Fictional Practices of Spirituality I: Interactive Media

"Fictional Practices of Spirituality" provides critical insight into the implementation of belief, mysticism, religion, and spirituality into worlds of fiction, be it interactive or non-interactive. This first volume focuses on interactive, virtual worlds - may that be the digital realms of video games and VR applications or the imaginary spaces of life action role-playing and soul-searching practices. It features analyses of spirituality as gameplay facilitator, sacred spaces and architecture in video game geography, religion in video games and spiritual acts and their dramaturgic function in video games, tabletop, or LARP, among other topics. The contributors offer a first-time ever comprehensive overview of play-rites as spiritual incentives and playful spirituality in various medial incarnations

Ancient Greece and Rome in Videogames: Representation, Player Processes, and Transmedial Connections

Videogames are a hugely popular entertainment medium that plays host to hundreds of different ancient world representations. They provide very distinctive versions of recreated historical and mythological spaces, places, and peoples. The processes that go into their development, and the interactive procedures that accompany these games, must therefore be equally unique. This provides an impetus to both study the new ways in which ancient worlds are being reconfigured for gameplayers who actively work upon and alter them, and to revisit our conception of popular antiquity, a continuum within popular culture wherein ancient worlds are repeatedly received and changed in a variety of media contexts. This project begins by locating antiquity within a transmedial framework, permitting us to witness the free movement of representational strategies, themes, subtexts and ideas across media and into ancient world videogames. An original approach to the gameplay process, informed by cognitive and memory theory, characterises interaction with virtual antiquity as a procedure in which the receiver draws on preconceived notions and ideas of the ancient past to facilitate play. This notion of “ancient gameplay” as a reception process fed by general knowledges, previous pop-cultural engagements, and dim resonances of antiquity garnered from broad, informal past encounters allows for a wide, all-encompassing study of “ancient games”, the variety of sources they (and the player) draw upon, and the many experiences these games offer. The first chapter demonstrates the interrelationships between cinematic and televisual representations of antiquity and their action-based videogame counterparts, illustrating the ways in which branches of the onscreen tradition are borrowed and evolved in their new interactive forms. The next collective of ancient games locates “general” ancient materials in role-playing videogames, where familiar signifying materials are deployed to confront players with colonial spaces. The next chapter investigates the other side of ancient gameplay in foreign lands by investigating at how strategy games can become entrenched within a standardised visual vocabulary to provide one-sided, even troubling, impressions of classical empires represented in these gameworlds. The final chapter concretizes the transmedial, broadly cultural approach to ancient games and their play processes by presenting first-person videogames as multi-layered, multifaceted texts in which disparate, but specific, nodes of interpretative traditions surrounding ancient materials are drawn upon to immerse players in stylised, narrative-rich and thematically deep experiences. This study therefore has three primary motivations: to see how antiquity is represented and made functional in the interactive medium; to see how this affects player reception of these ancient games; and to build an interconnected “big picture” of antiquity in videogames within a wider media environment

Le goût pour le Moyen Âge dans les fictions post-catastrophiques contemporaines : Une lecture mésocritique

Cette thèse a pour objectif de comprendre l’engouement pour le Moyen Âge dans la culture de genres contemporaine et, plus spécifiquement, dans les fictions post-catastrophiques. Ces fictions, dans la mesure où elles témoignent d’une appréciation négative du monde contemporain qui les a vues naître, appellent pour les analyser une herméneutique soucieuse d’examiner les relations qu’elles entretiennent avec la société d’où elles émergent. En raison de leur caractère utopique, de telles fictions opèrent une lecture symptômale de la conjoncture présente et proposent en retour une alternative (une contrepartie améliorative) sous la forme d’une société autre, sise dans un espace-temps autre. Nombre d’entre elles, produites dans les dernières décennies du XXe s. et au début du XXIe s., ont ceci de particulier qu’elles traitent moins d’organisations sociales que d’un écoumène, d’une part – un terme qui désigne l’ensemble des milieux humains vus comme les relations techniques et symboliques qu’une société entretient avec son environnement (Berque 2000b) – ainsi que des modalités de l’habiter en cet écoumène, d’autre part. L’hypothèse de départ de cette thèse est la suivante : le goût pour le Moyen Âge dans la culture de genres contemporaine témoigne moins d’une affinité des producteurs et des récepteurs d’œuvres médiévalistes avec cette période historique qu’avec l’écoumène et l’habiter qui la caractérisent – ou du moins ceux que la culture de genres contemporaine lui impute –, mais aussi d’un rejet symétrique de l’écoumène et de l’habiter contemporains. En d’autres termes, il est question ici d’un malaise de l’habiter. En vue d’atteindre l’objectif que nous nous sommes fixé, une perspective soucieuse d’examiner la représentation de l’écoumène et de l’habiter dans les fictions post-catastrophiques d’inspiration médiévale sera proposée, la mésocritique, de même qu’une méthode qui lui est propre, l’analyse mésogrammatique. Une fois cette perspective et cette méthode définies, elles seront appliquées à un corpus composé de la pentalogie romanesque The Maze Runner, de James Dashner, des franchises transmédiatiques Dead Rising, de Capcom, et Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, de Ninja Theory, ainsi que du roman Cloud Atlas, de David Mitchell

Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association -- Vol. 3, No. 2

No-one Plays Alone Chris Bateman “Ruinensehnsucht” Longing for Decay in Computer Games Mathias Fuchs Creative Communities: Shaping Process through Performance and Play Lynn Parker & Dayna Galloway Playful Fandom: Gaming, Media and the Ludic Dimensions of Textual Poaching Orion Mavridou A Review of Social Features in Social Network Games Janne Paavilainen, Kati Alha, & Hannu Korhonen Focus, Sensitivity, Judgement, Action: Four Lenses for Designing Morally Engaging Games Malcolm Ryan, Dan Staines, & Paul Formosa Developing Ideation Cards for Mixed Reality Game Design Richard Wetzel, Tom Rodden, & Steve Benford Source Code and Formal Analysis: A Reading of Passage Ea Christina Willumsen </ul