Meaning and emotion in Squaresoft\u27s Final Fantasy X: Re-theorising realism and identification in video games

This thesis takes the position that traditional theories of realism and identification misrepresent the relationships between players and videogames, and that a cross·disciplinary approach is needed. It uses Ed Tan\u27s (1997) and Torben Grodal\u27s (1997) analyses of narrative, cognition, and emotion in film as a basis for interrogating existing research on, and providing a working model of, video gameplay. It develops this model through an extended account of Squaresoft\u27s adventure role-playing game Final Fantasy X (FFX) (2001), whose hybrid narrative and game macrostructures foreground many of the problems associated with video games. The chapters respectively address; existing research on video games; how perceptual qualities of the interface determine the reality status of gameplay; how narrative and game codes regulate or retard interest; FFX\u27s henneneutic coding of reality; the dual narrative and game coding of video game characters; the uses and limits of the psychoanalytic concept of identification when analysing video games; how gameplay promotes empathetic emotions towards characters; how players develop empathetic emotions towards themselves; and how the disjunctive quality of play may have un existential quality

Automatic Recognition of Protective Behaviour in Chronic Pain Rehabilitation

Exergames are increasingly being proposed for physical rehabilitation in chronic pain. They can be engaging, fun and can facilitate the setting of targets and evaluating performances through body movement tracking and multimodal feedback. While these attributes are important, it is also essential that psychological factors that lead to avoidance of physical activity are addressed in the game design. Anxiety about increased pain and/or of further damage often causes people to behave in a self-protective manner (e.g., guarding movement) and to avoid particular movements. Protective behaviour may itself cause increased pain or strain. In this paper we investigate the possibility to automatically detect such behavior. Automatic detection of protective behaviour can be used to adapt the exergame at run time to alleviate anxiety and increase treatment efficacy

Aesthetics of sport : a metacritical analysis

This study attempted to analyze and synthesize the concepts of sport and metacritical aesthetics and to utilize that philosophical base from which to speculate on the nature of a metacritical aesthetic of sport. Tao complementary tools of philosophical research were utilized: "theory building" as described by Fraleigh (1970), and "analysis of the structure of knowledge" as developed by Gowin (1969). Fraleigh's design outlined steps or elements with which general and particular phenomena of interest are examined for consistency with and derivation from an existing philosophic statement. Gowin's methodology, which suggested the positing of a series of telling and connecting questions to explore a philosophical concept, was utilized to identify the germinal issues. The philosophical and experimental literature of aesthetics and sport was examined to identify the major ideas and concepts associated with the general phenomenon of interest, sport; the source philosophy, metacriticism; and with the particular phenomenon of interest, an aesthetic of sport

Play: paradox and paradigms

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses

Measuring musical interaction: analysing communication in embodied musical behaviour

This thesis addresses the ubiquity and necessity of embodied interaction to musical activity, using video analysis to observe communication in musical events. Through the specific study of classical North Indian instrumental duo performance, the thesis examines how processes of social interaction may inform human musical activity, using a combined methodology of ethnographic study and quantitative data analysis of original video-recordings. Proposing a pragmatic approach to the study of the meaningful nature of musical events, the thesis keeps sight of the generative context of the human body in social interaction, and offers a model of musical communication that privileges nonlinguistic, socially co-regulative elements in its account of human musical interaction. The socially meaningful nature of the behaviour-in-time of the musicians included in the study is investigated by means of a novel methodology. This combines the qualitative exploration of emic concepts related to the practice of North Indian classical music with an empirical analysis of video data, based on a cognitive ethological framework. The thesis draws on current notions of embodied cognition and contributes to the growing corpus of musicological literature emphasising the embodied and social nature of musical communication. The results of this exploratory study suggest that both social-interaction and music-structural factors contribute to the organisation of the musicians' communicative behaviours and that, to a certain extent, these organisational factors can be separated in analysis

Feeling the groove: shared time and its meanings for three jazz trios

The notion of groove is fundamental to jazz culture and the term yields a rich set of understandings for jazz musicians. Within the literature, no single perspective on groove exists and many questions remain about the relationship between timing processes, phenomenal experience and musical structures in making sense of groove. In this account, the experience and meaning of groove is theorised as emerging from two forms of sharedness. Firstly, a primary intersubjectivity that arises through the timing behaviours of the players; this could be likened to the 'mutual tuning-in' described in social phenomenology. It is proposed that this tuning-in is accomplished through the mechanism of entrainment. The second form of sharedness is understood as the shared temporal models, the cultural knowledge, that musicians make use of in their playing together. Methodologically, this study makes use of detailed investigation of timing data from live performances by three jazz trios, framed by in-depth, semi-structured interview material and steers a new course between existing ethnographic work on jazz and more psychologically informed studies of timing. The findings of the study point towards significant social and structural effects on the groove between players. The impact of musical role on groove and timing is demonstrated and significant temporal models, whose syntactic relations suggest musical proximity or distance, are shown to have a corresponding effect on timing within the trios. The musician's experience of groove is discussed as it relates to the objective timing data and reveals a complex set of understandings involving temporality, consciousness and communication. In the light of these findings, groove is summarised as the feeling of entrainment, inflected through cultural models and expressed through the cultural norms of jazz

Theoretical Video Game Analysis: The Creation of Experience

The creation of experiences is a focused Masters by Research thesis in the field of media and specifically game studies. The purpose of this study is to introduce and investigate the effects of game design, specifically through the open world genre on the player's experience. This approach involves applying a phenomenological theory to games participation in order to analyses the ways in which narratives are unfolded for the gamer. This thesis specifically aims to determine how the individual gaming sessions determines the connection one makes in order to create memorable and meaningful participation. Qualitative research was conducted, such as observation and textual analysis, to collect material and evidence to support the subject of the thesis. Features include: comprehensive approaches and theory for analysing video games: exploration of the methodology to provide new perspective on video games both as an art and as a cultural medium: accounts of specific case studies as a focal point expanding on the academic, social and cultural dynamics of video games. The meaning games create whilst experiencing the content, cannot be defined and to a certain degree identified until brought into the range of human interaction. These features, combined within this thesis, allow for the conclusion that the experience of playing a game depends on the individual and their formulation of the subjective projection of the content. This thesis hopes to offer access to further research and detailed analysis, and thus make a small contribution to improving the understanding on the connection between the player[s], hardware and the software