Digital Library Publication Archives

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

- 1506 articles or papers

 

Genre in Genre: The Role of Music in Music Games

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

The first academic researchers of music and dance games focused their primary attentions on ethnographic observations of game play, how the shift from arcade to console play affects game play strategies, defining embodied aesthetics, and analyzing the rise of a competitive play circuit in Dance Dance Revolution fan culture [Chan; Demers, 2006; Smith, 2004; Behrenshausen, 2007]. The Dance Dance Revolution franchise has attracted the attention of both academic researchers and members of the education and medical establishments, who wish to harness the power of exergaming in physical education classes to combat rising levels of childhood obesity. Less attention has been by academic researchers to the economics of the production of these games or the ways that the management of track lists, genres, and artists in music games affects gamers’ opinions of these titles and their evaluation of the relationship between a game’s core mechanics and in-game outcomes. This paper analyzes the ways that game publishers and developers create and license the music for games such as Flow: Urban Dance Uprising, Band Mashups, the Guitar Hero, Rock Band and Dance Dance Revolution franchises, and the forthcoming titles Scratch and DJ Hero. Critics’ and gamers’ complaints about the use of “soundalikes” to replace the master recordings by original artists along with recent attempts from Warner Music to push for increased licensing fees point to ongoing controversies over in-game music and the industrial relationships between the gaming industry, the recording industry, and performance rights organizations such as ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. This paper also examines how particular genres of music create difficulties for game design, constructing the relationship between on-screen content, the player, and game peripherals, and for players working to make sense of the relationship between their musical and gaming tastes. Examples I discuss include blog reactions to the introduction of country music as downloadable content in Rock Band, the lukewarm reception given THQ’s Band Mashups, fan and critical ruminations over the potential success or failure of the turntable peripheral in Scratch and DJ Hero, and the difficulties of mapping hip hop into the dance game in Flow! Urban Dance Uprising. Reactions to the introduction of country music in Rock Band ran the gamut, with many bloggers and online fans expressing frustration that the visual culture of the game and its embrace of rock culture militated against the inclusion of country music. Likewise, many gamers and critics were bewildered by Band Mashups, a game that simulated a battle of the bands and a battle of musical genres. Even the deceptively simple Dance Dance Revolution franchise illustrates the difficulty of managing the track list for each title. The need for genre diversity and for a range of songs with varying numbers of beats per minute to satisfy inexperienced, intermediate, and advanced players illustrates the need for designers to have at least an elementary knowledge of musicology and/or musical form. Perhaps the most interesting example of a music game’s failure is Flow! Urban Dance Uprising. This game, developed by Artificial Mind and Movement and published by Ubisoft, illustrates the difficulty of mapping hip hop onto a DDR style game. The biggest problem with Flow wasn’t the paucity of A-list artists and a track list that privileged lesser known songs that were hard to groove to, but the ways that game designers made few significant modifications to the core mechanic of the dancing game. In Flow, it is a stretch to think that the diegetic operator acts of the player bear any “realistic” relationship to the “machinic embodiments” of the onscreen avatar’s breakdancing moves [Galloway, 2006]. Players seem willing to suspend disbelief that the scrolling arrows in DDR match up exactly to the movements of the player on the pad and the movements of the onscreen avatar, but the complicated breakdancing moves performed by the avatar in Flow substantively challenge the relationship of action and outcome that Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman [2004] posit as critical to designing meaningful play.

 

