Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture
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Time to stop playing: No game studies on a dead planet
No full textThis article highlights the interrelated crises that the games industry, its digital game consumers, and the academic field of game studies are embedded in and responsible for reproducing. By couching our analysis in Marxist, feminist, anti-fascist, and anti-imperialist understandings of how our social relations arise from the historical-material basis of society, we identify several different conditions of modern digital games that everyone working in and around games should confront and take seriously, especially regarding contemporary and future impacts and restrictions on the type of research and education we are able to conduct. These crises emerge from social and economic structures including imperialism, racism, militarism, fascism, and patriarchy. To better confront them, we broadly define the causes from which the morbid symptoms we witness arise in primarily Western societies and how they manifest in the games industry, its consumers, and its academic institutions. Based off these aspects, we extrapolate their trajectory in how they will change and adapt to the future of games and of their study, as the ecological and social crises intensify and reverberate. This allows us to propose potential strategies for radically confronting and potentially overcoming the looming crises related to war, patriarchy, white supremacy, famine, destitution, fascism, and climate apocalypse
Playing on life\u27s terms: Behavioral strategies for changing situations
No full textThis article sheds light on the changes to play habits when there is not as much time or possibilities to play as before. The research is based on a survey and interviews of Finnish former active players, who now played less or had quit some game types they used to enjoy. Most of the respondents still played something, but the playing had changed on the level of games, playstyles, time management, and content. These changes were then used as behavioral strategies to keep gaming as a part of the changing lives: shifting to lighter options, integrating playing into everyday life, redefining co-play, and focusing on opportunities. The results highlight the complexity and continuity of the changes and negotiations, and further hint at how the borders of casual and hardcore playing are fluid and mixed. This complexity and fluidity of play should be the starting point of a game design that must be heard in the public and academic discourses around gaming
Editorial: Futures
No full textThe editorial offers some red threads connecting the articles of this issue, introduces each contribution, and takes up some organisational matters
Book review: Literature, Videogames and Learning by Andrew Burn
No full textA review of Andrew Burn’s book Literature, Videogames and Learning. Published in 2022 by Routledge. ISBN: 9781032024523, pp. 232
Narrative selfies and player–character intimacy in interface games
No full textThis paper discusses the use of selfies in narrative-driven interface games, that is games that place the narrative within fictionalized interfaces resembling those of computers or smartphones, as methods of creating intimacy between the characters and the player, while simultaneously maintaining the player’s separateness as a witness of personal stories, rather than their active actor. The article analyses how inter-character and player–character intimacy and emotional distance can be negotiated through the implementation of selfies into the narrative within interface games. The inherent intimacy of such games, which often tell personal stories of people of marginalized identities, is juxtaposed with the constrictions on the player’s agency—both in the overall gameplay and in their inability to take the selfies themselves. Three games are discussed according to three frameworks used to discuss selfies as noted by Gabriel Faimau (2020): a dramaturgic lens (the selfie as self-presentation), a sociosemiotic approach (the selfie as an art of communication), and a dialectical framework (selfie as a social critique)
I Am... Bothered About D&D
No full textIs Dungeons & Dragons receiving too much attention in game studies compared to other tabletop role playing games? And what, if any, are the issues with this?
In this commentary the author creates an overview of the overwhelming focus on Dungeons & Dragons in game studies journals and puts it in relation to the cultural and economic position of the popular role playing games. The author calls for a more diverse and critical approach to tabletop role playing games in game studies, and the need to take into account the different playstyles fostered by different mechanics and the communities that form around the games
Editorial: Transitions
No full textIn this editorial, we outline recent developments in the organization of the journal and briefly summarize each contribution
Categorizations of World War II in Videogames
No full textWWII remains a popular adaptation for videogames seventy years after its end, yet, what kind of war is depicted through these games? With inspiration drawn from Ethnomethodology, this article asks which cues WWII first person shooters, strategy games and flight simulation provide players with to categorize WWII. Eight different categorizations are identified. Even though preferred categorizations are found in each of the three genres analyzed, each game invites players to categorize WWII in several different ways. Moreover, it is shown that the sequentiality of these different categorizations is crucial for the way in which players are led to engage in virtual military engagements. They are offered varied moral orders and varied moral engagements
A Game of Twisted Shouting: Ludo-Narrative Dissonance Revisited
No full textThis article takes a deeper look at the notion of ludo-narrative dissonance (henceforth LND), a popular term that refers to the perceived clash between the ludic and the narrative aspects of games. We wish to argue that a better understanding of the nature of LND and the reasons it appears in games enables us to look at this phenomenon from a new perspective that was not, as of yet, considered in game studies literature or the popular discourse. The typical approach to LND presents it as a problem or a design flaw that needs to be avoided by the developers. In contrast to this, we suggest that LND can be seen as a source of inspiration for the creators as it inherently invites the developers and the players to reflect on the game structure. We start with a closer look at the notion of LND and present three ways it can be interpreted. In section two we analyze the reasons LND can appear in games (regardless of the developers’ intentions). Section three goes through some of the existing methods of dealing with LND. Here we argue that embracing LND as a result of some of the necessary tensions of game design can result in the creative victory of the developers. We finish the paper, in the fourth section, with a longer case study of Manhunt which we see as a good exemplification of the reinvigorating power of LND
Understanding Esports Teamplay as an Emergent Choreography: An Ethnomethodological Analysis
No full textWe, as analysts and researchers of game play, may be overlooking important aspects of players’ actions that may help us understand the interconnectedness of interactional resources, such as body, gaze, talk and avatar actions, in players’ gaming experiences. Players, from their perspective, do not necessarily concern themselves with making distinctions between, for example, off-screen and on-screen actions at all. They employ all, and whatever, interactional resources that are available to them to play together as a team. This may become especially salient in multiplayer esports games where players are geographically dispersed. This study analyses several Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) matches being played by esports teams, in an attempt to, from an ethnomethodological (EM) participant perspective, understand how teams coordinate, or choreograph, their game play as part of larger sequences of situationally emergent tactics. We incorporate an understanding of expanded choreography developed within the field of dance and draw on the structural possibilities of choreography, seeking to understand the actions, collaboration, and coordination in the players’ game play through analyzing interactional resources and movement qualities enacted when playing. Understanding individual players’ actions and team actions as part of a larger, emergent, choreography may help us to better realize how esports players in a team, intersubjectively, construct a ’mental map’ of current and next actions, which affect their own (individual) current and next actions