Adarna: Remediating Philippine Source Texts Through Video Games

This paper will explore the possibilities of using video games as a means of remediating Philippine source texts. This begins by defining Philippine Source texts based on Dr. Joyce Arriola’s book Pelikulang Komiks: Toward a Theory of Filipino Film Adaptation (2019) and understanding how remediation changes perception of the material through concepts defined in Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s book, Remediation (2000). Video games will later be explored as a form of new media in the 21st century, and how media convergence and globalization has brought it to its current state. This paper will then analyze Adarna (2015), a video game adaptation of the corrido Ibong Adarna created by Senshi.labs, and how remediating the source text allowed the game developers to further develop the world of the corrido and its main characters, making it a prime example of the possibilities of video game storytelling in Philippine source texts

Embodied Historiographies: Affect and Realism in the "Medal of Honor" and "Call of Duty" Franchises after "Saving Private Ryan"

This dissertation examines the representation of World War II in First Person Shooters (FPSs) and the shift in their perception after the release of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998). It argues that the release of Saving Private Ryan (1998) allowed the genre to unhinge itself from a popular discourse critical of immersive video games and attach itself to a discourse that regarded embodiment as a privileged way of representing history realistically. The first chapter analyzes the PC game Wolfenstein 3D (1992) to establish the genre’s state of play before the release of Spielberg’s film. It lays out the limitations faced by the game genre: due to the perception that FPSs engage the players’ bodies more directly than other media, they found themselves unable to function as fact-based historiographies. As a result, they approached representations of WWII by combining them with the genre inventories of science fiction and horror. Chapter II introduces the term “visceral realism” to analyze the impact of Steven Spielberg’s 1998 war film Saving Private Ryan on representations of WWII and their perception. It argues that the highly physical opening battle scene in particular shifted the perception of such representations from associations with horror and the ‘body genre’ to the idea that bodily experienced WWII historiographies offer a privileged access to the hardships and struggles of the ‘Greatest Generation.’ Chapter III analyzes the first FPS to react to this shift, Medal of Honor (1999), and argues that it unhinged the genre from public controversies in the wake of the Columbine High School Massacre by alluding to accepted genres like the spy thriller and ideologies like the celebration of the ‘Greatest Generation.’ Chapter IV discusses the 2003 FPS Call of Duty and its use of cinematic conventions and portrayal of historical artifacts to establish a U.S.-centric narrative of war from the perspectives of the U.S., U.K. and USSR troops. I argue that this shift in national subjectivities during the game serves as an extension of Cold War ideology by constructing a moral hierarchy between the United States, Great Britain and Communist Russia. Finally, the conclusion considers the historical and cultural environment of this dissertation’s analyses and, using postwar Germany as an example, shows the wide variety of possible readings of these games.PHDGermLang&Lit&ScrArtsCult PhDUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147519/1/hecknerm_1.pd

You Can\u27t Get There from Here: Movement SF and the Picaresque

This dissertation examines the crisis of authenticity in postmodern culture and argues that contemporary science fiction, specifically the subgenre of Movement SF, has evolved a unique answer to this crisis by adopting, perhaps spontaneously, the picaresque narrative structure. Postmodern fiction has a tenuous relationship with the issue of authenticity, such that the average postmodern subject is utterly without true authenticity at all, alternately victim to the socioeconomic conditions of his or her culture and to the elision of the self as a result of the homogenizing effects of advertising, television, etc. Postmodern SF also carries this bleak perception of the possibility of agency; William Gibson\u27s Sprawl and Bridge trilogies are rife with negations of human agency at the metaphorical hands of various aspects and incarnations of what Fredric Jameson terms the technological sublime. This dissertation puts forth the argument that a group of post-Eighties SF texts all participate in a spontaneous revival of the picaresque mode, using the picaresque journey and related motifs to re-authenticate subjects whose identity and agency are being erased by powerful social and economic forces exterior to and normally imperceptible by the individual. This dissertation is organized around three loosely connected parts. Part 1 attempts to define Movement SF by separating the various, often confusing marketing labels (such as cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, etc.) and extracting a cluster of core characteristics that have shaped the genre since its inception in the early 80s. Part 1 further examines how these core characteristics (or premises) of Movement SF provide fertile ground for picaresque narrative strategies. Part 2 describes in detail the picaresque as it appears in Movement SF, examining worldbuilding strategies, the persistence and evolution of tropes and motifs common to the traditional picaresque, and the generation of new tropes and motifs unique to Movement picaresques. Part 3 examines the spatial tactics used in Movement picaresque narratives to enable picaresque marginality in totalized, globalized environments. Furthermore, Part 3 examines the use of psychological plurality as an internal tactic to escape closed environments

