readings – Page 3 – The Ludologist

Game Studies vol 21, issue 1 (20th anniversary)

Yes, Game Studies issue 21/1 is out. The rumors are true, this is the 20th anniversary issue.

Without going overboard reminiscing, I’ll just say I think our major goals were achieved, and that it’s fine how Game Studies is just one journal among many now. I think we helped:

Provide a platform for all kinds of work related to video games – humanities, social science, philosophical, aesthetic, political.
Establish video games as a meaningful cultural form (with “aesthetic, cultural and communicative” aspects, as the original header said).
Establish that this meaning (and politics) can be found not only using traditional analytical tools, but that a new object of study can call for new tools (yeah, such as looking at meaning, politics in game rules and interaction – which many people resisted in the beginning).
Reflect a field that changed over time.

One thing I have learned since is that history is basically a game of telephone, often a heavily mythologized one. Thus I don’t want to overstate our centrality – many people were studying video games and thinking about publication channels back then and before. And to counter the erasure that the game of mythologizing telephone creates, let me just list and thank all the people who were in the original group when I was most involved in the journal: Espen Aarseth, Markku Eskelinen, Marie-Laure Ryan, Susana Tosca, Gonzalo Frasca, Anja Rau, Aki Järvinen, Lisbeth Klastrup, Torill Mortensen, Jill Walker.

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Two Decades of Game Studies

by Espen Aarseth

This issue of Game Studies marks the 20th anniversary of the journal.[more]

Animal Mayhem Games and Nonhuman-Oriented Thinking

by Marco Caracciolo

This article discusses a recent strand of videogames that foreground disruptive animal characters in an urban environment. I link this “animal mayhem” to recent debates on the nonhuman, showing that videogames like Goat Simulator and Untitled Goose Game (my case studies) evoke the inherent strangeness of human-nonhuman connectedness.[more]

Beyond the French Touch: The Contestataire Moment in French Adventure Digital Games (1984-1990)

by Filip Jankowski

This article attempts to suggest a revision of the historical aesthetic category frequently called the “French Touch.” The article focuses on games that matched the contestataire moment in the history of France from three development circles (Froggy Software, Cobra Soft and François Coulon), arguing that they escape this traditional categorization.[more]

The Child in Games: Representations of Children in Video Games (2009 – 2019)

by Emma Reay

This paper examines representations of children in contemporary video games through content analysis. Using a sample of over 500 games published between 2009 and 2019, it identifies the dominant functions of child characters and documents patterns of representation across genres and over time.[more]

“Twere Well It Were Done Quickly”: What Belongs in a Glitchless Speedrun?

by Martin Ricksand

This article analyzes speedruns, the practice of beating a game as fast as possible. The article applies theories from the philosophy of sport as well as the philosophy of fiction, and outlines a way of how to adjudicate on what strategies may be employed in different kinds of speedruns.[more]

“Actual history doesn’t take place”: Digital Gaming, Accuracy and Authenticityby Eve Stirling, Jamie Wood

This paper examines university students’ perceptions of how playing historical videogames has affected their understanding of the past. It focuses on how active engagement in gameplay affects perceptions of historical time and sense of place, in particular the relative importance of accuracy and authenticity.[more]

Towards a Model of Objective-Based Reward Systems

by Agata Waszkiewicz, Mateusz Kominiarczuk

The article proposes a model of objective-based reward systems based on Gary Alan Fine’s frame analysis and Jesper Juul’s goal typology. The model reconceptualizes various reward-bound goals commonly encompassed under the categories “quests” and “achievements” in order to show them as non-homogenous and yet not dissimilar.[more]

Book Reviews

Review: Who Are You? Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance Platform

by Martin Roth

Who Are You? Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance Platform (2020) by Alex Custodio. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262044394. pp. 280.[more]

Review: Transnational Play: Piracy, Urban Art, and Mobile Games

by John Sharp

Transnational Play: Piracy, Urban Art, and Mobile Games (2020) by Anne-Marie Schleiner. Baltimore, Maryland: Project MUSE. ISBN: 9789048543946. pp. 182.[more]

Game Studies vol 20, issue 4 is out

For your theoretical traversal, Game Studies volume 20, issue 4.

