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Chasing the Fugitive on Campus: Designing a Location-based Game for Collaborative Play
Full text linkWe report on our experiences with building and deploying a collaborative location-based mobile game. The Fugitive is a multiplayer game that is played using mobile TabletPCs in a
university campus environment. The objective is to track and capture a hidden object called the Fugitive on a digital campus map using annotations for communication among one’s teammates.
We discuss the design, development, and network infrastructure as well as focus group and observational findings from our field study. Our findings suggest that the effect of locationawareness
on collaboration and game play strategies is an intriguing area for study, and we share our insights from this project with the Canadian Game Studies community
I’m a warrior, I’m a monster – Who am I anyway? Shifting/Shaping Identity through Video Game Play
Full text linkThis article examines the implications of video game play on identity constructions. Our study focused on the gendered nature of identity and young males’ construction of their gendered
identity. Our study involved interviewing 3 young adult males aged 21, 24, and 30. The interviews allowed for the participants to reflect on their particular (previously unexamined) ideologies and values, as they began to question the incongruence of these values with particular game-based behaviours. For example, practices of competition, aggression, and violence were issues that either conflicted with or paralleled participants’ practices in other aspects of their lives
A Virtual World for Teaching German
Full text linkIn this research, a virtual world of an Austrian town centre was created to teach German to first year students at the University of Calgary. While interacting with characters in the City
of Salzburg, students were able to take control of their own learning, and at the same time were exposed to cultural and linguistic realia that are often not present in other types of language games. In playing the game, students reported an improvement in their listening skills, and they
also noted that the experience was beneficial for vocabulary learning, pronunciation, general fluency, and improving reading skills. Surveys and direct observation of student game play offer
insights into attitudes towards personal use of games, the value of educational games for teaching language and impact of different testing environments on the success of playing a game.
Examining the recorded paths taken through this world by students during the game, space syntax research offers some interesting perspective insights into strategies game players employ when looking for the correct path through an urban space. In fact, isovist and axial maps may be helpful in predicting the first line of action taken by game players as they navigate through a virtual world with no verbal clues
A Reusable Scripting Engine for Automating Cinematics and Cut-Scenes in Video Games
Full text linkStorytelling can play a critical role in the success of modern video games. Unfortunately, it can often be quite difficult for storytellers to directly craft content for games, typically
requiring them to work with programmers to implement story elements. This needlessly complicates the development process, straining scarce resources while potentially hampering
creativity and story quality at the same time. As a result, supports and tools are necessary to enable storytellers to generate story content for games directly, with minimal programming or programmer assistance required, if any.
This paper introduces a Reusable Scripting Engine to automate the generation of cinematics and cut-scenes in video games. This approach allows storytellers to provide their
stories in a well-defined, structured format, which is then interpreted by our engine, along with supplemental graphic and audio content, to produce an animated presentation of the story in an automated fashion. This paper presents the design of our Reusable Scripting Engine, and discusses a prototype implementation of this design, as well as initial experiences with using this prototype system to date
Continuity and Discontinuity: An Experiment in Comparing Narratives Across Media
Full text linkWhat is the metaphor of the digital game? How might we see the world differently in the age of the Playstation than we did when RCA was a cutting edge company? There is, of course, not one answer to that question, and more than one way to investigate it. This paper is one attempt to think about the social and cultural change introduced by this new medium. Using Edmund Carpenter’s (1960) brief analysis of multiple renditions of the Caine Mutiny as a model, I want to share some impressions of the transformation that mythically-styled narrative undergoes when it moves from one medium to another—with a specific focus on the digital game medium
Games and Narrative: An Analytical Framework
Full text linkoai:ojs.journals.sfu.ca.loading:article/1The paper considers the recent academic struggle between "narratologists" and "ludologists", and argues that it was exacerbated by two sources of confusion. The first confusion was differing concepts of immersion as an outcome of mediated experience. "Suspension of disbelief" and "flow" are both immersive states, but they grow out of fundamentally different processes of engagement. The second confusion was the conflation of "story" with the concept of a narrative arc. Interaction necessarily interferes with authorial control over the timing and the details of the narrative arc, and makes it a misleading focus for analysis or understanding of game narrative.
The paper maintains that if we ignore the concept of a grand narrative arc, we are free to examine other parameters of story within the game, which may be more limited, but are also more relevant. These narrative components - character, storyworld, emotion, narrative interface, and micro-narrative - are useful channels for focusing a more accurate analysis of the role of narrative within the design of the game and the experience of gameplay
Machinima: Video Game As An Art Form?
Full text linkThis paper examines the new audiovisual form emerging from the video game field, Machinima. Machinima is the “art of making animated movies in a 3D virtual environment in
real time” (Marino, 2004, p. 2). More simply, it means making films from video games. Studying this new hybrid form, this communication seeks to investigate the present and the future of these practices, which aspire to become a medium itself.
After the exploration of the characteristics of this new technology, I will investigate its consequences on the video game industry, demonstrating how video games are used in new ways, i.e. not as a playing hobby but as a technology for producing audio-visual art, animated films to be more exact
Mapping Gendered Play
Full text linkTo better understand boys’ privilege and girls’ educational disadvantage with regard to video games, this presentation takes up Jo Bryce and Jason Rutter’s recent challenge to confront the ways girl gamers are rendered “invisible” by gaming communities, researchers, and designers. From the fall of 2004 to the spring of 2005, Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell’s EGG (Education, Gender and Gaming) project carried out a gaming club for girls at a local elementary school in the Greater Toronto Area. Not only did the project provide female students with a “safe” space to attain and practice gaming competency – which they were consistently denied at home – but it provided an audio-visual record of girls’ play allowing for critical explorations of gendered gaming practices. At one point in the footage, a gaming session between five girls is interrupted when two boys enter the scene and try to hijack their play. Using the MAP (Multimodal Application Program, developed by Suzanne de Castell and Jennifer Jenson) tool to visually chart and analyze the co-ordinated reactions of the girls as they put down their controllers and hold their bodies immobile during the boys’ disruption, this paper explores the tenuous relationship to video games these girls enjoy, even within a space ostensibly devoted to their play