Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture
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223 research outputs found
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Playing with one’s self: notions of subjectivity and agency in digital games
No full textThis paper explores the ways in which the experience of participation or interactivity in digital games may influence or reinvent the player’s ideological subjectivity. It offers an application to video game analysis of the theoretical perspectives of Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Slavoj Žižek, and thereby suggests that the simulated realities of commercial digital games cultures offer an illusion of agency or co-authorship which, in common with similar illusions promoted by parallel manifestations of industrial mass culture, may foster a critical complacency which permits the inscription of their consumers within virtually invisible ideological perspectives
Two Halves of Play - Simulation versus Abstraction and Transformation in Sports Videogames Design
No full textSports videogames need to model a complex reality to a gratifying game experience. This paper suggest a methodology and terminology to describe and explain deviations from pure simulation in sports videogames design. Using the terms of abstraction and transformation and by introducing a graphic representation for those qualities in respect to realism, selected games are qualitatively analysed regarding their respective implementations of reality
Grand Theft Auto IV Considered as an Atrocity Exhibition
No full textThis review outlines the intersections between Rockstar Games\u27 "Grand Theft Auto IV" (2008) and the British novelist J.G. Ballard\u27s experimental text "The Atrocity Exhibition". Obvious parallels like the dominant roles of cars and carnage are supplemented by more subtle similarities. Grand Theft Auto is an Atrocity Exhibition, a deliberately instigated scandal and a cynical masterpiece
“We don’t want it changed, do we?” - Gender and Sexuality in Role Playing Games
No full textVideo games in virtual worlds serve as reference points in negotiations of socially efficacious meanings. Therefore they entail the potential either to reproduce and affirm or to challenge traditional concepts of identity. This article presents findings of an in-depth content analysis of three role playing games with a male avatar belonging to the Gothic-series that was published between 2001 and 2006. Focal points of the examination were issues of gender and sexuality, how they are incorporated in narrative, interactions and rules of the game series, and how they are being discussed on fan sites and player forums
The 3D Story
No full textThis reading attempts to show how Iron Storm connects history and fiction by means of a three-dimensional storytelling system. This paper further explores new limits of game concepts such as Jenkins space architecture and Murray\u27s immersion, and directed towards the testing of an experientail approach to game narrative and play analysis.  
Mass(ively) Effect(ive): Emotional Connections, Choice, and Humanity
No full textA brief review of Bioware\u27s successful sci-fi game Mass Effect, a combination first person shooter and role playing game
Theorizing gender and digital gameplay: Oversights, accidents and surprises
No full textThis paper attempts to tell a story of a different kind about gender and digital gameplay. Resisting the repetition of stereotypes about who plays, how and why, we show how, as researchers, our own assumptions and presumptions about gender keep surprise at bay, enforcing instead "findings" that solidify an inner "truth" about gender. Re-citing hegemonic gender ideologies that tell us nothing we don\u27t already know, we argue here, is no accident. Rather than recurring encounters with the all-too-familiar, we are entitled to expect to be surprised by the research we do, and more serious interpretive work, in conjunction with alternative methodologies, promise very different findings than those hitherto attributed to women and girls playing games