Investigating Advances in the Acquisition of Secure Systems Based on Open Architecture, Open Source Software, and Software Product Lines

Naval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research Progra

Architecture at Play: The Magic Circle and Flow in Video Game Spaces

Video games are a part of modern culture. As video game spaces begin to enter a new generation’s spatial lexicon, it is important for architects, curators of spatial design, to understand this new medium of space. This thesis aims to introduce two concepts specific to video game design, the magic circle and flow, to architects as a means of understanding the design of video game spaces. First coined by the Dutch historian Johann Huizinga in Homo Ludens, and later adapted by video game designers Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, the magic circle refers to the boundary created by the rules of a game that separate reality from the fantasy of the game. Within the magic circle, the rules of play can transform and give new meaning to spatial organizations that could be considered problematic in real world architectural design. Flow is a psychological concept introduced by Hungarian psychology professor Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. When completing a task, flow occurs when both the skill level of the participant and the challenge level of the task are equally high. When a state of flow is achieved, the task becomes enjoyable and can be carried out indefinitely until the balance is broken. Effective video games spaces are specifically designed to contribute to flow experiences, while ineffective spaces can make a game too easy or too hard, creating a boredom or anxiety for the player. Through a series of explorations and video game case studies, specifically in the first-person and third person shooter genre, this thesis first observes the transformation of implied spatial meanings in the magic circle. It then introduces the unique spatial languages used to generate spaces that support the creation of flow alongside the gameplay and narrative of a video game. This thesis culminates with the design and execution of an original capture the flag map created with the Unreal Engine that tests the concepts of the magic circle and flow in video game spaces. As video games become increasingly ubiquitous, this thesis acts as means of entry for architects to understand the unique properties of an emerging form of spatial design.

Navigating Ambiguous Negativity: A Case Study of Twitch.tv Live Chats

The popular gaming-oriented platform Twitch.tv, which offers video game fans an online space to interact by sharing and viewing gameplay and participating in live chats, is faced with the problem of online negativity alongside all of gaming culture. The content of live chat interaction has been explored on a larger scale, using rules from computer-mediated communication to classify behaviors such as spam and capital letters as negative. The current study used a nuanced qualitative look at particular user communities and the intersection between their descriptive and injunctive community norms and the use of ambiguous negativity, or interactions whose valence is not unanimously understood because communities have their own sets of meanings and rules that can be misunderstood by outsiders. Based on a study of systematic recordings of chats and streams of the Dark Souls game series, ambiguous negativity is prevalent and includes behaviors like cursing, game jargon, banter, spam and sarcasm. True negativity and hostility are rare, but they exist and manifest as usage of exclusionary language and banter gone too far. Despite its infrequency, clear negativity can shape the way people experience these communities. The role community members are to assume in responding or not responding to negativity is often not clearly defined by community norms

On the definition of non-player character behaviour for real-time simulated virtual environments.

Computer games with complex virtual worlds, which are populated by artificial characters and creatures, are the most visible application of artificial intelligence techniques. In recent years game development has been fuelled by dramatic advances in computer graphics hardware which have led to a rise in the quality of real-time computer graphics and increased realism in computer games. As a result of these developments video games are gaining acceptance and cultural significance as a form of art and popular culture. An important factor for the attainment of realism in games is the artificially intelligent behaviour displayed by the virtual entities that populate the games' virtual worlds. It is our firm belief that to further improve the behaviour of virtual entities, game AI development will have to mirror the advances achieved in game graphics. A major contributing factor for these advancements has been the advent of programmable shaders for real-time graphics, which in turn has been significantly simplified by the introduction of higher level programming languages for the creation of shaders. This has demonstrated that a good system can be vastly improved by the addition of a programming language. This thesis presents a similar (syntactic) approach to the definition of the behaviour of virtual entities in computer games. We introduce the term behaviour definition language (BDL), describing a programming language for the definition of game entity behaviour. We specify the requirements for this type of programming language, which are applied to the development and implementation of several behaviour definition languages, culminating in the design of a new game-genre independent behaviour definition (scripting) language. This extension programming language includes several game AI techniques within a single unified system, allowing the use of different methods of behaviour definition. A subset of the language (itself a BDL) was implemented as a proof of concept of this design, providing a framework for the syntactic definition of the behaviour of virtual entities in computer games