The Order of Play: Seeing, Teaching, and Learning Meaning in Video Games

Hung Aaron Chia-Yuan
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

This paper explores the locally-produced meaning-making practices of video game players, taking the position that the contingent properties of situated actions play a significant role in the construction of meaning. The participants of this study are Asian adolescents from China, currently studying in New York City, who play video games after school. There are four participants in the following example: Jason, Andrew, Kevin, and Li. As Li was a novice player to the game, her participation yielded interesting insights on the underlying assumptions that both expert and novice players possessed. In particular, it reveals that the expert players had their own definition of proper play that they needed the novice to understand, and the initial failure to communicate with the novice showed that the experts’ interpretation differed from that of the novice. The study is guided by ethnomethodology, an approach that has been applied to many studies involving human-machine interactions, and has been increasingly important in helping us understand how people make sense of environments that involve different interfaces and equipment.The findings show that, even when their interpretations of the action diverge from the game designers’ intentions, these interpretations continue to make sense within the context of their interaction. The findings also highlight the importance of describing these meaning-making practices as they emerge in situated time, as they demonstrate how players are able to comprehend one another in an inherently ambiguous environment. It demonstrates how players’ actions are shaped by their social relationships and are continually refined and clarified by the ongoing deliberation with other players. These findings can help future educational researchers better understand the process of learning in virtual environments, the role of social interaction during play, and can potentially improve our approach towards designing better games for education.

 

Contextually-Ambiguous Pervasive Games: An Exploratory Study

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

In this paper a player-centric view is taken to illustrate game rules in terms of definition and validation. Games with externally-defined but internally-validated rules are given the term contextually-ambiguous games, and it is suggested that a contemporary definition of pervasiveness in games should accommodate contextual ambiguity. Several pervasive games have displayed elements of this ambiguity, but examples of games which feature this as a core gameplay mechanism are rare. Therefore, four such games are implemented in a case study in order to explore the potential of contextually-ambiguous games. Results are tentative, but offer some insight into potentially popular features and target audiences of such games.

 

Exploring Game Aesthetics

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

This paper explores an approach to understanding player experience and immersion through aesthetic theory. It should be noted that the paper limits itself to a consideration of singleplayer, avatarbased games with a narrative element. This paper will argue that the experience of immersion is intrinsically tied in with the body and its spatiotemporal positioning within a fictional or constructed space. Seeing immersion from the point of view of the body makes it possible to see a dichotomous relationship between textbased and audiovisual media. When a reader is immersed in fiction, the 'transportation' from one space to another is purely cognitive the readers body is still and the construction of the fictional world takes place in the readers mind. For a player of games to experience immersion, various technologies exist that act directly upon the player's perceptive systems in order to create an experience.

 

Emulation as a strategy for the preservation of games: the KEEP project

Pinchbeck Dan Anderson David Delve Janet Ciuffreda Antonio Otemu Getaneh Lange Andreas
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Game preservation is a critical issue for game studies. Access to historic materials forms a vital core to research and this field is no different. However, there are serious challenges to overcome for preservationists in terms of developing a strategic and inclusion programme to retain access to obsolete games. Emulation, as a strategy already applied by major developers and the gaming community, is introduced and the KEEP project, designed to create an open emulation access platform is described.

 

A Platform-Independent Model for Videogame Gameplay Specification

Montero-Reyno Emanuel Carsí-Cubel José Á.
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Videogames require a more precise specification language to define and communicate gameplay than rules written in natural language. The proposed platform-independent model for videogame gameplay specification offers game designers a precise model to describe, analyze and communicate gameplay from early stages of development. The social context diagram defines how many players and teams interact with the game system. The structure diagram defines the game elements, attributes and events that compose the game system. And the rule set defines the game system behavior, implicitly specifying gameplay through precisely defined declarative rules.

 

DATAPLAY: Mapping Game Mechanics to Traditional Data Visualization

Macklin Colleen Wargaski Julia Edwards Michael Li Kan Yang
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

