Gaming DOTA Players: Iterative Platform Design and Capture

From Technological Revolution to Cultural Obsolescence. NEC’s PC Engine between American erasure and French edification

Cities appropriate Pokémon GO: remix models for local needs

In Situ: Researching corporate diversity initiatives with game developers

This paper explicates the design and development of a feminist action research pilot that studied and supported the launch of a diversity initiative within a major game development studio. Drawing on methods from design research including rapid ethnography and model making, we describe the stages our pilot study followed, including key models and high-level findings, as well as outline the ways in which we collaborated with our research partner in this initial stage. Use of these methods helped us build an integrated model that can be used as a strategic tool to direct the focus of ongoing work by our partner and other developers. By sharing our process, we hope to illustrate one way that researchers might engage design research methods in service of equity work of this nature in partnership with the game industry.

On the de-familiarizing and re-ontologizing effects of glitches and glitch-alikes

Interactive digital experiences are understood as disclosing possibilities of being that can extend beyond the actual. The ways in which those experiences prompt their audiences to interactively apply and repurpose their cognitive faculties are constrained by the technical possibilities of the digital medium. This entails that the transformative activities invited and upheld by the computer depend on the functional affordances of digital technology as well as on the specific ways in which it errs and malfunctions. In this paper, I discuss non-catastrophic computer malfunctions (i.e. glitches) as potentially introducing aspects of surprise, ambiguity, and humor in the interactive experience of a virtual world. Computer glitches can also be intentionally designed to be a constitutive part of a virtual world and triggered deliberately; these types of glitches are used as expressive tools that can stimulate critical thought and make us suspicious of the stability and the validity of our world-views.

Adapting the Empty Orchestra: the Performance of Play in Karaoke

Karaoke is a unique social game of performance play that is easily adapted into existing play forms and play communities. In this paper, we examine how karaoke is encountered by players, how the game is structured, and how karaoke is adapted by play communities by evaluating the ludic elements of karaoke and the playful methods players use to engage with the game, ending with critical examples of playful adaptations. The success of the informal play experience of karaoke can inform the design of more intentional social play. We argue that karaoke is so adaptable because of its ubiquitousness, its relative lack of explicit rules, the flexibility of is implicit rules, the personal nature of its goals, and the variability of its primary mode of play. This creates a loose structure that can take in other structures, be incorporated by them, or even completely consumed by them, yet remain recognizable.

On the Local Value of Game Jam Games: Beyond Learning from the Process

The Gamification of Tactical Thinking; Linking Gamification with Spatial Concepts

Meaningful Transformation: Intra-activity and Video Games

Sites of Play: Locating Gameplace in Red Dead Redemption 2

In Video Game Spaces (2009), Michael Nitsche proposes three indicators of ‘placeness’ in video games: identity, self-motivated and self-organised action, and traces of memory (191-201). We read this notion of placeness as closely aligned to, or overlapping with, the understandings of place and site articulated in theatre and performance research as site-specific performance. Here, we articulate the ideas (and analyse the experiences) of placeness and sitedness in Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) through an analytical conversation between performance studies and games design research with a human-computer interaction bias. Through a close-reading of gameplay experiences (Bizzocchi and Tanenbaum, 2011), we individually experienced over 30 hours of RDR2 gameplay while taking notes, recording, and capturing screenshots. During our individual analyses, we met periodically to compare notes, discuss notable game moments and share analytical insights. At this intersection of game research and performance research, we ask to what extent the theoretical articulations of aesthetic/affective experience in physical, corporeal and material spaces can develop – and further nuance – our understanding of how place is experienced (and thus designed) in contemporary videogames. In doing so, we propose the term gameplace as a means of articulating what this article will define as the affective relationship between place, experience and play.