2,824 research outputs found
There's No Place Like Home: Dwelling and Being at Home in Digital Games
This chapter considers the presence, in digital games, of experiences of dwelling. Starting with an engagement with the philosopher Edward S. Casey's distinction between hestial and hermetic spatial modes, the chapter argues that the player's spatial engagement with digital game worlds has tended to align with the hermetic pole, emphasizing movement, traversal and exploration. By contrast, hestial spatial practices, characterized by centrality, lingering and return, are far less prevalent both in digital games themselves and in discussions on spatiality in the game studies discourse. To counter this lack, this chapter draws upon philosophical work on space by Casey, Martin Heidegger, Yi-Fu Tuan and Christian Norberg-Schulz, using these as a conceptual lens to identify spatial structures and practices in digital games that diverge from the hermetic mode. Attention is paid to games that invite pausing and lingering in place, games where the player's relation to place is structured around practices of building, the phenomenology of home and dwelling in games, and familiarity and identity as experiential characteristics of being at home. Minecraft and Animal Crossing: New Leaf are examined in detail as case studies, though the chapter also refers to examples from other games
Audio Description in Video Games Research in Progress
As video games continue to grow in popularity, accessibility is a key concern which developers must consider to ensure the most people possible can enjoy the games they create (Cairns et al., 2019; Nova et al., 2021). With approximately 500,000 blind and partially sighted people in Canada alone, visual accessibility is a central concern of game accessibility. Visual accessibility has developed for decades with one of the most popular and effective methods of this being audio description (AD) (Fryer, 2016). Audio description comes in different styles depending on its use, with standard and extended AD being 2 of the most common types (Canadian National Institute for the Blind, 2019). Despite the success of this option in film and television, AD has not caught on in the game industry (SightlessKombat, 2020). This research looks to investigate AD as a method for visual accessibility in video games with a focus on determining the advantages and disadvantages of both standard and extended AD in this medium
Not Untitled.
This chapter situates my own practice within an emergent field of urban intervention. It discusses the process, value of and inherent dangers in reframing interventionist practices and generating critical discourse around the 'invisible' and 'unofficial,' in interventionist practice.
From the introduction:
Cultural hijack is a term that cropped up in conversation with the editor, Ben Parry, in a bar in Glasgow some time ago. I was referring to that moment of being taken unawares by an experience – by something that stops you in your tracks, that redirects your thoughts, actions, attitude; something uninvited, unannounced, perhaps unnamed. The writing that follows is an attempt to sharpen my own thinking around the term. My intention is to frame cultural hijack and to discuss its recurrence and relevance in my own practice. in the process, I want to weigh up its value to artists and activists – partly to argue for its place in the canon of contemporary art and particularly to explore its various functions as a tool in the critical resistance toolkit.
Sometimes like the benign stuff of day-to-day serendipity, this hijack can be a gentle gift; more often it’s a type of deliberate misdirection, like that practised by the magician to pull off a trick, by the conman to separate you from your money and by the artist to ‘wilfully disrupt’ your day. Cultural hijack doesn’t ask to be engaged with, cultural hijack doesn’t wait patiently to be consumed. Cultural hijack works against your best interests because it thinks it knows better. With the most provocative cultural hijack, you never escape without being perturbed, altered or otherwise redirected
D3.1 Instructional Designs for Real-time Feedback
The main objective of METALOGUE is to produce a multimodal dialogue system that is able to implement an interactive behaviour that seems natural to users and is flexible enough to exploit the full potential of multimodal interaction. The METALOGUE system will be arranged in the context of educational use-case scenarios, i.e. for training active citizens (Youth Parliament) and call centre employees. This deliverable describes the intended real-time feedback and reflection in-action support to support the training. Real-time feedback informs learners how they perform key skills and enables them to monitor their progress and thus reflect in-action. This deliverable examines the theoretical considerations of reflection in-action, what type of data is available and should be used, the timing and type of real-time feedback and, finally, concludes with an instructional design blueprint giving a global outline of a set of tasks with stepwise increasing complexity and the feedback proposed.The underlying research project is partly funded by the METALOGUE project. METALOGUE is a Seventh Framework Programme collaborative project funded by the European Commission, grant agreement number: 611073 (http://www.metalogue.eu)
The medical pause in simulation training
The medical pause, stopping current performance for a short time for additional cognitive activities, can potentially advance patient safety and learning in medicine. Yet, to date, we do not have a theoretical understanding of why pausing skills should be taught as a professional skill, nor empirical evidence of how pausing affects performance and learning. To address this gap, this thesis investigates the effects of pausing in medical training theoretically and empirically. For the empirical investigation, a computer-based simulation was used for the task environment, and eye-tracking and log data to assess performance
Examining the role of smart TVs and VR HMDs in synchronous at-a-distance media consumption
This article examines synchronous at-a-distance media consumption from two perspectives: How it can be facilitated using existing consumer displays (through TVs combined with smartphones), and imminently available consumer displays (through virtual reality (VR) HMDs combined with RGBD sensing). First, we discuss results from an initial evaluation of a synchronous shared at-a-distance smart TV system, CastAway. Through week-long in-home deployments with five couples, we gain formative insights into the adoption and usage of at-a-distance media consumption and how couples communicated during said consumption. We then examine how the imminent availability and potential adoption of consumer VR HMDs could affect preferences toward how synchronous at-a-distance media consumption is conducted, in a laboratory study of 12 pairs, by enhancing media immersion and supporting embodied telepresence for communication. Finally, we discuss the implications these studies have for the near-future of consumer synchronous at-a-distance media consumption. When combined, these studies begin to explore a design space regarding the varying ways in which at-a-distance media consumption can be supported and experienced (through music, TV content, augmenting existing TV content for immersion, and immersive VR content), what factors might influence usage and adoption and the implications for supporting communication and telepresence during media consumption
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Temporalities in Digital Games – A Brief Archaeology
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to analyze the relationship between digital games and temporality based on the relationship between the technological elements that establish the relationship between player and game. From an arbitrarily established chronology, it is proposed to associate three generations of digital games, each with its respective way of dealing with the value produced by the player, namely: expenditure (arcade), investment (console and PC) and capturemobile games). For this, the analysis of the mobile version of the SimCity franchise is made, comparing some of its features with its PC version
Better off:when should pervasive displays be powered down?
Digital displays are a ubiquitous feature of our public spaces - both ever present, and "always on". In this paper we use a combination of literature survey, experimental work, and stakeholder interviews to consider if maximising the amount of time such displays are powered on is truly advantageous. We challenge existing practice by considering arguments from the perspectives of multiple stakeholders (viewers, passers-by, content creators and signage owners), and identify multiple facets for consideration including levels of attention, cognitive load, impact on social interactions, energy and financial costs, advertising revenue, perceptions of failure and the pressures of creating valuable content
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