Sound in Video Games: How Sound Is an Important Aspect of the Virtual Experience

This paper will take the form of an analysis, with video games as the medium/text that will be analysed. Although analysis is typically reserved for poems, books, short stories, or plays, video games are simply a form of conveying ideas and a form of text that is representative of the 21st century. Video games is a rare medium that has an interactive element, which can alter/enhance the experience an audience member can have, even if there were the same audio/visual components in a film or play. In most forms of media with an audio component, the analysis is done by a passive listener, one who is not interacting with the piece/having any form of impact on it as it is being played (Collins, 2008) . With forms of media that invite passive listening, it is easier for every potential audience member to have the same experience, with the meaning of the experience being relatively the same. This paper will analyse the usage of sound/music in video games and how the experience of the medium can be affected greatly by it

Affective level design for a role-playing videogame evaluated by a brain\u2013computer interface and machine learning methods

Game science has become a research field, which attracts industry attention due to a worldwide rich sell-market. To understand the player experience, concepts like flow or boredom mental states require formalization and empirical investigation, taking advantage of the objective data that psychophysiological methods like electroencephalography (EEG) can provide. This work studies the affective ludology and shows two different game levels for Neverwinter Nights 2 developed with the aim to manipulate emotions; two sets of affective design guidelines are presented, with a rigorous formalization that considers the characteristics of role-playing genre and its specific gameplay. An empirical investigation with a brain\u2013computer interface headset has been conducted: by extracting numerical data features, machine learning techniques classify the different activities of the gaming sessions (task and events) to verify if their design differentiation coincides with the affective one. The observed results, also supported by subjective questionnaires data, confirm the goodness of the proposed guidelines, suggesting that this evaluation methodology could be extended to other evaluation tasks

Pblcloud Virtual Patient Simulator: Enhancing Immersion Through Natural Language Processing

PBLCLOUD VIRTUAL PATIENT SIMULATOR: ENHANCING IMMERSION THROUGH NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING Pierre Martin M.Ed.(1), Lisa DelSignore M.D.(2), and Traci A. Wolbrink M.D. M.P.H.(2) (1)Yale School of Medicine (2)From the Division of Critical Care Medicine, Department of Anesthesia, Perioperative and Pain Management, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Department of Anesthesia, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA. (Sponsored by JH, Department of Pediatrics, Yale School of Medicine) Virtual patient simulation has been utilized to teach interviewing skills, often employing selection-based methods (e.g., multiple-choice lists and menu-based prompts) to simulate doctor-patient conversations. Users have evaluated these systems as inauthentic, which can diminish user immersion (influenced by control, realism, distraction and sensory factors) and, in turn, negatively affect skill acquisition, mastery and transfer. Our objectives were to design and develop PBLCloud, a scenario-based and highly interactive platform that uses natural language processing to support a more realistic doctor-patient conversation and create an immersive clinical learning environment. PBLCloud was developed utilizing an iterative design thinking process and its initial evaluation involved a mixed methods approach. We recruited a convenience sample of 11 participants: three (27%) fourth-year medical students from Harvard Medical School as well as two (18%) residents, four (36%) fellows and two (18%) attendings from Boston Children’s Hospital. There were two rounds of formative evaluation testing with eight participants in Round 1 and three participants in Round 2. Each participant completed a semi-structured think–aloud protocol exploring our pilot case, 10-item system usability scale (SUS) and 10-item open-ended questionnaire. The chat-based functionality provides users with computer-generated context-specific responses during the historical encounter. Users have the opportunity to perform physical examinations, review incorporated multimedia, order and interpret diagnostic investigations, order therapeutic interventions that have appropriate effects on patient vitals and laboratory data, formulate and refine a differential diagnosis, receive just-in-time feedback regarding user-initiated actions and complete embedding learning exercises. 73% of participants strongly agreed that PBLCloud was useful (i.e., it is clinically-oriented, realistic, provides helpful feedback and is widely applicable) and 64% of participants strongly agreed that their experience with the system was enjoyable (i.e., it is relevant with an engaging interface). It was deemed to be more interactive and engaging than other simulators and 82% of participants were very interested in utilizing the system in the future. The average SUS score for Round 1 and 2 were 79.7 ± 12.0 and 82.5 ± 19.8 respectively. Areas of improvement were identified, in particular, the unsatisfactory response accuracy of the chat-based functionality. Future work will include the investigation of various strategies to optimize the platform’s natural language processing algorithm as well as the formal evaluation of the system’s validity, reliability, level of induced user immersion and educational impact. We anticipate that PBLCloud will serve as a cost-effective and scalable approach for the instruction and assessment of clinical reasoning

