 

The Cultural Economy of Ludic Superflatness


Chan Dean
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

This paper examines the situated play aesthetics of Japanese digital games with reference to what Takashi Murakami calls Japan’s superflat visual culture. According to Murakami, superflat visuality is born out of imbricated cultural, political, and historical contexts concerning the relationships between high art and subculture, between Japan and the United States, between history and contemporaneity. In this paper, I examine these dialectical tensions and use superflatness as a hermeneutical tool for examining associated aesthetic forms and ludic properties that are recurrent in Japanese games culture. Key videogames under discussion include We Love Katamari, WarioWare: Mega Microgame$ and Viewtiful Joe. My conception of ludic superflatness acts as an interpretive cue for analysing Japanese digital cultural production in context. In particular, I focus on how ludic superflatness might be regarded as a complex agentive – and polemical – expression of culturally hybrid national identity within the contexts of contemporary digitalised globalisation.

 

Critical Potential on the Brink of the Magic Circle


Poremba Cindy
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

This paper explores the problem space of forbidden games: games not only on the border of games and reality, but explicitly referencing the double-coded nature of that boundary—in other words, games that use their status as “only a game” as a strategic gesture. It asks three key questions: what does it mean to be a forbidden or “brink” game, what is the function of these works, and, perhaps most importantly, to what extent do they have critical potential. To answer these questions, a methodological approach is drawn from functional systems theory, as read primarily through the work of Niklas Luhmann. Through this approach, I demonstrate the importance of these games in relation to the separation of games and reality, and suggest the strength of such works lies in their ability to both observe and critique everyday life.

 

Girls and Gaming: Gender Research, “Progress” and the Death of Interpretation


Jenson Jennifer de Castell Suzanne
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

This paper is about the persistent absence of critical interpretation in work focused on gender and gameplay. Since its beginnings, research (and resulting practice) in this area has moved little if at all from the early work in the path-breaking Cassells and Jenkins volume dedicated to girls and gaming. In the currently very well-regarded and oft-cited volume on “girl-friendly” game design, Sheri Graner-Ray re-instates the gamut of gender stereotypes by now so familiar as to have become “canonical” for the field. In this paper we illustrate some theoretical, research, and practice dilemmas, and, drawing upon sophisticated interpretive work in gender studies and on socio-cultural approaches to research, we propose some tactics for rethinking the very terms and conditions of this by now clearly resilient orthodoxy about “what girls like best,” arguing that until we are able to be surprised by its findings, we can be fairly confident that games studies research into gender accomplishes little beyond re-instating and further legitimating inequality of access, condition and opportunity. This is no game: no fun, and no fair.

 

The State of the Art: Western Modes of Videogame Production


Wade Alex
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

This paper intends to offer some preliminary insights into the milieu that produce the world of videogame play. Beginning with an historical overview of the industry from it’s inception as a major entertainment medium, I will examine the means by which production of videogames has been set-up and sustained and it’s subsequent successes and failures. From here, I will map these instances onto culturally relevant theoretical models. By using empirical data from interviews with developers, programmers, artists and producers throughout the West, I will investigate the current state of the art in the industry and analyse the relationships, differences and similarities that contemporary videogame production has with its antecedents. Finally, I will offer some thoughts on the future of videogame production and the increasing opportunities of expansion it offers to sociological exploration of situated – and displaced – play.

 

“I am not a fan, I just play a lot” – If Power Gamers Aren’t Fans, Who Are?


Wirman Hanna
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

The goal of this paper is to discuss one of the well-known and widely accepted characteristics of fandom, textual productivity, in relation to the productive practices surrounding computer games. The paper will show that the social and cultural aspects of computer game playing as well as games’ structural and game-mechanical support for various forms of player participation give the traditional fan theories a slip. The paper aims to illustrate that it is not trouble-free to read certain players as fans just because their actions at first sight correspond to what we have usually considered as fandom. In addition, it suggests that we should look for new manifestations of fandom among players. The issues will be considered in part of the artificial division between the so-called (power/hardcore/pro) gamers and game fans. Examples are drawn specially from the productive practices within and beyond the games World of Warcraft and The Sims 2.

 

Real-Time Sweetspot: The Multiple Meanings of Game Company Playtests


Niedenthal Simon
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

Game design, like gameplay, is situated. Though we find ourselves in a period of global growth and consolidation in the games industry, marked by broad changes in how design work is organized, our understanding of game design as it is currently practiced needs to be rooted in local contexts of production. One useful way to explore the situated-ness of game development is by tracing the implementation of playtesting of prototypes in game companies. The implementation of playtesting serves as an acknowledgement of the complexity of designing for the emergent properties of games, and also reveals attitudes towards the player. This case study of playtesting a real-time strategy (RTS) game under development at a Swedish game company is based upon observations of test sessions and interviews with employees from March 2006-February 2007. Specifically, this study will trace the various outcomes of a single game-balancing (“Sweetspot”) playtest conducted in March of 2006. This test serves as a locus of playtest meaning, and demonstrates that playtesting at the company is used to achieving clarity in the game design process, to support an evolutionary design methodology, and as a means of communicating the state of the game to outside actors. In short, playtesting has meaning in several contexts, both within and beyond the immediate design task at hand. Whether the results of a playtest session take the form of a numerical figure, a written report, or a fast scrawl in the lead designer’s notebook, they need to be interpreted carefully in the light of their complex nature.

 

Play with me: Exploring the autobiographical through digital games


Poremba Cindy
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

This paper uses two game-based artworks by Mary Flanagan (primarily [domestic] and to a lesser extent [rootings]), to examine autobiography in the form of digital games. Specifically, it explores the ways in which these games construct/represent subjectivity, how they negotiate agency (both within the work and within the realm of cultural production), and how the game form structures selfnarrative. This is framed in relation to theoretical work from both autobiography and game studies.