3,606 research outputs found
Chronotypology:a comparative method for analyzing game time
This article presents a methodology called âchronotypologyâ which aims to facilitate literary studies approaches to video games by conceptualizing game temporality. The method develops a comparative approach to how video games structure temporal experience, yielding an efficient set of termsââdiachrony,â âsynchrony,â and âunstable signifierââthrough which to analyze gamingâs âheterochroniaâ or temporal complexity. This method also yields an approach to the contentious topic of video game narrative which may particularly recommend it to literary scholars with an interest in the form. Along with some examples from conventional games, a close reading of the âreality-inspiredâ game Bury Me, My Love will serve to demonstrate the use of a chronotypological approach
Effects of Team-Based Computer Interaction: The Media Equation and Game Design Considerations
The current paper applies media equation research to video game de-sign. The paper presents a review of the existing media equation research, de-scribes a specific study conducted by the authors, discusses how the findings of the study can be used to inform future game design, and explores how other media equation findings might be incorporated into game design. The specific study, discussed in detail in the paper, explores the notion of team formation between humans and computer team-mates. The results show that while highly experienced users will accept a computer as a team-mate, they tend to react more negatively towards the computer than to human teammates (a âBlack Sheepâ Effect
Putting the "Fun Factor" Into Gaming: The Influence of Social Contexts on Experiences of Playing Videogames
The increasingly social nature of gaming suggests the importance of understanding its associated experiences and potential outcomes. This study examined the influence of social processes in gameplay and different gaming contexts on the experience of individual and group flow when engaged in the activity. It also examined the affective experiences associated with different types of social gaming. The research consisted of a series of focus groups with regular gamers. The results of the thematic analysis revealed the importance of social belonging, opportunities for social networking and the promotion of social integration for game enjoyment. However, social experiences could also facilitate feelings of frustration in gameplay as a result of poor social dynamics and competitiveness. The analysis furthermore suggested that group flow occurs in social gaming contexts, particularly in cooperative gameplay. A number of antecedents of this shared experience were identified (e.g., collective competence, collaboration, task-relevant skills). Taken together, the findings suggest social gaming contexts enhance the emotional experiences of gaming. The study demonstrates the importance of examining social gaming processes and experiences to further understand their potential influence on associated affective outcomes. Areas of further empirical research are discussed in reference to the studyâs findings
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Demon girl power: Regimes of form and force in videogames primal and Buffy the Vampire Slayer
'There's nothing like a spot of demon slaughter to make a girl's night'. Since the phenomenal success of the Tomb Raider (1996) videogame series a range of other videogames
have used carefully branded animated female avatars. As with most other media, the game industry tends to follow and expand on established lucrative formats to secure an established market share. Given the capacity
of videogames to create imaginary worlds in 3D that can be interacted with, it is not perhaps surprising that pre-established worlds are common in videogames, as is the case with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (there are currently three videogames based on the cult TV show 2000-2003), but in other games worlds have to be built from scratch, as is the case with Primal (2003). With the mainstream media's current romance with kickass action heroines, the advantage of female animated game avatars is their potential to broaden the appeal of games across genders. This is however a double-edged affair: as well as appealing to what might be a termed a post-feminist market, animated forms enable hyper-feminine proportions and impossible vigour.
I argue that becoming demon - afforded by the plasticity of animation â in these games troubles the representational qualities ordinarily afforded to female avatars in videogames. But I also argue that theories of representation are insufficient for a full understanding of the formal particularities of videogames and as
such it is crucial to address the impact of media-specific attributes of videogames on the interpellation of players into the game space and the way that power regimes are organised. While theories of gender representation can go someway towards understanding the ideological construction of game characters, they
are not developed sufficiently to accommodate the particular nature of player participation intrinsic to playing digital games. The fact that players are interpolated into the game worlds of the Buffyverse and Primal in ways quite different to other media forms is significant and I offer the concept of 'being-in-the-world-of-thegame'
to illustrate how theories of representation alone are not sufficient to the task of analysing videogame forms. This paper focuses on the ways in which the interactive and spatial features of videogame formats affect narrative structure, characterisation and themes (particularly agency and power) and I argue that an address of the ways that videogames operate structurally is essential if we are to understand how they take
animation into the realms of interactivity and how videogames generate meaning and pleasure
Optimising Humanness: Designing the best human-like Bot for Unreal Tournament 2004
This paper presents multiple hybridizations of the two best
bots on the BotPrize 2014 competition, which sought for the best humanlike
bot playing the First Person Shooter game Unreal Tournament 2004.
