The 25-hour Moment: How Pathologic 2 Facilitates Presentness and Constructs Its Ludonarrative

This thesis investigates how interactivity, one of digital games’ most prominent and productive aspects, can be leveraged to produce particular experiences within games. I demonstrate how Pathologic 2 is designed to leverage interactivity in order to immerse the player within its fiction and world, primarily by the player’s own continuous interaction with the game system as represented in the game’s fictional world. This interactivity, made meaningful through its systemic context, is shown to also be crucial in the construction of the game’s ludonarrative, during which the player engages in continuous embodied thinking. This ludonarrative is made legible through the game’s consistent representation and allows for interpretation and a deeper analysis of the game’s fiction as well as the embodied player’s role within it. The concept of “difficulty,” a prominent device in games, is also accounted for and discussed. This “difficulty,” encompassing both the game system as stress-inducing and the fictional world’s as informationally ambiguous, motivates player action and is key in the further facilitation of immersion and, especially, the facilitation and nuancing of the player’s embodied thinking. The cohesive and uncompromising design of Pathologic 2 becomes a complex system of mutual reinforcement, with the player’s actions, guided by the game’s design, as its primary and ever-present driving force

What is the Avatar? Fiction and Embodiment in Avatar-Based Singleplayer Computer Games: Revised and Commented Edition

What are the characteristic features of avatar-based singleplayer videogames, from Super Mario Bros. to Grand Theft Auto? The author examines this question with a particular focus on issues of fictionality and realism, and their relation to cinema and Virtual Reality. Through close-up analysis and philosophical discussion, the author argues that avatar-based gaming is a distinctive and dominant form of virtual self-embodiment in digital culture. This book is a revised edition of Rune Klevjer's pioneering work from 2007, featuring a new introduction by the author and afterword by Stephan Günzel, Jörg Sternagel, and Dieter Mersch

A Ludic Generation: Bridging Architecture, Games, and Technology for More Playful Spaces

In a world dominated by mundane environments, this thesis proposes a novel approach to designing public spaces that integrate game design principles and extended reality technology. By embracing the inherent ludic behavior found in human nature and games, I aim to elevate everyday experiences. This research delves into the capabilities of extended reality technology, psychology of play and its cultural and societal background, psychology of human archetypes, and game design components as an extraction for architectural typologies. Key findings reveal that by analyzing game components, design languages are formed and can be used to develop feasible architectural typologies. The significance of ephemerality in architecture is also revealed as a mirroring concept for the need of frequent updates in games to maintain stimulation. There must also be an emphasis on understanding that typical space users may have different emotions and tendencies compared to game users, and thus, spaces must be designed to coexist harmoniously with their users

Microworld Writing: Making Spaces for Collaboration, Construction, Creativity, and Community in the Composition Classroom

In order to create a 21st century pedagogy of learning experiences that inspire the engaged, constructive, dynamic, and empowering modes of work we see in online creative communities, we need to focus on the platforms, the environments, the microworlds that host, hold, and constitute the work. A good platform can build connections between users, allowing for the creation of a community, giving creative work an engaged and active audience. These platforms will work together to build networks of rhetorical/creative possibilities, wherein students can learn to cultivate their voices, skills, and knowledge bases as they engage across platforms and genres. I call on others to make, mod, or hack other new platforms. In applying this argument to my subject, teaching writing in a college composition class, I describe Microworld Writing as a genre that combines literary language practice with creativity, performativity, play, game mechanics, and coding. The MOO can be an example of one of these platforms and of microworld writing, in that it allows for creativity, user agency, and programmability, if it can be updated to have the needed features (virtual world, community, accessibility, narrativity, compatibility and exportability). I offer the concept of this MOO-IF as inspiration for a collaborative, community-oriented Interactive Fiction platform, and encourage people to extend, find, and build their own platforms. Until then and in addition, students can be brought into Microworld Writing in the composition classroom through interactive-fiction platforms, as part of an ecology of genre experimentation and platform exercise

What is the Avatar?

What are the characteristic features of avatar-based singleplayer videogames, from Super Mario Bros. to Grand Theft Auto? Rune Klevjer examines this question with a particular focus on issues of fictionality and realism, and their relation to cinema and Virtual Reality. Through close-up analysis and philosophical discussion, Klevjer argues that avatar-based gaming is a distinctive and dominant form of virtual self-embodiment in digital culture. This book is a revised edition of Rune Klevjer's pioneering work from 2007, featuring a new introduction by the author and afterword by Stephan Günzel, Jörg Sternagel, and Dieter Mersch

Player agency in interactive narrative: audience, actor & author

The question motivating this review paper is, how can computer-based interactive narrative be used as a constructivist learn- ing activity? The paper proposes that player agency can be used to link interactive narrative to learner agency in constructivist theory, and to classify approaches to interactive narrative. The traditional question driving research in interactive narrative is, ‘how can an in- teractive narrative deal with a high degree of player agency, while maintaining a coherent and well-formed narrative?’ This question derives from an Aristotelian approach to interactive narrative that, as the question shows, is inherently antagonistic to player agency. Within this approach, player agency must be restricted and manip- ulated to maintain the narrative. Two alternative approaches based on Brecht’s Epic Theatre and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed are reviewed. If a Boalian approach to interactive narrative is taken the conflict between narrative and player agency dissolves. The question that emerges from this approach is quite different from the traditional question above, and presents a more useful approach to applying in- teractive narrative as a constructivist learning activity

