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Structuring Feeling, Feeling Structure: Affect and the Game Engine
Get PDFCritical engine studies is a burgeoning subfield of games studies that takes as its point of departure not games themselves but the tools used to create them. Scholars in this field take seriously the influence that game development software, also known as game engines, have not only on the development process but on games culture and beyond. Far from viewing them as abstract tools or apolitical pieces of software, critical engine studies insists upon understanding engines as sociocultural objects as much as technical ones. This work requires, and the field calls for, new conceptual frameworks and analytical methods to advance our understanding of engines and the work that they do.In this thesis, I consider affect as one approach to developing a more nuanced perspective of game engines. Affect is, I propose, well-equipped to refuse the abstraction that critical engine scholars problematize by not merely attending to game engine use but to the game engine user— and doing so with radical specificity. I consider three approaches to affect across the social sciences and the humanities in order to think broadly about what its multiple modalities can offer critical engine studies. First, I look at how affective game engines like GAMYGDALA strive to reproduce affect in the games that they are used to make. By providing prebuilt code structures that developers can then deploy in their own games, these engines formalize but also flatten emotional experience in order to render it machine-legible. Second, I turn to a more expansive definition of affect to consider how engines structure feeling for users themselves. By looking at objects such as Become a Great Artist in Just 10 Seconds, I argue that game engines are always already affective, although some are felt more intensely and more deliberately than others. Finally, I consider how feeling could itself act as a mode of inquiry for critical engine studies. Drawing from queer theory and personal experience feeling different game development software, I argue that we can use affect to advance our understanding of game engines and how they act upon the user. Even when a game engine’s structure cannot be seen, it can still be felt, and it is through such feeling that we can come to characterize engines beyond a binary discourse of freedom versus control
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Bootleg Consoles: Culture, History, and Legitimacy at the Margins Of Gaming
No full textPirated “bootleg consoles” have existed alongside traditionally released video gameconsoles since the popularization of the medium in the 1970s, often providing regional
compatibility to players in secondary markets left unsupported by the mainstream gaming
industry. Yet in current contexts, these consoles are culturally derided by Western gaming fans;
viewed as illegitimate and inferior products meant to trick consumers out of their money. Despite
this cultural perception, there is an active community of gaming fans, preservationists, and
historians who see value in them as important pieces of the gaming ecosystem and the history of
games.Drawing upon qualitative and historical research methods, this dissertation explores thegenre of bootleg consoles both historically and culturally to understand their place in the gaming
landscape and the lives of game users. It seeks to go beyond bootleg consoles’ negative
communal perception and show these artifacts as culturally evocative objects that speak to the
complex social relationships that occur in and through the medium of video games—complex
social interactions that range in scale from as high as transnational politics to as minute as
interpersonal relationships. In situating these devices within a wider narrative of the global
emergence of video games, I contend that bootleg consoles speak to the prominence of video
games as a colonial medium, inform how cultural narratives are weaponized in gaming fandoms,
and reveal how, despite all of that, video game participation still emerges and flourishes even in
inhospitable environments
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Playing with the Double Bind: Authenticity, Gender, and Failure in Live Streaming
Get PDFMisogyny and meritocracy in video game live streaming culture are powerful forces that shape the experience of streamers according to social norms and stereotypes regarding authenticity and gender. In streaming culture, feminine gender performances and authentic performance as a streamer are considered by many streamers to be mutually exclusive. Using the framework of double binds as patterns of competing expectations, I explore how popular notions of authenticity and the figure of an authentic player in video games culture interact with stereotypes about women in the context of the live streaming ecosystem. Using qualitative methods of discourse analysis, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews, I present an account of how marginalized streamers experience and deal with labor, harassment, authentic expression, and the social failure that comes with being deemed inauthentic. The central double bind revealed in this work is between gender and gamer identity. In this double bind, stereotypes about the skills and motivations of women place women further at odds with the streamer subject position when they are forced to choose between skillful play or emotional engagement. I argue that these double binds restricting women in streaming, while powerful, are paradoxical because streaming is a creative cultural industry fundamentally based in gendered labor. Harassing women and situating them as failures are therefore actions meant to disavow the many gendered aspects of live streaming labor. Discussing these issues with 17 femme non-binary, genderfluid, and women streamers, I found that many have struggled with issues of gender and authenticity in streaming. This manifested through their decisions to stream with the camera on or off, to practice a game before streaming it, and conversational topics they have to avoid in chat. Despite these experiences, they persist in engaging in the work of streaming for the sake of their communities, for reasons of personal fulfillment, and to politically assert their presence on the platform. However, this persistence continues to expose them to abuse and objectification. What I contribute with this research is an understanding of how women in live streaming perform for or despite the sociotechnical affordances of live streaming that enact a meritocratic hierarchy, enforce notions of commercialized authenticity, and police and politicize gender performance. This account demonstrates a further need for an understanding of how streamers are marginalized and who benefits from this marginalization
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Inter-Asian Gaming in Southeast Asia: Remapping the Globalization of Videogames through the Lens of Malaysia and Singapore
No full textThe gaming landscape of Southeast Asia, dubbed by prominent market reports as “the world’s fastest growing games region,” has undergone profound transformation due to globalization since the late 1990s. Southeast Asia, however, remained an understudied region in game studies. Conversely, videogame as a medium is largely overlooked by scholars in Southeast Asian studies. Due to this gap, mainstream discourses about Southeast Asia vis-à-vis gaming are driven by industry rhetoric that frames the region as a new frontier to be exploited, neglecting the agency of Southeast Asians in shaping their own gaming culture and history.To remedy this issue, this project charts the evolution of Southeast Asian gaming culture from the perspective of Malaysia and Singapore between the 1990s and 2010s occasioned by the region’s integration into the global gaming economy in ways that foreground the agency of local entities, including players, developers, private companies, and state agencies. In particular, the late 2000s is an important turning point which marks the intensification of endeavors to formalize gaming activities from within the region. The elevation of videogames into an essential cultural and economic sector within the region, while brought on by foreign impetus, is increasingly driven by Southeast Asian entities, especially state governments invested in strengthening their positions in the global digital economy.This project proposes that Southeast Asia can serve as a framework to remap the globalization of videogames through the lens of regional integration, which allows for an alternative mode of knowledge production that recenters Southeast Asian autonomy. I name this framework the “Inter-Asian Gaming.” Inspired by Kuan-Hsing Chen’s “Asia as method,” Inter-Asian Gaming aims to decenter the West by focusing on regional gaming economy, including intra-regional cooperation within Southeast Asia and inter-regional exchanges with East Asia. I posit that a study of Southeast Asian gaming culture that centers on regional interconnections holds the potential to generate alternative understandings of non-Western gaming histories in relation to neighboring spaces instead of imperialist centers
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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