Gamemunication: prosthetic communication ethnography of game Avatars

This study revisits Hymes’ ethnography of communication for game avatars, functioning as a communication nexus connecting games and gamers. Hymes formulates his ethnography of communication into SPEAKING (Settings and Scenes, Participants, Ends, Act Sequences, Keys, Instrumentalities, Norms, and Genres) and this formula deems to be unfit to explain how game avatars communicate. Implementing Klevjer’s prosthetic telepresence (2012) to analyze sixty-two game titles, it is revealed that SPEAKING requires an extension when applied to study game avatars since the formula is not designed to explain the prosthetic nature of game avatars. This prosthetic nature produces specific communication ethnography of avatars, which we dub prosthetic communication ethnography. By prosthetic communication ethnography refers to technical elements of gaming, which contribute to the ways the avatars communicate. As Hymes’ ethnography of communication with SPEAKING, this avatar based communication ethnography requires the same tool of analysis, which we call GAMING (Gaming systems, Attributes, Mechanics, Indexicalities, Narratives, and Geosocial systems), constructed with indexical storytelling by Fernández-Vara (2011), user interface types of games by Stonehouse (2014) and prosthetic video game theory by Jagodzinski (2019) as the theoretical foundations. GAMING and SPEAKING are integrated by bridging them with Aarseth’s ludonarrative dimensions (2012)

Figuren in Film, Fernsehen, Literatur und anderen Medien : eine interdisziplinäre Arbeitsbibliographie

Eine theoretische Auseinandersetzung mit fiktiven Figuren begann spätestens vor gut 2000 Jahren mit Aristoteles’ Poetik und dem indischen Natyashastra. Wie in diesen einflussreichen Poetiken des Theaters standen Jahrhunderte lang normative Konzepte im Vordergrund, bis sich die Forschungsschwerpunkte Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts auf die psychologische Interpretation von Figuren und in den sechziger Jahren des 20. Jahrhunderts auf ihre formale Analyse verlagerten. Ein Fokus der heutigen Forschung liegt auf dem Bemühen, solche unterschiedlichen Perspektiven zu integrieren. Grundlage dafür ist oft eine Beschäftigung mit der Rezeption: Wie verstehen wir Figuren, und auf welche Weisen reagieren wir emotional auf sie

Interaction and interest management in a scripting language.

Interaction management is concerned with the protocols that govern interactive activities among multiple users or agents in networked collaborative environments. Interest management is concerned with the relevance-based data filtering in networked collaborative environments. The main objective of the former is to structure interactive activities according to the requirements of the application concerned, while the main objective of the latter is to provide secured data transmission of a subset of information relevant to each recipient. The research in these two important aspects of networked software has largely been carried out in specific application domains such as online meetings, online groupware and online games. This thesis is concerned with the design and implementation of high-level language constructs for interaction and interest management. The work that has been undertaken includes: an abstract study of interactive activities and data transmission in networked collaborative environments through a large number of variations of the noughts and crosses game; the design of a set of language constructs for specifying a variety of interaction protocols; the design of a set of language constructs for specifying secured data sharing with relevance-based filtering; the implementation of these language constructs in the form of a major extension of a scripting language JACIE (Java-based Authoring Language for Collaborative Interactive Environments); the development of two demonstration applications, namely e-leaming on Simulation of Network Trouble Shooting and online Bridge, using the extended JACIE for demonstrating the technical feasibility and usefulness of the design. These high-level language constructs support a class of complicated software features in networked collaborative applications, such as turn management, interaction timing, group formation, dynamic protocol changes, distributed data sharing, access control, authentication and information filtering. They enable programmers to implement such features in an intuitive manner without involving low-level system programming directly, which would otherwise require the knowledge and skills of experienced network programmers