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Taking College Esports Seriously
Full text linkThis study examined how collegiate esports players conceptualized their own competitive gameplay as situated between work and play. Using interviews guided by Stebbins’ (2007) serious leisure perspective, 16 collegiate esports players described how belonging to a collegiate esports team has shaped their identity, and how they experienced gaming within the structured environment of a collegiate esports team and club. Stebbins’ description of skill and knowledge development was supported, and the findings are in accord with Stebbins’ conceptualization of “personal rewards,” such as self-expression, self-image, and self-actualization
“No one gives you a rulebook to raise a kid”: Adoptive Motherhood in The Walking Dead Video Game Series
Full text linkAbstract
This article closely examines the representation of adoptive motherhood in Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead video game series. It builds off previous research which has examined The Walking Dead: Season One as an example of a ‘dadified’ game to explore the ways adoptive motherhood is represented throughout the series. More specifically, this article focuses on the series’ protagonist, Clementine, as she develops from a daughter-figure to a mother-figure. Overall, this article argues that although TWD has been discussed primarily as a dadified game and much of the extant literature on the series has focused on Lee as a father-figure, TWD series can also be read as a ‘momified’ narrative. While there are several problematic aspects in the way Clementine is portrayed, the series is notable in that it explores adoptive maternity, centralizes the experiences of non-white characters, and reinforces the message that family is not limited to blood relations. Because of its centralization of Clementine – a young, potentially queer, adoptive mother of colour – TWD series should be considered as a maternal narrative, rather than only categorized as another dadified series
Buying Time: Capitalist Temporalities in Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp
Full text linkIn November 2017, Nintendo released Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp (Nintendo 2017) for iOS and Android devices. At first blush, the game is much like previous instalments in the series. The player character finds themselves as a new denizen of a rural space populated by sentient animals that all have wants and offer rewards for those that satisfy those wants. However, the conversion of Animal Crossing from console game to mobile game was not without its major changes. A free-to-play game par excellence, Pocket Camp introduces Leaf Tokens, a separate currency from bells which can be bought with real money. Leaf Tokens can be used to buy certain in-game objects but, for the most part, are used to eliminate instances of waiting in the game, which stands in direct opposition to the series’ apparent valorization of slower, simpler living. Through a discussion of this translation of Animal Crossing’s mechanics and values into the mobile game genre, Pocket Camp is shown to gamify the capitalist monetization of time. In the face of this reality, the paper concludes examining the role of the player as a critical actor within this system and suggests that, far from being a passive victim of the game’s capitalist logics, one might engage with the game in subversive ways that articulate a virtual refusal of virtual labour and an instance of what the author has taken to calling radical slowness
The Role of Architecture in Constructing Gameworlds: Examples from Dishonored
No full textIn this article, we present a close analysis of the role that the steampunk industrial Victorian architecture in Dishonored (2012) has in constructing the player’s experience and knowledge of the gameworld. Through various intertextual allusions and metaphorical representations, we argue the architecture works as an important storytelling element, contextualizing information that the player learns and conveying information about the game’s main characters, similar to the ways that architecture is utilized in other visual media such as television and film. In addition, we also argue that the architecture in Dishonored plays a crucial role in conveying to the player information about the morals and values of the fictional society, key to the game’s moral-choice gameplay
Always On: Understanding the Intrinsic Motivations for Playing Games on Smartphones and the Effect of User Characteristics
Full text linkThis study examines the intrinsic motivations that drive the enjoyment of smartphone games and the influence of the characteristics of age, gender and playfulness on such motivations. Using Self-Determination Theory (SDT) from the discipline of psychology as a basis, a sample of 340 smartphone gamers was surveyed and the results were analyzed using a multiple linear regression approach. The consequent model was then tested in relation to two specific games to further validate the approach and provide a model that is relevant to individual games. This study thus provides a clearer idea of the nature of play as it develops in the era of the smartphone game as well as adding another layer to our understanding of intrinsic motivation due to the fact that smartphone games can be accessed as necessary for need satisfaction, to experience flow, to gain a sense of escapism and ultimately to allow a player to experience a sense of enjoyment. Given that smartphones now constitute an essential communication device, this represents a key change in that people can now access a mode of play almost at whim. Players now have access to an enjoyable experience that can provide satisfactions that other experiences in their daily life may not allow
Survival Themed Video Games and Cultural Constructs of Power