To this aim the participants were evaluated using a Turing test in the
game. The work considers MirrorBot (the winner) and NizorBot (the
second) codes and combines them in two different approaches, aiming to
obtain a bot able to show the best behaviour overall. There is also an
evolutionary version on MirrorBot, which has been optimized by means
of a Genetic Algorithm. The new and the original bots have been tested
in a new, open, and public Turing test whose results show that the evolutionary
version of MirrorBot apparently improves the original bot, and
also that one of the novel approaches gets a good humanness level.Universidad de MĂĄlaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional AndalucĂa Tech
Language-GAME-Players: Articulating the pleasures of âviolentâ game texts
Young peoplesâ voices have been considered irrelevant or unreliable when it comes to discussing the influence and impact of their engagement with screen-mediated depictions of violence. Historically, such viewpoints have been derived from the controlled experimentation of modernist psychology, which constitutes the most sustained and prominent enquiries into the consequences of individual participation in, and viewing of, simulated violence. In espousing an impersonal approach, psychological research has opted not to demonstrate any understanding of the properties of the particular games or the medium its findings have been used to denigrate. Neither does its research possess broader awareness of the social dimensions of play or the productivity inherent in the practices of its surrounding cultures. This paper introduces findings taken from a two-year project that attempted to draw together what have essentially remained separate lines of inquiry â the critical and analytical scrutiny of Game Studies applied to understanding the pleasures of engagement with game violence. The aim of this research was to achieve a more contextual understanding of texts that utilise violence from the perspective of young people that opt to experience them as an entertainment form. In doing so, a range of qualitative methods were employed to encourage game players to present their viewpoints and offer a voice that is all too often absent from the âone-way debateâ attached to the representation of violence within games
Fact, Fiction and Virtual Worlds
This paper considers the medium of videogames from a goodmanian standpoint. After some preliminary clarifications and definitions, I examine the ontological status of videogames. Against several existing accounts, I hold that what grounds their identity qua work types is code. The rest of the paper is dedicated to the epistemology of videogaming. Drawing on Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin's works, I suggest that the best model to defend videogame cognitivism appeals to the notion of understanding
Group emotion modelling and the use of middleware for virtual crowds in video-games
In this paper we discuss the use of crowd
simulation in video-games to augment their realism. Using
previous works on emotion modelling and virtual crowds we
define a game world in an urban context. To achieve that, we
explore a biologically inspired human emotion model,
investigate the formation of groups in crowds, and examine
the use of physics middleware for crowds. Furthermore, we
assess the realism and computational performance of the
proposed approach. Our system runs at interactive frame-rate
and can generate large crowds which demonstrate complex
behaviour
The challenge of Automatic Level Generation for platform videogames based on Stories and Quests
In this article we bring the concepts of narrativism and ludology to automatic level generation for platform videogames. The initial motivation is to understand how this genre has been used as a storytelling medium. Based on a narrative theory of games, the differences among several titles have been identified. In addition, we propose a set of abstraction layers to describe the content of a quest-based story in the particular context of videogames. Regarding automatic level generation for platform videogames, we observed that the existing approaches are directed to lower abstraction concepts such as avatar movements without a particular context or meaning. This leads us to the challenge of automatically creating more contextualized levels rather than only a set of consistent and playable entertaining tasks. With that in mind, a set of higher level design patterns are presented and their potential usages are envisioned and discussed
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