The zone of "becoming": game, text and technicity in videogame narratives

Videogames have emerged as arguably the most prominent form of entertainment in recent years. Their versatility has made them key contributory factors in social, literary, cultural and philosophical discourse; however, critics also tend to see videogames as posing a threat to established cultural parameters. This thesis argues that videogames are firmly grounded in older media and they are important for the development of the notions of textuality, technicity and identity that literary and cultural theories have been debating in recent years. As its point of departure, the thesis takes the contested role of videogames as storytelling media. Challenging the opposition between games and narratives that is posited in earlier research, the framework of the Derridean concept of supplementarity has been adopted to illustrate how the ludic and the narrative inform each other's core, and yet retain their media-specific identities. It is also vital to consider how the technicity and narrative of games inform their perception as texts. Videogames provide a direct illustration of this but they develop on similar principles in earlier media instead of doing something entirely 'new'. The multitelic structure of videogames tends to be looked upon as symptomatic of novelty; in reality, however, they illustrate more clearly the inherent nature of telos in all narrative media

Mediating the Immediate – Endogenous meanings and simulated narratives in ludic spaces

The thesis discusses games and the gaming experience. It is divided into two main sections; the first examines games in general, while the second concentrates exclusively on electronic games. The text approaches games from two distinct directions by looking at both their spatiality and their narrativity at the same time. These two points of view are combined right from the beginning of the text as they are used in conceptualising the nature of the gaming experience. The purpose of the thesis is to investigate two closely related issues concerning both the field of game studies and the nature of games. In regard to studying games, the focus is placed on the juxtaposition of ludology and narratology, which acts as a framework for looking at gaming. In addition to aiming to find out whether or not it is possible to undermine the said state of affairs through the spatiality of games, the text looks at the interrelationships of games and their spaces as well as the role of narratives in those spaces. The thesis is characterised by discussing alternative points of view and its hypothetical nature. During the text, it becomes apparent that the relationship between games and narratives is strongly twofold: on one hand, the player continuously narrativizes the states the game is in while playing, while the narratives residing within the game space form their own partially separate narrative spaces, on the other. These spaces affect the conception the player has of the game states and the events taking place in the game space itself.Tutkielma käsittelee pelejä ja pelikokemusta. Se on jaettu kahteen pääosioon, joista ensimmäisessä tutkitaan kaikenlaisia pelejä ja toisessa ainoastaan elektronisia pelejä. Teksti lähestyy kaikkia pelejä yhtä aikaa sekä tilallisuuden että kerronnallisuuden suunnista. Näkökulmat yhdistetään heti tutkielman alussa niiden toimiessa apuna pelikokemusta käsitteellistettäessä. Tutkielman tarkoitus on käsitellä kahta toisiinsa läheisesti liittyvää kysymystä, joista toinen kytkeytyy pelitutkimukseen ja toinen itse peleihin. Pelitutkimuksellisesti tutkimuksen keskiössä on ludologian ja narratologian välisen vastakkaisasettelun mielekkyys, joka toimii viitekehyksenä pelien luonteeseen pureutuvassa ongelmassa. Sen lisäksi, että tavoitteena on ottaa selville, onko edellä mainittua asetelmaa mahdollista purkaa pelien tilallisuuden kautta, tekstissä keskitytään myös pelien ja niiden luomien tilojen suhteisiin sekä narratiivien rooleihin kyseisissä tiloissa. Tutkimukselle ominaista on uusien näkökantojen kehitteleminen ja tietty hypoteettinen luonne. Tutkimuksen myötä käy selväksi, että pelien ja narratiivien suhde on vahvasti kaksitahoinen: toisaalta pelaaja kerronnallistaa pelitilanteita jatkuvasti pelikokemuksen aikana, kun taas toisaalta pelien sisältämät narratiivit luovat pelitilaan omia osittain pelitilasta irrallisia kerronnallisia tilojaan. Nämä tilat vaikuttavat osaltaan pelaajan käsitykseen pelitilanteista ja pelitilan sisältämistä tapahtumista.Siirretty Doriast

The suspension of disbelief in videogames

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel UniversityThis thesis explores the ways in which suspension of disbelief works in digital games. Primarily concerned with how players relate imaginatively to the often major dissonance between gameplay and narrative in digital games, this thesis questions how the literate players of games reconcile these complex texts imaginatively. Proposing that Samuel Taylor Coleridge's concept of suspension of disbelief is a complicated process often cited rhetorically rather than given its theoretical due, this thesis aims to rehabilitate the term and turn it into a useful, sharpened tool for games studies. Digital games themselves are also seen to be an intense new realm of possibilities for the suspension of disbelief, and textual analysis of games which approach the fourth wall or the suspension of disbelief on their own terms helps to make this clear. Beginning by defining the differences of games compared to other media, the thesis goes on to define suspension of disbelief in both its historical and modern contexts and see how it fits with games, isolating three key problems with uniting the concept with the medium. The three chapters which follow looked in more depth at the problems of the skilled reader, fundamental activity and dissonance through investigations into games’ textual construction, the mindsets they engender in players and their reformulation of the fourth wall. The final section looks at the conclusions working together to achieve the dual aims of proposing a new model for game reading which centres around a willed disavowal of presence on the part of the gamer combined with the gamer's taking up of a role offered by the game-text, and rehabilitating both the term and the concept of suspension of disbelief