Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture
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Exploring the Creative Potential of Values Conscious Game Design: Students’ Experiences with the VAP Curriculum
No full textValues at Play is a research project investigating how social, moral, and political values can inform the design of digital games. For example, how can designers create games that affirm, explore, and/or interrogate values like peace, justice, patriotism, and tolerance. One project activity has been the development of a curriculum introducing university students to values conscious design. We use this term to describe an approach wherein designers consider the social, political, and moral resonances of design features in a systematic way. The curriculum has been used and evaluated in leading American game design programs. Here, we discuss the results of a focus group study and analysis of student design documents. Students experienced significant challenges applying values conscious design methods. However, they often overcame these challenges using either strategies provided by the curriculum or strategies of their own devising. These strategies can serve as models for designers interested in values conscious design. Overall, students’ work was impressively innovative and reactions to the curriculum were enthusiastic
Indoor Fireworks: The Pleasures of Digital Game Pyrotechnics
No full textFireworks in games translate the sensory power of a real-world aesthetic form to the realm of digital simulation and gameplay. Understanding the role of fireworks in games can best be pursued through through a threefold aesthetic perspective that focuses on the senses, on art, and on the aesthetic experience that gives pleasure through the player’s participation in the simulation, gameplay and narrative potentials of fireworks. In games ranging from Wii Sports and Fantavision, to Okami and Assassin’s Creed II, digital fireworks are employed as a light effect, and are also the site for gameplay pleasures that include design and performance, timing and rhythm, and power and awe. Fireworks also gain narrative significance in game forms through association with specific sequences and characters. Ultimately, understanding the role of fireworks in games provokes us to reverse the scrutiny, and to consider games as fireworks, through which we experience ludic festivity and voluptuous panic
Playing the Second World War: Call of Duty and the Telling of History
No full textThrough its interactive representation of the Second World War, the Call of Duty series is emblematic of a contemporary form of historical remembrance. This article analyzes the ways in which the series\u27 cut scenes and game play interrelate and represent history, warfare, and traumatic violence. Using Marita Sturken’s discussion of screen memories as sites of negotiation between differing conceptions of the past, the essay positions Call of Duty as a digital screen memory that actively produces multiple, competing understandings of historical warfare
Book Review: The Mergence of Spaces by Elke Hemminger
No full textReview of Elke Hemmingers doctoral thesis The Mergence of Spaces. Experiences of Reality in Digital Role-Playing Game
Commodifying Scarcity: Society, Struggle, and Spectacle in World of Warcraft
No full textOverrun by monsters and tyrants, and ravaged by fanaticism, excess, and greed, World of Warcraft offers players a chance to struggle metaphorically against that which oppresses them: the excesses of late capitalism as they are represented by the game’s spectacular antagonisms. In order to take advantage of this opportunity, however, players must employ the very thing through which their oppression is manifested. Interpellated into the game as fetishized images, players must construct themselves and function in accordance with the limitations imposed upon them by the race and class of their characters. Players, as such, are incorporated into World of Warcraft’s spectacle even as they struggle against it. What World of Warcraft sells players is thus not liberation and fulfillment, but more of the same: a spectacular version of the present tense in which the race- and class-based antagonisms that define the status quo of late capitalism are represented as magical and fantastic. In approaching World of Warcraft in these terms, this article attempts to understand how the game commodifies struggle, not only securing the consent of players to produce themselves and perform as subjects, but in doing so, reproducing the illusion in which the society of World of Warcraft’s spectacle is manifested: the illusion that the spectacular hierarchies and inequalities of late capitalism are natural and inevitable rather than socially constructed
No B.S.: The Contemporary Practice of Game Education, Design, and Development
No full textThis interview is excerpted from a series we conducted in 2010 with Quentin Rezin, a scripter/level designer at inXile Entertainment (http://www.inxile-entertainment.com/). Prior to joining inXile, Rezin studied computer science at the University of Arkansas and interned at Disney Interactive Studios/Buena Vista Games. He is currently working on Hunted: The Demon’s Forge
Preface: A Community of Players
No full textThe articles in this section were initially developed for and presented at the 2010 conference of the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (http://swtxpca.org/). The conference, which began as a small, regional meeting in the 1970s, has since become international in scope, with upwards of a thousand presentations delivered by participants from dozens of countries. Yet despite its size, the conference maintains a friendly, casual, and intellectually robust atmosphere
Game Characters as Narrative Devices. A Comparative Analysis of Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2
No full textThis article presents a comparative analysis of how characters are used as narrative tools in Bioware’s computer role-playing games Dragon Age: Origins (2009) and Mass Effect 2 (2010). The analysis aims to demonstrate how sophisticated narrative features can be integrated in gameplay through the development of interesting characters. Using a comparative analysis, the author shows that the two games’ have different approaches to using characters as narrative tools within the same genre, while also incorporating these narrative features tightly into gameplay. Central to the argument is the idea that presenting the player as protagonist is not necessarily the most fruitful approach to narrative experiences in games, and that narrative coherence may be better established and maintained through letting non-player characters carry the weight of narrative progression
The Museology of Computergames—An interview with the curator of the Computerspiele Museum, Andreas Lange, and art historian and archivist Dr. Winfried Bergmeyer, Berlin.
No full textGermany may be the second largest market for videogames in Europe after Britain, but its recognition of the cultural impact of computer games is rather unique. The first videogame museum in the world, the Computerspiele museum in Berlin is thriving on the German state’s support of non-profit initiatives dedicated to develop digital media literacy. Since the museum’s founding in 1997, its activities have been steadily branching out from the initial goal of providing an educational venue focused on computer game culture. At its cramped office space in the Marchlewskistr. 27, the museum hosts Europe\u27s largest collection of entertainment software and hardware. The archives also contain a collection of publications. Its exhibitions range in scope with of late a focus on exhibiting the work of artists using videogames as an artistic medium. The museum is also involved in research related to digital media archiving and preservation. My visit took place on the eve of the upcoming move to larger quarters that presume a permanent exhibition, a public library, and facilities for academic research