Gaming for Post-Work Recovery: The Role of Immersion

Playing digital games can be an effective means of recovering from daily work strain. However, limited research has examined which player experiences contribute to this process, limiting the ability of players to select games and play them in a manner which helps them recover effectively. Hence, this paper reports a mixed-methods survey study investigating how a recent post-work recovery episode was impacted by immersion: a player experience which has been implicated in theoretical accounts relating games and recovery. We found that particular dimensions of immersion, such as cognitive involvement, support specific post-work recovery needs. Moreover, participants report not only experiencing benefits in a passive manner, but actively optimising their levels of immersion to achieve recovery. This study extends previous research by improving our understanding of how digital games support post-work recovery and by demonstrating that immersion is key in determining the restorative potential of digital games

Putting the Video Back in Video Games: Opportunities and Challenges for Visual Studies Approaches to Video Game Analysis

I argue for the application of visual studies in video game analysis. This approach presents opportunities for the intersectional analysis of video game visuals as games are brought into dialogue with other visual media like film and painting. This approach also presents challenges due to ontological distinctions between different media as well as due to academic divisions regarding the study of different art and media objects. Despite the challenges presented, a visual studies approach is particularly useful as a critical window into contemporary visual culture at large. I outline the fields of game studies and visual studies, marking their distinctions as well as the areas in which they overlap. I provide examples of visual studies approaches to video game analysis through an emphasis on the visual characteristics of video games. As visual studies is generally considered an interdisciplinary endeavor, I contextualize my analyses through comparisons with other visual media, in particular finding intersections with art history and film studies. Specifically, I argue that perspective is an integral visual trait of many video games, relating the use of linear perspective and isometric perspective, used in some genres of games, with the development of perspective in painting. I examine various cinematic techniques used in video games and discuss their ideological potency. I also cover ways in which video games subvert conventional norms, such as through self-reflexivity, to open up novel avenues for visual expression

Call of Cthulhu and Vampire: the Masquerade: invocation, spatiality, and ritual transcendence in two tabletop role-playing games

Includes bibliographical references.2015 Fall.In 1974 the world's first Tabletop Roleplaying Game (TRPG) was published, Dungeons and Dragons. Since that time hundreds of TRPGs have been published in multiple genres. In this thesis I explore the rhetoric of two of the most popular horror-themed TRPGs: Call of Cthulhu and Vampire: the Masquerade. I focus on explaining how these games came to be, how they serve their players as equipment for living, how they rhetorically (re)construct real-world places and spaces, and finally, how they encourage transcendence and jamming through ritual play and participation. This thesis hopefully helps to show the complex multi-layered rhetoric taking place in a relatively ignored form of media. Additionally, I introduce the concept of textual invocation as a complimentary theoretical construct to that of textual poaching as an explanation for how players and designers engage in a give and take of authorship

Chronotope in western role-playing video games

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThe development of the video game industry and the increasing popularity of the medium as a form of entertainment have led to significant developments in the discipline of game studies and a growing awareness of the cultural significance of video games as cultural artefacts. While much work has been done to understand the narrative aspect of games, there are still theoretical gaps on the understanding of how video games generate their narrative experience and how this experience is shaped by the player and the game as artefact. This interdisciplinary study investigates how meaning is created in Western Role Playing Games (WRPGs) video games by analysing the narrative strategies they employ in relation to those commonly used in Heroic Epic and Fantasy narratives. It adopts the Bakhtinian concepts of chronotope and dialogue as the main theoretical tools to examine the creation and integration of narratives in WRPGs with a special focus on the time-space perspective. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Dragon Age Origins were chosen as representatives of the WRPG video game genre while Beowulf and the tale of Sigurd, as it appears in the Poetic Edda and the Volsung Saga, were chosen as representatives of the Heroic Epic poetic tradition. References are also made to Fantasy novels, especially the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. Textual analysis along with some techniques employed by researchers working with visual methodologies and compositional interpretation were used to analyse relevant aspects of the texts and games. The findings suggest that intertextual and genre materials considerably shape the narrative of WRPGs and exercise a profound dialogical effect on the ludonarrative harmony of the games investigated through their interaction with the game world and gameplay systems. This relationship is most visible in the chronotopic (time-space) aspect of the chosen games. The findings also suggest that Epic material dialogically orients the WRPG players‘ experience and adjusts their expectations and understanding of the fictional world. This study as well as the refining of chronotopic analytical tools to encompass chronotopic awareness, transportation, and flow may be of use in further chronotopic investigations of different games, literary genres, and/or other media artefacts

