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Aya of the Beholder: An Examination of the Construction of Real-World Locations in Parasite Eve
Get PDFThe ways in which virtual environments are constructed and perceived is rarely a direct one-to-one experience. Using the foundational example of Squaresoft’s Parasite Eve (1997), I examine the ways in which real-world locations and approximations of such are represented within videogame worlds. I examine the methods through which videogames can create spaces which evoke the conceptual idea of a given place, both through audio/visual and interactive means, without constructing a one-to-one simulacrum of the location. Thus, the player actively contributes in the transformation of an actionable virtual space into an actualized lived place.
Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, my discussion draws on cinematic semiotic theory, by way of Christian Metz, in association with Wittgenstein’s examination of language as a foundation from which to proceed. These concepts are then incorporated into a broader discussion of theories more focused on videogame studies, such as Laurie Taylor’s Lacanian approach to the videogame avatar and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow, to illustrate how video game locations may leave out large portions of their real-world referents and yet still be identified as said referents by the player. The choices for what to include/exclude are also examined from a socio-political perspective, allowing reflection on what is considered necessary for a representation of a real-world place
Shifting Borders: Walking Simulators, Artgames, and the Categorical Compulsions of Gaming Discourse
Get PDFThis paper looks at how the walking simulatorand artgame categories intersect, before comparatively analyzing two game designers whose work functions to disrupt the notions of genre these terms exemplify. The first work is Bill Viola’s The Night Journey (Game Innovation Lab & Viola, 2007), a gallery installation that many early game studies scholars used to help them first define how videogames could function as art. Following this, the paper compares Viola’s work to Connor Sherlock’s (2015) cheekily titled “Walking Simulator A Month Club.” With this project, Sherlock uses the itch.io and Patreon platforms to release a new experimental walking simulator game every month. Like The Night Journey, each of Sherlock’s games are ambiguously rendered and non-goal oriented. To conclude, this paper uses these two examples to investigate the potentially useful relations that can be uncovered between the experiences of traversing gallery and game space
Reading, Writing, Lexigraphing: Active Passivity as Queer Play in Walking Simulators
Get PDFIn this article, we address the histories and influences of reading and writing within the genre of digital games called “walking simulators.” Reading is framed as an activity separate from (and, sometimes, incompatible with) the set of actions afforded to players in most game genres. Walking simulators, on the other hand, converge the act of reading and walking in complex ways that expose the playful but putatively inactive action of reading as a disruptive queering. This queering subverts the standard expectation that to count as “player” (and for walking simulatorsto count as games) one must act and produce. We call this subversion “lexigraphing,”our repurposed verb form of Garrett Stewart’s (2006) neologism “lexigraph,” which refers to paintings of written text. Lexigraphing, applied to digital games, describes the seemingly passive action of walking in a gamespace, and reading its texts, as a recursive act of writing reading. We argue that the disruptive “passivity” of lexigraphing operates as a form of queering gamespace, citing J. Jack Halberstam’s (2011) rejection of a world that is constantly doing, acting, and producing. We apply lexigraphing to walking simulators through the lens of queer game studiesas articulated by Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw (2017), which invites us to reject limited conceptions of gamic action and participate in a more playful queering. Reading “queer”as a verb is crucial to understanding the feminist and queer actions that walking simulators welcome. With our own verb, lexigraphing, we re-articulate the active passivity of reading-as-writing in walking simulators.
 
From Walking Simulator to Ambience Action Game: A Philosophical Approach to a Misunderstood Genre
Get PDFWhen Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012) was released in 2012 as a standalone game, the new “walking simulator” genre name came into popular use. The term implies a banalization of game design while also missing the core characteristics of the games subsumed under it and, therefore, lacks epistemological value. Following this notion, we offer “ambience action game” as an alternative to provide an epistemological tool which enables researchers to appreciate the genre’s cultural significance as a continuation of practices of atmospheric experience.The proposed term offers myriad starting points for analysis and future research by unifying well-received game studies theories with the barely recognized—at least in game studies discourse—philosophical theory of atmospheres. Consequently, this article is a contribution to an affective turn in game studies, which takes player experience beyond the act of play seriousl
The Burden of Queer Love
Get PDFVideo games are a unique narrative and interactive experience that allow players to construct their own fantasies through play. The fantastical possibilities a video game could explore are nearly limitless. However, a game’s design often precludes certain imaginative routes, shutting down one fantasy in favour of another. Games close out possibilities through actions as small as character design (gender, race, ability) and restrict imaginative interpretations to serve a narrow audience. Game developers design play that prioritizes hypermasculine narrative experiences, and players that do not align with this identity must condition themselves to play that excludes fantasies or alternate worlds that align with their experiences.
