KEER2022

Avanttítol: KEER2022. DiversitiesDescripció del recurs: 25 juliol 202

Augmented play: An analysis of augmented reality features in location-based games

As well as popularising location-based games, Pokémon GO helped connect location-based play with augmented reality (AR), bringing this still-nascent technology into the mainstream. Despite growing use of AR, its long-promised revolutionary potential remains stifled by limited innovation, technical barriers and lack of uptake by users. To explore how AR figures into location-based games, we analysed 11 location-based games with AR features. We identify four overarching ways these games incorporate the physical environment into gameplay: through superimposition, blending, immersivity and materiality. Our findings show that AR is most commonly a gimmick rather than a central element of the game experience and remains substantially hindered by technical glitches and limitations. While more advanced and deeply integrated AR mechanics are emerging, its use in location-based games remain far from the ‘technological imaginaries’ that have accompanied its development as AR continually oscillates between its status as a ‘mundane’ and ‘always-imminent’ technology.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

An Exploration of Voice

This combination of four pieces reflects an overarching theme of researching the ways that our foundations and experiences shape us, either by our own hands or by the hands of others. This is a final portfolio that was submitted to the English Department of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the field of English

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Planeswalking: Magic: The Gathering Across Analog and Digital Platforms

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between Wizards of the Coast\u27s trading card game Magic: The Gathering and its digital adaptations. I used critical technocultural, ludic discourse analysis, and ludic textual analysis to examine the analog trading card game and digital adaptations. I examined an archive of paratextual media including trade magazines, developer blogs, game reviews, and player guides. I chose Magic for its long history, impact on the analog game industry, and the sheer number of adaptations that have been produced. This analysis begins by introducing a method for describing analog to digital adaptations called Adaptation Mapping. Adaptation mapping describes adaptations as a relationship between how the interface of the game is remediated and the degree to which a game represents the thematic and ludic experiences of the original. Then I examine the narrative framework that allows Magic to tell stories through both its theme and mechanics. Identifying the figure of the Planeswalker as a key component in how narrative functions in Magic, I trace the development of the planeswalker as a player analog to independent original characters under the purview of Wizards of the Coast. The adaptations provide a backdrop for this change and highlights the way that the same mechanical and algorithmic systems can characterize both player and official characters within Magics ecosystem. This shift highlights the way that marketing is approached and influences the design of the game. Finally, I examine how digital adaptations are intwined with ludic platform economy that has emerged through the 2010s. The apparatus that allows for capital to flow through the community is coopted via adaptation and remediated in ways that redirect capital back towards Wizards of the Coast as the platform owner. Analog to digital adaptation is a critical juncture in examining the impact of platformization on play and games

The Post-human Gamer: Reflections on Fieldwork in World of Warcraft

This dissertation offers a longitudinal digital ethnography of a community of hardcore gamers who currently play, or have played, the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMO) World of Warcraft. The central theme embraces the challenge of identifying and voicing the emic perspective of these hardcore players, presenting them as individuals mediating their real lives (IRL, or in real life ) and virtual lives through social media and online multiplayer technologies, including the maintenance of relationships developed within the IRL and in-game spaces they inhabit. The dissertation offers a critical analysis of the hardcore gaming lifestyle as voiced by the gamers themselves, revealing not only their contestation of the boundaries of cultural expression, identity, and community, especially as it pertains to notions of “real” and “virtual” relationships, but also the social costs to their IRL lives. Embedding themselves within a virtual world community by way of immersive computer technologies (modem, PC, VoiP, mouse, and so on), yet conceptualizing this world as a prioritized reality, repositions these players out of the realm of traditional gamers and into one representing a post-human status. Ultimately, through this collaboration with this community of Post-human Gamers, the ethnographer challenges existing portrayals of these cultural groups in the media and within WoW itself, and offers a reflexive examination of the ethnographer\u27s own potentially self-destructive journey of researching the hardcore lifestyle