Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture
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Materiality, Nonlinearity, and Interpretive Openness in Contemporary Archaeogames
No full textDrawing inspiration from discussions on the relationship between archaeology and video games (“archaeogaming”), this article argues that contemporary games address three central concepts of archaeological theory: the uncertain materiality of archaeological finds, the way in which caring for artifacts complicates a linear or chronological understanding of history, and the open-ended quality of archaeological interpretation. The “archaeogames” I examine—which include Heaven’s Vault (Inkle, 2019), Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital, 2019), The Forgotten City (Modern Storyteller, 2021), and Elden Ring (FromSoftware, 2022)—capture these concepts by implementing a variety of gameplay and narrative mechanics. In addition to embedding archaeological objects at the level of representation, these games turn archaeological theory into a gameplay practice—a process potentially leading to the emergence of collaborative and creative storytelling within what I call archaeological fandom
A Game on Time: The Witness and the Temporality of the Digital Image
No full textThis essay addresses the temporality of digital images through a reading of the 2016 puzzle game The Witness. Fusing Paul Ricoeur’s definition of narratives as “games with time” and Alexander Galloway’s description of the computer as “remediating the very conditions of being itself,” I describe The Witness as a game on time. The methodical pace it ties its player to, along with the environmental awareness it elicits, creates, rather than simply representing, relations of time that bespeak the accelerated, non-human temporality—the “protentions” (Yuk Hui)—of digital objects and environments. Taking the game’s embedding of a ten-minute sequence from director Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia (1983) within its gameplay as a cue, I develop these ideas in relationship to both the phenomenology of time and the cinema of the “time image,” in particular the work of Abbas Kiarostami. For game designer Jonathan Blow, as for Kiarostami, the digital image is a fundamentally new form of temporal experience that requires new kinds of environmental awareness and care (Sorge)
The Game Studies Crisis: What Are the Rules of Play?
No full textThough no field or discipline’s historical vector presents itself as a strictly linear building of knowledge, the historical trajectory of Game Studies is problematic: certainly not linear, yet also not even multiplicious or rhizomatic. Instead, we are cyclical. Past debates often re-emerge, zombie-like, muttering the same arguments, often encased in binaries as endemic to our field as they are to the objects we study: unbridgeable disagreements on fundamental concepts; incompatible ontologies and epistemologies; incommensurability writ large. We view this as a chronic issue which has of late culminated in a crisis, exacerbated by changing institutional prerogatives championing multidisciplinary approaches and demands for “public impact”. This article takes a metaphysical approach, performing a meta-review to search for the root cause of our field’s cyclical nature. We identify and explore a key issue, namely our continuing status as pre-paradigmatic field, and ask questions designed to provoke ways forward, to provide more inflection points and fewer endless loops
The Philosophy of Computer Games – Introduction
No full textThe Philosophy of Computer Games—this special issue\u27s topic—might seem in vogue and out of date at the same time. Out of date on the one hand, because the first wave of philosophical approaches to computer games peaked about ten years ago. On the other hand, a renewed turn to computer game aesthetics and especially the turn towards a phenomenology of computer games that has gained some new momentum recently seem to have brought new attention to what philosophy has to offer to game studies (and vice versa), raising new questions and putting new emphases on old ones
Playful Strategies in Print Advertising
No full textThe fact that people are increasingly eager to seek out playful experiences in their everyday lives is part of a trend known as the ludification of culture. Scholars find that, in a time characterized by information overload, consumers are open and drawn to media products that offer entertainment through playful interaction. Meanwhile, the advertising industry is faced with the quandary of how to stand out and attract consumers’ fleeting attention in a landscape that has become highly competitive. Print advertising in particular faces a budget decline and has to compete with digital advertising forms that know richer affordances to appeal to consumers’ attention. For this reason, this article explores how print advertising uses playful strategies in order to stand out from the crowd and appease the demand to provide entertaining interaction for consumers. In doing so, the article focuses on the following research question: How do advertisers make use of playful communication strategies in print advertisements to stand out in the contemporary attention economy? To gain a comprehensive answer to this research question, a qualitative approach was taken. A thematic analysis of print advertisements was conducted, going through multiple rounds of coding that eventually resulted in the emergence of three central themes of playful strategies: (1) the use of playful visual design that is meant to instill a playful mindset; (2) the use of strategies based on a pleasurable interactive experiential logic; (3) the liberation of unspoken topics of a dark, solemn, and negative nature in a playful way. This study identifies playful aesthetics and their capacity for interactivity, resembling that of games, in static media forms such as print advertising; moreover, it identifies how playfulness can be used as a mode of production (playification) for the advertising industry as part of the creative industries. The conclusions and implications drawn from this article are thus theoretically and practically impactful. Regarding the former, contributions to an understanding of aesthetic interactivity and negative pleasurable experiences are made, and a need for further inquiry in playification is identified and encouraged. Regarding the latter, the benefit for advertisers to use playful print advertising strategies in their marketing mix is illuminated and ethical concerns regarding the persuasion of the strategies are expressed. The article closes by pointing out directions for future research
“This Is a Story about Regeneration”: Understanding The Missing: J. J. Macfield and the Island of Memories
