The papers from the DiGRA 2013 – Defragging Games Conference in Atlanta have now been made available.
Category: readings
Well Played vol 3, number 1
New issue of Well Played.
Assassin’s Creed III: The Complete Unofficial Guide, a Teacher’s Limited Edition
Wade Berger, Patrick Staley
Fiasco and Failure: Uncovering Hidden Rules in a Story Game
Sean C. Duncan
Ninja Gaiden Black and the Tutorial-Less Tutorial
Jason Mathias
Interaction Images promote Character Identification in Heavy Rain
Michael Nixon, Jim Bizzocchi
Replaying the remnants in Mark of the Ninja
Pierre-Marc Côté
Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: Values of Digital Objects in FarmVille2
Jane Gruning
Ascension: a Case Study in Deckbuilding Games
Andy Nealen
The Journal of Games Criticism
We have a new contender: The Journal of Games Criticism vol 1, issue 1 is out.
From Nicholas Hanford’s editorial:
With this journal, it is our aim to create a space for all members of the game studies, game journalism, and game development communities to publish criticism that influences both the making of games and betters our understanding of games as cultural artifacts.
Table of contents:
ARTICLES
Editorial: Standing on the Horizon of the Second Generation
by N. Hanford
Welcome to the inaugural issue of our open access, peer reviewed journal. Drawing out the assumptions and ideals of the journal, this text serves as an introduction for the current and future issues of the Journal of Games Criticism.
The Other Side of the Valley; Or, Between Freud and Videogames
by K. Aardse
This paper explores the root of the uncanny valley as based in Freud’s uncanny and posits that the uncanny valley allows us to engage in acts of violence and enjoy a masochistic relationship with the videogame; this relationship would break down if the uncanny valley is conquered.
INVITED ARTICLES
Across Worlds and Bodies: Criticism in the Age of Video Games
by B. Keogh
This article highlights the values inherited by game studies that have resisted the creation of a toolkit for close, descriptive analysis of individual texts. It suggests one path forward grounded in the phenomenological pleasures of videogame play across worlds and bodies.
“You’re Just Gonna Be Nice”: How Players Engage with Moral Choice Systems
by A. Lange
Are you a Paragon, or a Renegade? Light Side, or Dark Side? I surveyed over 1000 gamers to see how they engaged with moral choice systems in video games. The results are sadly predictable: You’re all too nice.
Public Memory and Gamer Identity: Retrogaming as Nostalgia
by D. S. Heineman
This essay adopts a critical perspective to analyze the rise of retrogaming culture and its related practices. Specifically, it considers the role of nostalgia in both constructing a retrogamer identity and in contesting histories of the medium.
Visualizing Game Studies: Materiality and Sociality from Chessboard to Circuit Board
by A. Trammell & A. Sinnreich
In this essay, we describe a paradigm shift in the social function and reception of games, from metaphors to social instruments. We also offer a taxonomic visualization of the Game Studies field in order to show the history of this paradigm shift.
BOOK REVIEW
Gaming for Better Life: A Review of Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken
by Q. Ji
Jane McGonigal’s groundbreaking work Reality Is Broken challenged the negative-effects-oriented rhetoric of game criticism by reconciling the contradictory relationship among games, individual well-being, and social change from a game designer’s perspective.
Bernie DeKoven’s new book “A Playful Path”
Is out now, and can be downloaded free of charge from the ETC web site.
Game Studies 13/2 on Game History
For your theoretical pleasure, here is the Game Studies 13/2 special issue on Game History.
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The Platform and the Player: exploring the (hi)stories of Elite
by Alison Gazzard
This article explores the landscape of British computer games through a case study of Elite. Utilising archival methodologies inherent in media archaeology, combined with approaches from platform studies, a history of Elite is approached through both its original development and the players’ responses to the game at the time. [more]
A Pedestal, A Table, A Love Letter: Archaeologies of Gender in Videogame History
by Laine Nooney
This article is a methodological exploration of gender as it relates to the writing of game history. This contribution presents three case studies, focused on the biography of Sierra On-Line cofounder and lead designer Roberta Williams, to analyze this historical mechanisms through which women are located — and left out of — game history. [more]
by David Parisi
This archaeological analysis of gamic electroshock charts changes in the way that electricity has been employed as a game mechanic, opening with an examination of the 18th century ‘electric kiss’ game, moving to a treatment of early 20th century arcade electricity, and concluding with a discussion of ludic electric shock in recent game art. [more]
The Foundation of Geemu: A Brief History of Early Japanese video games
by Martin Picard
The paper presents a short history of the beginning of the Japanese video game industry (from 1973 to 1983). It argues that specific local developments of a video game industry and market took place in Japan, which has never been addressed in Western histories of games, mainly interested in Japanese video games through a global perspective. [more]
Say it with a Computer Game: Hobby Computer Culture and the Non-entertainment Uses of Homebrew Games in the 1980s Czechoslovakia
by Jaroslav Švelch
Based on historical research into computer games in the 1980s Czechoslovakia, this article traces the uses of the medium in the context of an amateur community. It argues that the entertainment function of local homebrew games was often overshadowed by their potential as a means of communication among the community of users. [more]
Game Studies 13/1 is out
For your theoretical pleasure, Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research has just published its latest issue (Volume 13, Issue 1, September 2013). All articles are available at http://gamestudies.org/1301/
Contents
A Kinesthetic Theory of Videogames: Time-Critical Challenge and Aporetic Rhematic
by Veli-Matti Karhulahti
http://gamestudies.org/1301/ar
Sonic Mechanics: Audio as Gameplay
by Aaron Oldenburg
http://gamestudies.org/1301/ar
The work discusses the past and potential future intersections between game design and theories within contemporary sound art. The author will describe his design process in the creation of several experimental audio games. These range from music composition based on chance game events to silent games that simulate aspects of sound.
Automatic-Play and Player Deskilling in MMORPGs
by Stefano De Paoli
The concept of automatic-play refers to the use of game bots, macros and other software that allow a total or partial automation of gameplay and in particular avatar levelling. The paper theorizes a key aspect of the automation of gameplay: the deskilling of players with the transfer of human skills to automatic-play software.
A Review of Ludoliteracy: Defining, Understanding and Supporting Games Education
by Siobhán Thomas
http://gamestudies.org/1301/ar
Ludoliteracy: Defining, understanding, and supporting games education (2010). by José P. Zagal. Pittsburgh, PA: The ETC Press. ISBN:978-0-557-27791-9.
Game Developer Magazine, complete archive 1994-2013
I felt it a bit sad when Game Developer Magazine closed down in July. Though it was for a long clear that specialist magazines were threatened by, well, the internet, GDMag did provide an edited sense of what was happening in the game industry at any given time (with a North American slant, of course). I also remember poring over introductions to network programming in (it must have been) 1995 or so.
Now the entire back archive of the magazine is available directly for free, in PDF form. http://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag
It is pretty good as a document of 20 years of video game history. Remember when we were all (and all students were) aspiring to be AAA developers? It really happened, and here is the documentation.
Well Played: volume 2 number 2 – Theories
And here is volume 2, number 2 of the Well Played Journal titled Theories, John Sharp et al. 2013.
Inhabiting Games Well (If not Uncomfortably…) – Casey O’Donnell
Critical Literacy: Game Criticism for Game Developers – Yotam Haimberg
Well-played and well-debated: Understanding perspective in contested affinity spaces – Sean Duncan
On justification: WoW, EQ2 and Aion forums – Thibault Philippette, Baptiste Campion
Why we Glitch: process, meaning and pleasure in the discovery, documentation, sharing and use of videogame exploits – Alan Meades