Automatic mental processes, automatic actions and behaviours in game transfer phenomena: an empirical self-report study using online forum data

Previous studies have demonstrated that the playing of videogames can have both intended and unintended effects. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of videogames on players’ mental processes and behaviours in day-to-day settings. A total of 1,023 self-reports from 762 gamers collected from online videogame forums were classified, quantified, described and explained. The data include automatic thoughts, sensations and impulses, automatic mental replays of the game in real life, and voluntary/involuntary behaviours with videogame content. Many gamers reported that they had responded – at least sometimes – to real life stimuli as if they were still playing videogames. This included overreactions, avoidances, and involuntary movements of limbs. These experiences lasted relatively short periods of time but in a minority of players were recurrent. The gamers' experiences appeared to be enhanced by virtual embodiment, repetitive manipulation of game controls, and their gaming habits. However, similar phenomena may also occur when doing other non-gaming activities. The implications of these game transfer experiences are discussed

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 – 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

Default Characters and the Embodied Nature of Play: Race, Gender, and Gamer Identity

This paper examines several recent controversies in the gaming and popular culture fandoms that revolved around issues of sexuality, race, and gender. It uses these examples as a means for examining which roles and identities are privileged when it comes to talking about gamers and gamer identity. The paper argues that a shift toward play as an embodied process allows for more inclusive games and forms of play which would allow for the expansion of who both sees their self in videogames and is able to play like a character of their own identity. Drawing on videogames such as Mass Effect 3 and Grand Theft Auto V, this paper uses visual rhetorical strategies to analyse and identify how specific cultures and identities have been excluded from the tag of gamer. Additionally, it examines canonical videogames of the past to establish how feminine characters have been treated under the male gaze. Finally, it provides a glimpse of the possibilities for videogames to be aware of their embodied nature and potential for inclusivity

Cinesthetic Play, or Gaming in the Flesh

This paper adapts Vivian Sobchack’s (2004) concept of the cinesthetic subject, which addresses the corporeality of the cinematic experience, to the medium of videogaming. I thus develop the concept of cinesthetic play by translating the three components constitutive of Sobchack’s cinesthetic subject: cinema, kinesthesia, and synesthesia. The mediality of cinema is translated with recourse to another of Sobchack’s concepts, the film body, which has previously been translated into the game body (Crick, 2011). I then illustrate synesthetic sense-making of game-worlds and discuss how the notion of kinesthetic empathy figures in videogaming. These three components together mitigate some limitations of previous phenomenological models of gaming, which do not similarly integrate the human sensorium’s different modalities. I conceive of cinesthetic play as hybrid real-and-virtual embodiment, in which players corporeally understand a game through a perception that is informed by commutating senses and their tacit understanding of the movements of and within the game-world. Additionally, throughout the paper I contend that, although scholarship on videogame phenomenology generally focuses on three-dimensionally navigable games, this embodied experience holds for two-dimensional games as well. I illustrate this point with the game Celeste (Matt Makes Games, 2018), which I use to demonstrate the value of the notion of cinesthetic play for an analysis of the embodied playing and sense-making of videogames

Playing with Identity. Authors, Narrators, Avatars, and Players in The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide

This article offers a comparative analysis of Davey Wreden’s The Stanley Parable (Wreden 2011 / Galactic Cafe 2013) and The Beginner’s Guide (Everything Unlimited Ltd. 2015) in order to explore the interrelation of authors, narrators, avatars, and players as four salient functions in the play with identity that videogames afford. Building on theories of collective and collaborative authorship, of narratives and narrators across media, and of the avatar-player relationship, the article reconstructs the similarities and differences between the way in which The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide position their players in relation to the two games’ avatars, narrators, and (main) author, while also underscoring how both The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide use metareferential strategies to undermine any overly rigid conceptualization of these functions and their interrelation

An “other” experience of videogames: analyzing the connections between videogames and the lived experience of chronic pain

In this dissertation I argue for the connections between the lived experience of chronic pain and videogames, exploring what interacts with and influences them. To answer this, I draw on cripistemology as I engage in autoethnography, close-reading and close-gameplay, restorying, mixed methods design, formal interviews, surveys, and inductive coding. I further argue for pushing back against the unhelpful binaries that define the “human” and a false idea of “universal” experience or ability, instead pointing to the intersectionality that better reflects the biopolitics of disability, including both debility and capacity. I engage with these methods in three specific projects that consider additional sub-questions to further tease out why videogames disability, chronic pain, game design, lived experience, human centered design, embodiment in video games have impacted me so deeply and how this ties to my identity as a disabled woman. I further offer this dissertation to highlight the growing research of lived experience and disability in the field of game studies, providing empirical data that offers a foundational look of how I as a member of the chronic pain community think and feel about videogames, as well as how a small portion of the chronic pain community discusses videogames and the range of experiences this encompasses. In doing so, I unpack and argue on the relationship that exists between chronic pain and videogames, and further articulate why this matters. In Chapter 1 I provide necessary history and information regarding my research to better articulate the findings as presented in the following chapters. In Chapter 2, I analyze my connection to Animal Crossing: New Leaf (AC:NL) (Nintendo EAD, 2012) and explore opportunities about genre and mechanics as reflections of my own daily lived experience with chronic pain, especially including my experience in a 2014 pain rehabilitation program. Through this process, I define the “slice of life” genre and argue that AC:NL is exemplary of its markers. In Chapter 3 I provide a deep reading and analysis of Nintendo’s GameCube release Chibi-Robo! (Skip Ltd. et al., 2005) to “restory” the titular main character to have chronic pain like my own. Through the lens of debility and capacitation machines, I map these ideas onto the biopsychosocial model to organize a thorough analysis of his restoried identity. In modding the game’s narrative to reflect a lived experience of chronic pain like my own, I interweave fanfiction with deep reading and deep gameplay to unpack what representation I am looking for in videogames both narratively and mechanically. In this I further argue how this practice can be used to inform future game design. Finally, in Chapter 4, I interview members of the chronic pain community to understand their perspective on the connections between their lived experience with chronic pain and videogames, as well as how additional factors of their identity impact those experiences. For this I engage in a mixed methods design to conduct a survey and formal interviews to offer foundational work on how the chronic pain community interacts with videogames. I offer this project to intersect current research in chronic pain and videogames (and its related technology) that focuses on games as tools for “curing” pain, and argue the importance of considering what embodiment people with chronic pain already have in videogames instead. Ultimately, I argue for the necessity to complicate current design practices in human centered design (HCD) and game design. To do so, I highlight the lived experience of Othered identities to combat misguided notions of “universal” intent. In this, I analyze the inherent connections between videogames and disability, in this case chronic pain, through embodiment and lived experience. I center in on how my experience of chronic pain has impacted the way in which I engage and think about with videogames, and further, how my experiences align with that of the chronic pain community

Animal mayhem games and nonhuman-oriented thinking

A host of recent videogames revolve around animals that wreak havoc on human communities and the urban spaces they live in. After introducing this strand of “animal mayhem games,” my paper links it to recent arguments on human-nonhuman entanglement in times of ecological crisis. Games like Goat Simulator, Deeeer Simulator and Tokyo Jungle ask players to engage with an animal avatar while simultaneously unsettling dichotomies between human societies and nonhuman phenomena. The destabilization of anthropocentric assumptions, I argue, is the deeper significance of animal mayhem. The subversive fun generated by these games speaks to core ideas of nonhuman-oriented thinking, particularly Timothy Morton’s concept of “strange stranger.” My close readings of Goat Simulator and Untitled Goose Game focus on the intersection of nonhuman agency and generic templates drawn from open world and puzzle games, respectively