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Learning a Sport through Video Gaming: A Mixed-Methods Experimental Study
Full text linkThis study examined the impact of playing a sport video game on learning the sport as well as how the game may influence future intentions of watching or playing the sport. Utilizing American university students with little prior knowledge of cricket, this study employed a mixed-methods pre/post intervention design with randomized experimental (EG; n = 43) and control (CG; n = 46) groups. Results indicated that cricket knowledge significantly increased for the EG pre-test to post-test (p < .05, n^2 = 0.19; particularly regarding cricket rules, terminology, player positions, and field layout), while the CG did not significantly differ. A significant difference was also found between the EG and CG for interest in playing cricket (p < .05, n^2 = 0.9). Qualitative findings supported that video gaming motivated intentions to watch and play cricket. Sport video games can facilitate increased sport knowledge, sport appreciation, and intentions for future physical activity
Not Yet Game Over: A Reappraisal of Video Game Addiction
No full textThe rapid expansion of video gaming in an internet-using society has brought on a renewed focus on the phenomenon of video game addiction. Despite this focus, there remains a crucial absence of consensus over the diagnostic criteria of video game addiction. Currently both psychological and behavioral interventions regard screen time as an indicator of video game addiction. However, these interventions are challenged by substantial literature that increasingly regard time to not be a predictor of addiction. To build onto the work that has been done, this paper argues that time is an inadequate criterion in which to ascertain video game addiction, proposing that a physiological-based criteria be used in conjunction with contextualized understandings of video game dynamics to approach video game addiction. This realignment is all the more pressing as video games begin a transition from a leisure activity to its current orientation as a viable career option
Participant observation of griefing in a journey through the World of Warcraft
Full text linkThrough the ethnographic method of participant observation in World of Warcraft, this paper aims to document various actions that may be considered griefing among the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game community. Griefing as a term can be very subjective, so witnessing the anti-social and intentional actions first-hand can be used as a means to understand this subjectivity among players as well as produce a thorough recount of some of the toxic behavior in this genre. The participant observation was conducted across several years and expansions of World of Warcraft and the author became familiar with many griefing related actions; although some of these were perceived as acceptable game-play elements
Game Design and Affect: How Games Move Us as a Catalyst for Explorations in Game Studies
Full text linkHow Games Move Us: Emotion By Design is an introduction to the ways in which digital games and game studies are slowly encroaching on other territory; in this case, Isbister looks at the intersection of psychology, kinesthetics, design and games and how new notions from these fields alter our understanding of games as a whole. The book is aimed at changing how people talk about and understand digital games, not only as a technical object but as a social medium. Isbister readily accomplishes her goal of highlighting the ways that people can affect and are affected by games, though at times, the book struggles with its strong reliance on examples and dated references to the field of game studies and psychology
Making Ourselves Visible: Mobilizing Micro-Autoethnography in the Study of Self-Representation and Interface Affordances
Full text linkAvatar customization and self-representation in games has been widely studied. In this paper, I propose the use of micro-autoethnography as a complementary methodology in such studies. I propose such an approach, theoretically and methodologically informed by Actor-Network Theory, as a way for researchers to situate themselves within their own studies of identity and play in games. I present a micro-autoethnographic study in which I, the researcher, attempt to create the same avatar in eight different Character Creation Interfaces (CCIs), otherwise known as a "trans-ludic" avatar. Implications for a micro-autoethnographic approach to avatar and identity research are discussed
Touring the Animus: Assassin's Creed and chronotopical movement
No full textThe Assassin’s Creed videogame series, developed by Ubisoft, is known for its representation of historical places and eras, such as Jerusalem during the Crusades and Paris during the French Revolution. The current article takes an interest in the games’ chronotopical appropriation of touristic semiotics and behavior, that is, the ways in which the gameplay and game world involve a specific collocation of time and space within which touristic enactments can take place. Players are at once invited to admire and ultimately conquer the space they traverse. Through these procedures and forms of semiosis, players are provided with a set of rules, behaviors, and narratives that fit in with a contemporary attitude in the Western travel industry—namely, that of anti-tourism
"The Fantasy that Never Takes Place": Nostalgic Travel in Videogames