In William Playfair's 1786 book, The Commercial and Political Atlas, he states that information, “imperfectly acquired, is generally as imperfectly retained.” [6] Playfair is commenting on the failure of tables to represent comparative data in way that was useful to the reader. Since Playfair, many different forms of media have arisen beyond ink and paper. Yet printed charts (or their digital representations) remain, by far, the most commonly used tools of data visualization. Their evolution over many centuries has allowed them to achieve a degree of sophistication that time-based and interactive representations have yet to achieve. Is the supremacy of printed (or print-like) data visualization to remain unchallenged? Would it even need to be? The authors contend that new approaches may be possible, and even necessary, but would require tapping into a different way of learning that was not strictly about managing the short term visual and auditory memory of the readers [3]. This learning would involve less the experience of reading and more that of direct experience through play and games. Jesper Juul contends that all games are learning systems [2]. That is, to play a game and become good at it, the player must learn the necessary skills and strategies to overcome their opposition. If the goal of data visualization is educational, it may be possible to use specific types of games as ways of representing specific types of data. It may be possible for a player to learn the system of the game and the system of the information together. The authors have built three game prototypes that illustrate the ways in which different forms of data can be represented in the form of digital games. The first prototype, Kimono Colors, is based on data from a cross-referenced table that describes the types of ingredients used to create traditional Japanese dyes in the production of kimonos. The core mechanic [4] of the game has the player “fishing” for colors using one of several dyes the player has collected. By fishing for these colors, players learn the relationships between materials and the manufacture of dye. The second prototype, Mannahatta: The Game, asks players literally to walk around Manhattan and connect the living and non-living elements of a directed graph representing the ecology of the island 400 years ago. Played over an iPhone, users place themselves in the middle of the dataset they are piecing back together. The third prototype, Trees of Trade, uses data from two directed graphs of relationships, ecological and commercial, in a Brazilian Atlantic rain-forest ecosystem. The game involves the players re-establishing the trophic levels of the forest by navigating through the relationships and inserting the missing species on an idealized map. Through play, the user will better understand the elements of a system that is typically illustrated in a static, two dimensional directed graph illustration. Two questions stem from these prototypes: can data create play and can play enlighten data? To answer the first question affirmatively, we need to find evidence that a system created by data has the ability to produce “choice molecules” [4]. That is, in the form of a game, does the structure of data allow the player to make interesting choices about how to proceed as he or she navigates and elaborates the data? If so, then the data in question can create play, which in turn can drive the development of a full-fledged game. As for the second question, if the first answer holds, then the player is, in the course of a game, playing with the data. If the choices made available to a player are established in such a way that the player “levels up” through the information, then the achievement of the games goals will be coincident with the understanding of the data itself. By actively manipulating and using the data to win the game, the player will need to understand the facts and relationships inherent in the data itself, thus producing the desired educational outcome and a greater sensitivity to the systems that data represents.

 

Persuasive design of a mobile energy conservation game with direct feedback and social cues

Bang Magnus Svahn Mattias Gustafsson Anton
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Pervasive gaming has the potential of transforming the home into a persuasive environment in which the user can learn about appliances and their electricity consumption. Power Explorer is a mobile game with a special sensing approach that provides real-time electricity measurements and feedback when the user switches on and off devices in the home. The game was developed based on persuasive principles to provide an engaging means to learn about energy with positive and negative feedback and social feedback from peers on real energy actions in the home. We present the design and rationale of this game and discuss how pervasive games can be viewed from a persuasive and learning point of view.

 

Beyond Adversarial: The Case for Game AI as Storytelling

Roberts David L. Riedl Mark O. Isbell Charles L.
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

As a field, artificial intelligence (AI) has been applied to games for more than 50 years, beginning with traditional two-player adversarial games like tic-tac-toe and chess and extending to modern strategy games, first-person shooters, and social simulations. AI practitionershave become adept at designing algorithms that enable computers to play games at or beyond human levels in many cases. In this paper, we argue that the traditional goal of AI in games—to win the game—is not the only, nor the most interesting goal. An alternative goal for game AI is to make the human player’s play experience “better.”AI systems in games should reason about how to deliver the best possible experience within the context of the game. The key insight of this paper is that approaching AI reasoning for games as storytelling reasoning makes this goal much more attainable. We present an overview of traditional game AI techniques as well as a few more recentAI storytelling techniques. We also provide afoundation for describing and reasoning about games as stories, citing a number of examples. We conclude by discussingthe implications forfuture directions.

 

Experiential Narrative in Game Environments

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

This paper explores the contentious notion of experiential narrative and proposes the first step in a narrative framework for game environment. It argues for a shift in emphasis from story-telling, the dominant mode of narrative in literature and cinema, to story generation. To this effect the paper forwards a perspective on experiential narrative that is grounded in the specific qualities of the game. This avoids the over-generalization that tends to accompany discussions of experiential narrative while retaining the cognitive dimension in play.