Articles

Assessing Toxic Behaviour in Dead by Daylight : Perceptions and Factors of Toxicity According to the Game’s Official Subreddit Contributors
by Patrick Deslauriers, Laura Iseut Lafrance St-Martin, Maude Bonenfant

This article identifies 5 key aggravating factors that may lead to toxic in-game interactions according to players’ perception. We studied the Dead by Daylight community using a content analysis of players’ conversations on the game’s official subreddit to help us better understand how they perceive potentially toxic behaviour inside of the game.[more]

Dungeon Pirates of the Postcolonial Seas. Domination, Necropolitics, Subsumption and Critical Play in Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
by Mateusz Felczak

This article is a close reading of a cRPG directly approaching the topic of colonialism in the fantasy setting. Its main goal is to present a framework inspired by the ideas of Achille Mbembe to assess the difficulties in applying potential elements of critical play that would transfer from the narrative into the game’s mechanics.[more]

Negotiating Textures of Digital Play: Gameplay and the Production of Space
by Justyna Janik

This paper analyzes the mechanisms of communication connecting different types of actant during the moment of digital gameplay. Gameplay is here interpreted in the context of Lefebvre’s concept of texture, developing a view of gameplay as a performative and communicative experience.[more]

Grades on Games: Gaming Preferences and Weekly Studying on College GPAs
by Kelsey Prena, Andrew J. Weaver

This study surveys college undergraduates to explore patterns across gaming, studying, and academic performance. Time studying on the weekends (positive), gender, and preferences for action games (negative) were significant predictors of academic performance. These results and complimentary results are discussed.[more]

Like Seeing Yourself in the Mirror? Solitary Role-Play as Performance and Pretend Play
by Jaakko Stenros, Tanja Sihvonen

This article analyzes the single-player digital role-playing game as performance and pretend play through character creation, character interaction, and game mechanics. These games are positioned as toys that are “pretend-played” with expectations. Players’ extended “pretend play” is conceptualized and analyzed as queering.[more]

Player customization, competence and team discourse: exploring player identity (co)construction in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
by Matilda Ståhl, Fredrik Rusk

This ethnographic study explores a participant’s perspective on local player identity (co)construction in Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO). Although there are individual variances, the identities (co)constructed orient towards a perceived competent player identity shaped by technomasculine norms in online game culture.[more]

From Dead-end to Cutting Edge: Using FMV Design Patterns to Jumpstart a Video Revival
by Carl Therrien, Cindy Poremba, Jean-Charles Ray

This paper argues that design patterns from full motion videogames are a useful source of design knowledge that can scaffold the development of new works. It presents results from a historical analysis of over ninety games using live-action full motion video. Methods for re-integrating this knowledge back into the design process are explored.[more]

(Re)Mastering Dark Souls
by Timothy Welsh

This paper argues that the aesthetic experience of playing Dark Souls changes over time as the player community shares its collective mastery of the game. It analyses how late-stage player practices often replace exploration and discovery with efficiency and productivity. In conclusion it raises the need for a historically situated poetics of play.[more]

Book Reviews

Shira Chess, Play Like a Feminist.
by Esther MacCallum-Stewart

Play like a Feminist. (2020) by Shira Chess. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262044387. 184 pp.[more]

Game Studies 20/3 is out

For your theoretical consideration: Game Studies volume 20, issue 3.

“Elves are Jews with Pointy Ears and Gay Magic”: White Nationalist Readings of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
by Kristian A. Bjørkelo

This article explores how White Nationalists on Stormfront interpret (decode) Skyrim in accordance with their own worldview and the affordances of the game. In their eyes the Nords are a Germanic people and “Elves are Jews with pointy ears and gay magic”.[more]

A Typology of Imperative Game Goals
by Michael S. Debus, José P. Zagal, Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera

This paper presents a typology of game goals to fill a gap in the literature regarding kinds of goals in games and how they are interrelated. We focus on ludic goals, instead of player created or narrative goals. The typology can be used for describing goal structures, how higher-level goals relate to lower levels and analyzing a games’ design.[more]

Sorry, Wrong Apocalypse: Horizon Zero Dawn, Heaven’s Vault, and the Ecocritical Videogame
by Megan Condis

This article is an examination of the ecocritical potential of Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerilla Games, 2017) and Heaven’s Vault (inkle, 2019). I argue that to properly depict climate change, we must develop new narrative formats and game mechanics that showcase “slow violence” (Nixon 2011).[more]

