47 research outputs found

    Islands in the Making: National Investment and the Cultural Imagination in Taiwan

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    This ethnography looks closely at the Taiwanese company UrIsland, makers of Talking Island (TI) - an MMORPG to teach children English - in order to illuminate the increasingly important meeting point between technology, education, and games. At the level of national economic policy, companies like UrIsland have been at the focal point of the Taiwanese government’s hopes for their tech industry. With TI, UrIsland intended to create a revolution in ESL education. Despite compulsory ESL classes many Taiwanese struggle with English, and educational experts claim that the classes stress reading and writing too much, leaving many people’s listening and speaking lagging. UrIsland’s founder believed TI, an immersive environment focusing on listening and speaking, could fill this ability gap and make kids eager to learn English. UrIsland hired native English speakers for most of their voice acting and used innovative voice-recognition technology to create this “native” linguistic environment, but also designed TI to make studying compelling. The CEO was, like many high-tech company founders, charismatic, and his employees were (mostly) willing to follow him in his revolution, but UrIsland faced a major obstacle – entrenched cultural attitudes. Education has deep roots within Chinese culture. Not only were teaching methods thought of as sacred, but Taiwanese see work (including studying) and play as mutually exclusive. This work explores the collision of three major spheres of meaning: technology, games, and education, by analyzing the ways UrIsland sought to upend some ideas while simultaneously working with other cultural expectations in order to keep TI economically viable. While this ethnography focuses on Taiwan to highlight this relatively modern interplay, this increasing point of tension is not unique to Chinese societies seeking to develop their technological infrastructures and industries, but is also found around the developed and developing world

    Transgressive Positivity in Four Online Multiplayer Games

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    Online games have a reputation for toxicity. Forms of play that have been theorized as transgressive from the perspective of idealized play have become highly normalized within the toxic space of online gaming. In this context, positivity in online gaming takes on a transgressive quality that challenges the common behaviours, the norms of communication, and their underlying ideologies found within online gaming communities. Through an ethnography of four massively multiplayer online game spaces - DOTA 2, Lost Ark, Destiny 2, and World of Warcraft - this project examines the effects of positivity in play on others who share these game worlds to consider ways that positivity might be leveraged to impact gaming’s toxic culture. Positivity is approached through different scales, from smaller individual actions like friendly greetings and helpful gestures not often seen in these particular games, to larger community formations that promote positivity and inclusivity within these gaming communities. This study finds that positivity across these scales produces substantial and proportional resistance to positive deviations from the toxic norms within these games and their linked community sites. Players actively trying to resist toxicity through positivity add varying levels of labor to their leisure and are frequent targets for harassment, leading to burnout or self-exclusion from these online games. Transgressive positivity in online play can produce alternatives to self-exclusion from gaming by producing ephemeral connections and networks of support between players. Enclaves built on positivity can form, but they are always under threat when they intersect with the mainstream culture across each of these four games. Ultimately, there are severe systemic issues within these communities - reinforced by trends within the games industry and in online game design - that undercut player-led positivity initiatives. While positivity can be a useful strategy for some to connect with others and to persist in spite of these toxic environments, positivity’s transgressive quality in online play produces substantial vulnerability for those who actively pursue it as a strategy of resistance or cultural intervention

    Information Check: Studying the Information-Seeking Behaviors of Dungeons & Dragons Players

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    This study explores how, how often, and where players of the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons search for information. Over 2,500 participants were surveyed about what information they sought, what resources they used, and why. While participants’ purposeful information seeking was fairly similar to habits described in other studies of everyday life information seeking, participants had strong opinions about what resources were missing from the realm of existing D&D resources and what was most important to them when selecting a resource for use. Among the most common concerns were ease of access, cost of access (both temporal and monetary), validity of information, consolidation of information, and the feel of the resource.Master of Science in Information Scienc

    Working in Australia's digital games industry

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    The Working in Australia’s Digital Games Industry: A Consolidation Report is the outcome of a comprehensive study on the games industry in Australia by Dr Sandra Haukka from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) based at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. The study responds to concerns that Australia’s games industry would not reach its full potential due to a lack of local, highly skilled staff, and a lack of appropriately trained graduates with the necessary knowledge and skills. This is the first of two reports produced with the support of the Games Developers’ Association of Australia. Over coming months researchers will develop a future skills strategy report for the industry