Full text linkStudies of the relationship between games and culture have often considered the empowering effect of games on the player. Studies have related this empowerment to individual character growth as well as broader geopolitical action (e.g., the conquering of nations). Few studies, however, have considered the emergent and increasingly popular survival genre of video games. In the current inquiry, through an analysis of past and current examples of games in this genre, we explore how survival games disempower players and discuss the potential implications for this shift in terms of cultural attitudes toward the current state of the world, individual prospects, and optimism/pessimism about the future. The goal of this piece is to explore and converse with the existing state of the literature and exemplars from the survival genre, creating a typological framework for future empirical and theoretical development in the area of games, culture, and (dis)empowerment dynamics
“You’re Getting to be a Habit with Me”: Diegetic Music, Narrative, and Discourse in Bioshock
Full text linkThis article examines how diegetic music in Bioshock (2007) is an explicit component of narrative production, game environment creation, and player immersion. The songs from the 1930s-50s participate in the construction of narrative through a constant interplay or negotiation with the video game’s other elements—visual, textual, ludic—and thus music ultimately functions as a distinct discourse able to mediate between contesting factors for the protagonist Jack and the player. The discourse diegetic music produces in Bioshock operates through a system of musical, cultural, and filmic codes of signification that also incorporates new modes employed and generated by video games—particularly regarding the nature of narrative creation in digital media, and the ludic aspects which must necessarily inform all levels. The author argues that the songs in Bioshock not only produce ironic and poignant effects through antithetical juxtapositions of musical mood or expression in relation to the scene or overall story, but the lyrics may speak to the events enacted or depicted, to Jack and the player, or to the very nature of game play itself
Game Studies at Scale: Towards Facilitating Exploration of Game Corpora
Full text linkCritically playing a game, and performing a close reading of a specific aspect of a game, are valid game analysis techniques. But these types of analyses don’t scale to the plethora of games available, and also neglect implementation aspects of the games which themselves are texts that can be analyzed. We argue that appropriate software tools can support research in game studies, allowing individual games to be read at the level of gameplay as well as the implementation level. Moreover, these tools permit analysis to scale in a similar fashion as distant reading allows for traditional texts, and be applied to an entire corpus of games.
We illustrate these ideas using a corpus of games created using the Graphic Adventure Creator, a program first released in 1985 for a number of computing platforms. As a proof of concept, we have built a system called GrACIAS – the Graphic Adventure Creator Internal Analysis System – that we have used for both static and dynamic analysis of this corpus of games, effectively allowing them to be internally explored and “read.” Furthermore, our system is able to look for game solutions automatically and has solved over 60 game images to date, making the games accessible to researchers, but also people who may not be expert players or even able to understand the language the game uses
Better living through chems: Fallout’s post-apocalyptic pharmacy
Full text linkContemporary climate change research today speculates that life as we know it is at an end (Scranton, 2015). As planetary conditions optimal to the survival of the human species are undergoing profound transformation, the question of what future awaits the human species has become both prominent and pervasive. Extending into the speculative art of video games, this post-apocalyptic mis-en-scene today constitutes something of a familiar reference point for gamers, who might find in such popular games as Left 4 Dead (2008) and Gears of War (2006) a particular speculation on survival where life as we know it encounters the destructive forces of nuclear devastation, epidemic, invasion, or any one of a myriad catastrophic scenarios now cliché in the medium. Yet, the ways that video games think survival nevertheless constitutes a speculative fulcrum on which is dramatized both “world without-us”, or rather, an impersonal hostile world unremitting to the desires of ‘man’, and the human that might survive it (Thacker, 2011). Significant amongst such speculative games are the massive post-apocalyptic worlds of Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 4, each of which evokes the question of how we might survive after nuclear catastrophe and its transformation of the planet into a foreboding ecology populated by mutated animals, radioactive dead-zones, loosely organized bandit hordes, and nomads foraging the resource scarce post-apocalyptic future
Apophatic Gaming: The perpetual Journey to ‘catch em’ all’
Full text linkThis study shows certain video games are fostering apophatic practices. The study firstly investigates the notion of distance highlighted by Jean-Luc Marion and secondly the perpetual journey revealed through Gregory of Nyssa’s apophatic exegesis of Moses’ journey. These notions of distance reveal an unquenchable desire to reach a promised finality. With humanity shown to be limited in the face of immeasurable transcendence, a perpetual journey through a path of discovery is constantly desired. These aspects can be seen in certain video games such as Elite, No Man’s Sky, World of Warcraft, Pokémon and Journey which limit the subjectivity of players in the face of limitless possibility. The study enables a deeper reflection of certain video games which stretch beyond genres or play styles providing a means to dwell in the apophatic distance