Full text linkThis article explores the correspondence between a pensive mode of play and a nostalgic address in 1990s and early 2000s videogames. Conceiving of the wish to dwell within the game as a longing for radical alterity serves as a theoretical extension of rhythmanalysis for thinking about the porous boundaries of the game text. The article seeks to expand the established discursive and conceptual function accorded to stillness as a form of play. It discusses three ‘nostalgic gestures’ that stall the game’s action: the glance from foreground to background; the shift from the game to paratextual materials; and the drift of attention out the window or away from the gaming context altogether. Gaming’s promise of exotic transport activates a “fervor of the possible,” a melancholic identification with the world beyond which invests game spaces with the capacity for hopeful discovery, verging on a wish to remove oneself from the flow of time altogether
Survival as Species Narrative: (Supra-)Referentiality in Humanitarian Crisis Video Games
Full text linkSurvival is one of the main drivers of action in video games. The gamer's quest to survive zombie attacks, to end the siege of the earth by aliens, to fend off wild animals and human 'savages,' and to outlive and curb global natural disasters makes games not only appealing, but, more importantly, possible – that is playable. Among these instances of survival, the focus of the present article is on humanitarian crisis video games (HCGs) – a rather recent development in the ludisphere that, to simplify, casts a critical look at historically significant humanitarian crises of various degrees and their repercussions on the local and individual levels. HCG games place emphasis on the individual (actors who have caused, denied, and fallen victim to disasters in the making) in their encounters with local, national, or global disasters in the Anthropocene. Providing a detailed, comparative analysis of the different ways the siege of Sarajevo is rendered in Saragame and This War of Mine, the article categorizes HCGs into 'referential' and 'supra-referential' games as they take inspiration from specific events in modern history, such as September 11th or the recent refugee crisis, in order to tell the tale of individual suffering and survival as a common human fate in a world closely and chaotically wired through globalization
Simulating the Ages of Man: Periodization in Civilization V and Europa Universalis IV
Full text linkIn recent years historians have increasingly turned their attention to video games, encouraging a passionate debate about whether or not history can be produced through video games. Rather than directly intervene in this discussion, this article seeks to explore how historical arguments (whether they constitute “history” or not) are made through video games. Through an investigation of two popular historical strategy games, Civilization V and Europa Univeralis IV, this article demonstrates how a familiar historical concept, periodization (the division of time into distinct “ages”), is constructed through video game play. This investigation is valuable, not just in terms of understanding popular consumption of historical concepts, but in understanding the production of history more generally. As a relatively novel of medium for the production of history, video games heighten an awareness of the role of the medium in shaping history. This awareness can be folded back into a re-examination of the familiar and, after centuries of use, invisible determinative structures of textual history
Videogame Production: How the Capitalist Socius and Platformization Subjectivate
Full text linkDiverse representations of bodies in videogames has become a point of contention among developers and consumers alike, which has lead scholars to question why videogame production is breaking with trends of recognizable, anthropocentric characters in favor of “diverse” bodies. This paper contends that the overarching reason for this is that the capitalist socius (Deluze and Guattari, 1986) has become more readily equipped to be able to monetize and streamline diversity away from being an act of subversion and into an easily manipulatable source of revenue. In examining how the capitalist socius overlays onto the videogame production process, a few things become apparent. Because videogame production operates within the capitalist socius, their goals are the similar: to become autopoietic (able to reach a point of homeostasis in which the entity is able to reproduce and maintain its structural integrity) and to turn any and all resources into sources of capital generation. The expectation of bodies working in these regimes is to be as non-threatening and as pliable to new modes of subjectivation and capital generation as possible, but that means that bodies must undergo certain political transformations to adhere to these needs of the capitalist socius and videogame production process. As with any hegemonic structure, there are pockets of resistance that look to buck the current trends of subjectivation and capital generation. The form of resistance this paper examines is personal-games and affective experiences, but as with most things pertaining to the capitalist socius, personal-games are dangerously close to being swept up, monetized, and crunched down.
Keywords: capitalist socius, videogame production, gender and body politics, integrated world capitalism, autopoiesis, diversit