This essay explores attempts by game development studio Bioware to create video games that are inclusive of gay, lesbian, and bisexual players by writing in queer romantic narrative subplots into their games. While Bioware’s attempts are certainly not malicious, they fail time and time again, game after game, to break free of the hypermasculine and heterocentric culture dominant in the gaming industry. Instead, Bioware appropriates queer experiences and construes them as a burden to the player so as not to displace the fantasies of male, heterosexual gamers
The Environment at Play: Confronting Nature in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and the “Frostfall” Mod
Get PDFIn this paper, I argue that the natural environment in the base game of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is devoid of agency and power in the face of the player’s colonialist endeavours to explore, conquer and master that environment. Weaving together insights about spatiality in digital games from (ecocritical and postcolonial) game studies, as well as performance studies, the paper problematizes some of the most basic elements of digital games in general: navigation and movement. It then moves to a discussion of the “Frostfall” mod as one possible option to counteract the destructive and oppositional relationship between the player and nature in Skyrim. “Frostfall” is a mod that adds weather survival elements to the game, by which the player can freeze and die from hypothermia if they do not take the appropriate measures to cope with Skyrim’s harsh climate. In this way, the ‘power fantasy’ set up in the base game becomes somewhat limited, as the player’s agency encounters nature’s newfound agency and must find ways to negotiate the gameworld while taking seriously the environment as an agent in/of that gameworld
Guiding with a Soft Touch: Directing players in non-linear levels without UI
Get PDFResearch has demonstrated the difficulty in achieving a balance with User Interfaces(UI) in games. Almost all large, nonlinear levels rely on UI practices outside level design in order to guide players. The use of nondiegetic UI can lower player immersion and the use of diegetic navigational UI is extremely difficult to design well. Few attempts have been made todesign a large open world level that can be easily navigated without the use of some form of navigational UI, since research shows that the absence of UI can create a much better play experience. Many developers of linear single player games have begun to use embedded techniques, ranging from lighting and colour to motion and audio, to guide players through levels. However, these attempts have not been made in large nonlinear games.
This article explores the reliance of navigational UIin large nonlinear 3D levels by creating a 3D level using techniques such as light, colour, and architecture to guide players along an ideal path. By using an iterative development cycle with high amounts of internal testing throughout development, multiple navigational techniques were implemented. The level was tested for its effectiveness in guiding players at separate stages in development and updated based on the results before a final evaluation.
Results evidenced that players can be guided through large nonlinear levels as the designer intended without any UI and indicated that play style influenced how users move through spaces.
 
Editorial: Body Movements
No full textToday, the juxtaposition between physical bodies and the gameworld is ever more fluid. Virtual Reality headsets are available at game stores with more AAA games being created for the format. The release of the Nintendo Switch and its dynamic JoyCon controllers reintroduce haptic movement based controls. Pokémon GO’s augmented reality took gamers outdoors and has encouraged the Harry Potter franchise to follow in its mobile footsteps. Each development encourages a step further into the digital world.
At the same time, the movement of bodies always has political dimensions. We live in a world where walls seem like solutions to the movement of bodies, while the mere meeting of bodies elsewhere – for sex, marriage and other reasons – is still forbidden by many states’ rules. Games and game-like interfaces have shown the ability to bend those rules, and to sometimes project other worlds and rule systems over our world in order to make bodies move and meet.
For this special issue on ‘Body Movements’, Press Start invited authors to focus on embodiment, body movements, political bodies, community bodies, virtual bodies, physical bodies, feminine, masculine, trans- bodies, agency or its lack, and anything else in between. The response to this invitation was variegated, and provocative, as outlined here
Queer Gamer Assemblages and the Affective Elements of Digital Games
Get PDFCentering a discussion of gaming as an embodied experience, this essay explores the affective and embodied relationship between LGBT/queer gamers and video games. Drawing on qualitative interviews with seven queer gamers, I argue in that we should understand gamers as socio-technological assemblages, in order to illustrate how gamer identity, subjectivity, and sociality are enacted through the relationship between the body of a gamer and the game technologies. I further expand upon this by tending to how queer gamers talk about their embodied experiences and affective connections to various games through worlding and storytelling elements. These stories illustrate how games create affective possibilities for connection and belonging for queer gamers. I conclude by arguing that an attention to gaming as an embodied experience expands our conceptualizations of play and helps us understand the worldmaking practices that queer gamers often employ
Shrieking, Biting, and Licking: The Monstrous-Feminine and Abject Female Monsters in Video Games
No full textThis article examines examples of the monstrous-feminine in the form of abject female monsters in a selection of critically acclaimed and commercially successful video games. Various female monsters from CD Projekt RED’s The Witcher series (2007-2015), and Santa Monica Studio’s God of War series (2005-2013) are considered as examples of the abject monstrous-feminine which fall into a long tradition in horror media of making the female body and body movements into something horrific and repulsive. These female monsters use shrieking, biting, licking, and spreading disease as weapons against the male protagonist, who must slay them to restore symbolic order and progress in the games