49,277 research outputs found
Avatars Going Mainstream: Typology of Tropes in Avatar-Based Storytelling Practices
Due to the growing popularity of video games, gaming itself has become a shared experience among media audiences worldwide. The phenomenon of avatar-based games has led to the emergence of new storytelling practices. The paper proposes a typology of tropes in these avatar-based narratives focusing on non-game case studies. Suggested tropes are also confronted with the latest research on avatars in the area of game studies and current knowledge of the issues concerning the player-avatar relationship. Some of the most popular misconceptions regarding the gameplay experience and its representation in non-game media are exposed as a result of this analysis. The research confirms that popular culture perceives gaming experience as closely related to the player identity, as the latter inspires new genres of non-game narratives
Event-sequences, plots and narration in computer games
Starting with the debate between ludologists and narratologists this essay tries to show that there is a narrative aspect in computer games which has nothing to do with background stories and cut scenes. A closer analysis of two sequences, taken from the MMORPG Everquest II and the adventure game Black Mirror, is the basis for a distinction between three aspects of this kind of narrative in computer games: the sequence of activities of the player, the sequence of events as it is determined by the mechanics of the game and this sequence of events understood as a plot, that is as a sequence of chronologically ordered and causally linked events. This kind of narrative is quite distant to the prototypical narrative which is the basis of most of the narratology. But actually all media, not only computer games, need their own narratology
Writing In and Around Video Games
This undergraduate course uses video games as a lens through which to explore the infinitely broader topic of digital rhetoric. Students encounter games in several different ways: as texts to analyze, raw material for video compositions, systems to create and explore. Key topics include genre conventions and constraints, audience, procedural rhetoric, interface design, and convergence culture
Indirect Match Highlights Detection with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Highlights in a sport video are usually referred as actions that stimulate
excitement or attract attention of the audience. A big effort is spent in
designing techniques which find automatically highlights, in order to
automatize the otherwise manual editing process. Most of the state-of-the-art
approaches try to solve the problem by training a classifier using the
information extracted on the tv-like framing of players playing on the game
pitch, learning to detect game actions which are labeled by human observers
according to their perception of highlight. Obviously, this is a long and
expensive work. In this paper, we reverse the paradigm: instead of looking at
the gameplay, inferring what could be exciting for the audience, we directly
analyze the audience behavior, which we assume is triggered by events happening
during the game. We apply deep 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3D-CNN) to
extract visual features from cropped video recordings of the supporters that
are attending the event. Outputs of the crops belonging to the same frame are
then accumulated to produce a value indicating the Highlight Likelihood (HL)
which is then used to discriminate between positive (i.e. when a highlight
occurs) and negative samples (i.e. standard play or time-outs). Experimental
results on a public dataset of ice-hockey matches demonstrate the effectiveness
of our method and promote further research in this new exciting direction.Comment: "Social Signal Processing and Beyond" workshop, in conjunction with
ICIAP 201
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
Narratives from YouTube: Juxtaposing stories about physical education
The aim of this paper is to explore what is performed in studentsâ and teachersâ actions in physical education practice in terms of âdidactic irritations,â through an analysis of YouTube clips from 285 PE lessons from 27 different countries. Didactic irritations are occurrences that RĂžnholt describes as those demanding âdidactic, pedagogical reflections and discussions, which in turn could lead to alternative thinking and understanding about teaching and learning.â Drawing on Baradâs ideas of performativity to challenge our habitual anthropocentric analytical gaze when looking at educational visual data, and using narrative construction, we also aim to give meaning to actions, relations, and experiences of the participants in the YouTube clips. To do this, we present juxtaposing narratives from teachers and students in terms of three âdidactic irritationsâ: (a) stories from a track, (b), stories from a game, and (c), stories from a bench. The stories re-present events-of-moving in the data offering insights into embodied experiences in PE practice, making studentsâ as well as teachersâ actions in PE practice understandable
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