Games and Time

Video games are a medium uniquely immersed in time. While the topic of time and games has been broached by many in the field of game studies, its centrality to both how games function and the experience of playing games remains underexamined. Reading games as literary texts, this holistic study uses queer and social theories to survey the myriad of ways games play with time. I argue games are time machines, each idiosyncratically allows players to experience time differently from traditional linear time. Beyond games with literal time machines, this dissertation examines games which structure themselves around labyrinthine and existential loops. It also considers real-time, or games competitively organized around time and those which change over time, in a sense, aging. Regardless of the subject, this dissertation seeks to illuminate the complexities of games and time, and argues that, despite their many conflicting messages about the topic, they all have something meaningful to say about the human experience of time

Competitive Gaming: Design and Community Building

This project attempts to characterize the qualities that make a competitive game successful. By researching the relevant literature and conducting original interviews, we identified three important development principles: 1. Competitive games should be designed for casual play and balanced for competitive play. 2. Understanding who your players are and what they want can greatly assist in the design of competitive games. When a player gets to use a strategy they enjoy at a high level of play, the game becomes more enjoyable. 3. A competitive game is defined by its community. Communities are also vital to the evolution of their playersÂ’ skills. Without a supportive community, players in that community will have a harder time being successful

Practicing Work, Perfecting Play: League of Legends and the Sentimental Education of E-Sports

A growing force in the culture of digital games fandom, e-sports represents the profes-sionalization of digital games play. This thesis examines League of Legends, a prominent game in e-sports, to understand the relationship between e-sports and the ideology of neoliberal economics. Using Clifford Geertz’s descriptions of sentimental education as a model, the author argues that League of Legends and other e-sports texts create an environment where neoliberal economic values can be practiced and explored in a meaningful space. The game as text, the culture of e-sports fandom, and the e-sports broadcasting industry are all examined to reveal the ways that e-sports fosters a space to both practice neoliberal values and potentially question them through the conflicting values of Web culture. Understanding the ways e-sports texts and e-sports culture explore ideological values allows for the potential to create more recursive e-sports texts that question this ideology in the future

Cross-cultures impact on video game industry. : Case study: Dota 2’s game design and customer experience.

The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the culture’s impact on online game designs, how the game could attract players internationally with culturally adaptive design and last but not least create its own digital culture among its players. The main finding of the thesis was the importance of culture in the current online game industry. Since the players were from all around the world, their cultural impacts on the game’s design could be greater than ever. Companies who are aiming for the international market should take different cross-cultural factors under consideration while having the game developed. By studying Dota 2’s design from basic cross-cultural viewpoints of Hofstede’s theory, it was able to explain partly the success of this phenomenon in e-sports, bring out the reasons how a MMORPG can build up its own borderless empire and digital culture. On the other hand, the thesis also suggested solutions to deal with a few current problems the case game’s in-game features and its item designs

Introducing the Game Design Matrix: A Step-by-Step Process for Creating Serious Games

The Game Design Matrix makes effective game design accessible to novice game designers. Serious Games are a powerful tool for educators seeking to boost the level of student engagement and application in academic environments, but the can be difficult to incorporate into existing courses due to availability and the cost of quality game design. The Game Design Matrix was used by two educators, novice game designers, to create a serious game. The games were assessed in an academic setting and observed to be effective in engagement, interaction, and achieving higher levels of learning

Composing a Gamer: A Case Study of One Gamer\u27s Experience of Symbiotic Flow

Built upon symbiotic flow, that is a merging of flow theory (Csikzentmihalyi, 1975) and situated cognition (Gee, 2007) this dissertation presents the findings from a 6-month qualitative study of an elite gamer and his practices and experiences with video games. The study used mediated discourse analysis and case study methods to answer the following question: What does it mean to be an elite gamer, to one life-long player of video games? In addition, the following sub-questions were considered: a) What aspects of elite gaming are important and meaningful to one particular gamer? b) What moments of play does this gamer identify as significant? c) What does sustained play look like for one him? Data sources included interviews, observations of significant gaming (that is gaming in heightened states of enjoyment and success), observation de-briefs, co-analysis interview, and a research journal. The researcher coded observational data for elements of symbiotic flow and in response to interview data. Data are presented in narrative, expository, and graphic forms across the study. This inquiry has resulted in the creation of the Model of Nested Transaction in order to articulate and understand the nature of significant gaming experiences. Additional significant findings include: a) Time is the primary resource and commodity in this particular player\u27s elite gaming world, because it represents a level of dedication and insider status; b) this gamer values particular affordances in his gaming, namely experiences that develop knowledge and skills that can then be applied instantaneously in gaming contexts and be harnessed for longitudinal participation; c) video games provide the participant, and gamers like him, with possibilities for greatness, an aspect of his identity that is both critically important to him and often strikingly absent outside of games. The study argues for productive consideration of video games as a mediational tool of both meaningful learning and powerful identity exploration

The BG News September 10, 1993

The BGSU campus student newspaper September 10, 1993. Volume 76 - Issue 13https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/bg-news/6564/thumbnail.jp