The New Lara Phenomenon: A Postfeminist Analysis of Rise of the Tomb Raider
by Janine Engelbrecht

Lara Croft, the heroine of the popular Tomb Raider videogame series, has undergone a major transformation after the series reboot 2013. The new representation of Lara Croft is a clear departure from the postfeminist action heroine archetype and is replicated in other post-2013 videogames with female protagonists.[more]

Applying corpus linguistics to videogame data: Exploring the representation of gender in videogames at a lexical level

by Frazer Heritage

This paper argues for applying corpus linguistics to videogames; a method that can reveal textual patterns in a corpus of games. This method is applied to gender representation in an example corpus, offering quantitative analysis of how discourses around social identities are (re)produced.[more]

The Historical Problem Space Framework: Games as a Historical Medium

by Jeremiah McCall

Historical games present the past in terms of historical problem spaces: player agents with roles and goals that are contextualized in a virtual world whose features enable and constrain player action. The HPS framework helps us better understand the gamic medium of history, with utility for historical game scholars, educators, and game designers.[more]

Reconsidering The Grasshopper: On the Reception of Bernard Suits in Game Studies

by Liam Mitchell

While Bernard Suits’s landmark book The Grasshopper is as playful as it is rigorous, scholars in game studies tend to reference it only for its apparently bloodless definition of gameplay. This paper responds to this reception by highlighting the productive ambiguities of the text, particularly the relationship between games and society.[more]

Janky Controls and Embodied Play: Disrupting the Cybernetic Gameplay Circuit

by M. D. Schmalzer

This article develops the concept of janky controls to disrupt the assumed cybernetic connection of player and game. Through this disruption, standard notions of player subjectivity is also disrupted allowing for more diverse players and videogame design practices.[more]

Interviewed for the Professor Game Podcast

Rob Alvarez Bucholska was kind enough to interview me for his Professor Game podcast.

The conversation touches on a lot of things I don’t usually talk about, like writing method, game design methods, and the relation between game-making and theory. I hope you enjoy it.

Direct link here.

Bernie De Koven’s The Infinite Playground is out

I am happy to announce that Bernie De Koven’s final book is now out, courtesy of Holly Gramazio, Celia Pearce, and Eric Zimmerman. I contributed a small essay about what it was like to play with Bernie.

The Infinite Playground is available from MIT Press and elsewhere.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/infinite-playground

Game Studies vol 20, issue 1

For your theoretical inspection: Game Studies 20/01.

“I Harbour Strong Feelings for Tali Despite Her Being a Fictional Character”: Investigating Videogame Players’ Emotional Attachments to Non-Player Characters
by Jacqueline Burgess, Christian Jones

This study investigated players’ emotional attachment to two non-player characters from BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy. Qualitative analysis of forum posts found players expressed intense emotional attachments but from different viewpoints. These emotional attachments also influenced how players engaged with the game mechanics of Mass Effect 2.

Sick, Slow, Cyborg: Crip Futurity in Mass Effect
by Adan Jerreat-Poole

Can science fiction stories imagine more just futures for disabled bodies? Turning away from a future where technology has eradicated disability, this article explores crip encounters in Mass Effect 1-3 and interrogates the complex relationships between technology, culture, and disability.

Playing Virtual Jim Crow in Mafia III – Prosthetic Memory via Historical Digital Games and the Limits of Mass Culture
by Emil Lundedal Hammar

This article applies the concept of prosthetic memory to Mafia III in order to discuss the significance of both contexts of production and reception in determining memory-making potentials of historical digital games with attention to racialized oppression in and beyond games.

I’d Like to Buy the World a Nuka-Cola: The Purposes and Meanings of Video Game Soda Machines
by Jess Morrissette

Why do soda machines appear so frequently in video games? What purposes do they serve? What values do they represent? This article examines how virtual soda machines help anchor video games in a world we recognize as similar to our own, while simultaneously reinforcing the consumerist values of modern capitalism.

Liminality and the Smearing of War and Play in Battlefield 1
by Debra Ramsay

This article interrogates how war and play are smeared together in Battlefield 1, the first AAA game set in World War I. It advances liminality as a conceptual framework to investigate the ambiguities and contradictions that emerge in the tension between the history, memory and cultural meanings of World War I and the game’s ludic qualities.