    Um framework de MMORPG : desenvolvimento orientado pela arquitetura

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    Monografia (graduação)—Universidade de Brasília, Faculdade UnB Gama, Curso de Engenharia de Software, 2013.Os MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) são jogos de computadores que suportam centenas ou milhares de jogadores simultaneamente que controlam um ou mais personagens, interagindo com o ambiente do jogo, completando missões, manipulando objetos do mundo virtual, conversando com outros personagens e combatendo monstros. Este gênero possui a sua jogabilidade como fator crítico para o sucesso, que é significativamente influenciada pela performance dos servidores. Os MMORPGs têm aumentado a sua expressão no mercado de jogos nos últimos anos, entretanto observa-se uma lacuna ferramental que favoreça o reúso no momento da implementação de jogos dessa natureza. Por meio do estudo dos problemas enfrentados no desenvolvimento de novos jogos MMORPGs e do levantamento de requisitos para este tipo de sistema, este trabalho de conclusão de curso apresenta uma proposta de um framework que implementa características essenciais de uma arquitetura de software voltada para MMORPG, com o intuito atenuar essa lacuna. ___________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACTThe MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) are computer games that supports hundreds or thousands of concurrent players con- trolling one or more characters, interacting with the game environment, completing missions, manipulating objects in the virtual world, talking with other players and fighting monsters. This genre has the gameplay as a critical factor for the success, which is significantly influenced by the performance of the servers. MMORPGs have increased its expression in the gaming market in recent years, however, there is a gap tooling that promotes reuse at the time of implementation of such games. Through the study of the problems faced in developing new games of MMORPGs and gathering requirements for this type of system, this work presents a proposal for a framework that implements the essential features of a software architecture oriented to MMORPG in order to mitigate this gap

    Prospects for Anthropological Research in South-East Europe

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    The book marks a new phase in the fruitful collaboration between the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Ethnography Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. It is an important publication for any future research on the development of ethnology and anthropology in Southeast Europe. The papers presented here, the topics they raise and the methods they employ, comprise an overview of the issues, concepts, phenomena and research methodologies anthropology in this has been dealing with in the early 21st century. Positions of the discipline itself, transformations of traditional culture and various phenomena of contemporary culture in Southeastern Europe are subjected to a theoretical scrutiny in the papers of this volume

    Gaming myth: an exploration of video gaming, heritage, and identity creation in contemporary Cuba

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    This thesis examines the relationship between video games and the creation and sustainment of local, national, and personal myths in contemporary Cuba. This thesis examines traditional notions of myth, particularly those which relate to culture and heritage. At the same time, it will analyse the evolving role which video games, and technology more generally, play in our lives, and how new technologies affect the creation and propagation of myth in personal and national narratives. This thesis will then go on to give an overview of the historical context of Cuba, a nation in which myth continues to play a fundamental role in the national narrative, and explore how video games are an increasingly central element of these narratives. This thesis asks whether video games and computing can tell us anything of note about Cuban culture, and whether the games which are being played and developed in Cuba are part of a broader cultural and historical tradition which shapes Cuba as it is today. This thesis answers both of these questions in the affirmative, and demonstrates the significant impact which video games have had upon Cuba (particularly the more rural and remote parts of the country). This thesis also examines the question of whether gaming in Cuba might provide us with any practical or theoretical approaches to gaming which might be missing from the existing literature, and brings to the fore the lessons which Cuba’s unique circumstances hold for the furthering of the study of video games as an academic discipline. In order to support these assertions, the final chapter of this thesis is dedicated to a case study of the rural province of Granma. Using original interviews and fieldwork, this chapter combines the extensive historical and theoretical considerations which have been laid out in the preceding chapters, and applies them to the contemporary Cuban context. This thesis makes an original contribution to both the fields of Cuban studies and video game theory. Video game studies have traditionally been Western-centric, and have all but ignored countries such as Cuba. Whilst previous works have explored the role of myth within Cuba and gaming separately, this is the first work to study the manner in which myth underpins both video gaming and Cuban culture as a symbiotic whole
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