Narrative at Risk: Accident and Teleology in American Culture, 1963-2013

Accident in fiction is always inevitable. When a character in a novel suffers a car accident, for example, the accident is the effect of the author\u27s intentions, and therefore it is not accidental. The words and images that constitute the meanings and events of the text do not change. The accidents in the narrative always happen the same way, reading after rereading. Drawing from this observation, the question that Narrative at Risk attempts to answer is, in its simplest iteration: how can narrative accurately represent accident when its textual representation is not subject to the effects of accident? I ask this of a number of American cultural objects that were produced over the last fifty years, from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the present. Narrative at Risk interrogates representations of accident primarily in novels and films--but also in television, roleplaying games, comic strips, and videogames--in order to examine how contemporary American culture ascribes meaning to the accidental. I read a wide array of accidents--from mechanical failures to failed suicides, depictions of biological evolution to games of chance--as providing a broad but nonetheless coherent understanding of how American society has conceived of accident in relation to individuals, communities, and the species as a whole. Narrative at Risk, in treating media such as film, television, and videogames alongside literature, broadens our understanding of how accident developed as a danger over the past fifty years, as well as how various media influenced and shaped one another through borrowed reading practices. In the introduction, I focus on the crystallization of the mass media that brought traumatic events into American homes again and again, specifically, the moment of President John F. Kennedy\u27s assassination and the epistemological and ontological crises this event and its media coverage initiated. The first chapter reads the role of this mediation and the crises of the 1960s as they jointly inform representations of accidental mechanical failure. Through readings of four texts, I theorize a politics of accident, taking as my initial subject what Ronald Reagan called his most formative moment: his role as a train accident victim in King\u27s Row: 1941), and his discussion of this role in his 1965 memoir Where\u27s the Rest of Me? I delineate how Reagan\u27s obsession with narrating accident later shaped a politics of the accident in texts such as David Cronenberg\u27s film Crash: 1996), Don DeLillo\u27s novel White Noise: 1985), Colson Whitehead\u27s novel The Intuitionist: 1999), and Rockstar Game\u27s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: 2004). The subsequent chapter shifts from the first\u27s broad historical range to texts composed and published at the end of the Cold War: Paul Auster\u27s novel Leviathan: 1992); Jeffrey Eugenides\u27s novel The Virgin Suicides: 1993); and Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man : 1996) an episode of the television show The X-Files: 1993-2002). I read the failure of suicide attempts in these texts as accidents that express the limits of intentionality, which bring to the fore the nation\u27s inability to conceive of a future beyond the ideological bounds of the conflict with the Soviet Union that provided meaning during the Cold War. The third chapter recontextualizes the final years of the Cold War. Here I read Richard Kenney\u27s poem, A Colloquy of Ancient Men from his collection, The Invention of the Zero: 1993), alongside two novels: Michael Crichton\u27s Jurassic Park: 1990) and Richard Powers\u27s The Gold Bug Variations: 1991). Rather than depicting the futurelessness of the United States, these texts look to deep history on the scale of evolutionary time. They depict evolution as a series of random, accidental changes that take place in the history of a species\u27 development; in doing so, they together trace the Cold War fear of thermonuclear annihilation shifting to an anxiety of genetic manipulation. The fourth chapter turns to the 1970s to investigate the early years of the culture wars. I begin by reading how chance disrupts the narrative of Kathy Acker\u27s novel Blood and Guts in High School: 1984), then consider the religious right\u27s hyperbolic condemnation of chance in TSR\u27s roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons: 1974). I then scrutinize games of chance in three other texts: Michael Cimino\u27s film The Deer Hunter: 1978); Thomas Pynchon\u27s novel Gravity\u27s Rainbow: 1973); and Sam Lipsyte\u27s short story The Dungeon Master : 2010). These three cases demonstrate how chance undermines the paranoid fantasy that there are external forces authoring the world. Finally, Narrative at Risk concludes with an exploration of accident in the present through a discussion of two television shows--Breaking Bad: 2008-2013) and The Americans: 2013-)--and Steve Erickson\u27s 2012 novel These Dreams of You. Imagining accidents as the fault of the government, these texts collectively suggest American culture\u27s continued reliance upon teleological thinking and conspiracy theory