No full textThe Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories (2018) is an intricate case of playing through an often grotesque and horrific game to develop empathy and understanding for the main character J.J. Macfield. The SWERY developed game involves physically dismembering the titular character to solve puzzles and move forward in her quest to locate her love interest, Emily. At first, it seems absurd and disturbing, but as the player moves through the game or reads the texts on J.J.’s phone, more of her story takes shape. There are odd moments such as a deer-headed character with a distorted voice indicating that there is a medical emergency, and they add to the sense of absurdity in a game that purposefully intends for you to harm your player character. The brutal mechanics are an integral part of J.J.’s journey and story. The game involves multiple suicides, bullying, self-harm, and ultimately, the revelation that the entire game is a narrative about a trans woman who has been in a dream while being revived by paramedics after a real-world suicide attempt. It’s a story of self-acceptance, of seeking the support of those closest to you, and by finishing game, J.J. is able to fight and conquer her self-loathing, represented by a monstrous being carrying a razorblade. J.J.’s physical pain and the body horror throughout the game represent the struggles that she has with body dysmorphia and her pain dealing with intolerance from her mother. This gameplay mechanic frames J.J.’s experiences in a way that is understandable even without her lived experience. I will argue that The Missing’s audio design and gameplay mechanics are integral to creating an empathetic playing experience. The game begins with the message, “this game was made with the belief that nobody is wrong for being what they are,” and that message is key to understanding The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories
The Meaning of Playfulness: A Review of the Contemporary Definitions of the Concept across Disciplines
No full text‘Playfulness’ is a concept used in various disciplines. In this article, we conduct a qualitative, systematic, and interdisciplinary literature review on the term ‘playfulness’ as used in recent scholarship. The article aims to overcome the ambiguity relating to ‘playfulness’ in order to create opportunities for growth in all related fields of study. Based on 429 written works and the 184 extracted definitions of ‘playfulness’ across disciplines, we find six clusters of meaning all of which emphasise engagement. Three themes describe different methods for how engagement is structured to become a higher priority than its context. The other three themes discuss structural characteristics of contexts that are playfully engaged in. A new synthetic conceptualization is offered: Playfulness prioritizes engagement over external consequence, realness, or convention. Furthermore, the study argues that playfulness is not a ‘what’ or a ‘why,’ but a ‘how,’ a priority organizing principle
The Playful Affordances of Picture Book Apps for Children
No full textThe tradition of children’s literature has evolved side by side with the market of children’s entertainment, games, and toys. The selection of contemporary print products includes a wide variety of materially or technologically enhanced picture books. This background is rarely considered in the examination of children’s book applications that have attracted scholarly interest after the arrival of smartphones and tablets during the early 2010s.The relationship between picture book apps, mobile games, and digital playthings requires further examination that considers the specific affordances of the mobile platform. Leaning on five case studies, this article examines how picture book apps afford opportunities for a reading experience that contains features characteristic for children’s digital play. For this purpose, I adapt a specific model of close reading that focuses on the visual, auditory, tactile, and performative elements of children’s video games.On the basis of the case studies, it seems that navigating a picture book app requires balancing between different modes of action: reading, playing, and exploring. Engagement with picture book apps has different forms that resemble the features of both traditional print reading and digital play. However, further examination of children’s playful reading practices and intergenerational play is necessary from a premise that recognizes playing with a book as a valuable research topic
Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments
No full textTwentieth-century serial figures enacted a “parergonal” logic by crossing boundaries between various media, slipping in and out of their frames, and showing them—in accordance with a Derridean logic of the parergon—to be reversible. With the rise of interactive, networked, and convergent digital media environments, these medial logics are transformed. A figure like Batman exemplifies the transition from a “parergonal” to a new “parergodic” logic; the latter term builds upon Espen Aarseth’s notion of the “ergodic” situation of gameplay—where ergodics combines the Greek ergon (work) and hodos (path), thus positing nontrivial labor as the aesthetic mode of players’ engagement with games. Ergodic media give rise to new forms of seriality that accompany, probe, and trace the developmental trajectories of the new media environment and the blurring of relations between work and play, between paid labor and the incidental work culled from our leisure and entertainment practices
Playing with Plants, Loving Computers: Queer Playfulness beyond the Human in Digital: A Love Story by Christine Love and Rustle Your Leaves to Me Softly by Jess Marcotte and Dietrich Squinkifer
No full textThis article argues that queer playfulness sets up a utopian relationality based on desire and vulnerability between human players and their nonhuman Others. Specifically, using the indie games Rustle Your Leaves to Me Softly by Jess Marcotte and Dietrich Squinkifer and Digital: A Love Story by Christine Love as case studies, the article reconfigures the notion of queer playfulness from its more familiar conceptualizations in queer game studies as residing less in willful resistance and agentive subversion than in the willing subjection of the playing self to the play and pleasure of the nonhuman Other—in the case of these games, plants and computers. Thus, queerness manifests as a precarious form of desire that does not seek to and cannot master its object. Ultimately, the article posits queer playfulness as a radical decentering of the human subject and the playing ego in favor of a humble, vulnerable, and contingent form of relationality between humans and their unassimilable Others