MUsE – a framework for reception-based gaming research

Game studies are approached from very different faculty cultures and research perspectives. As the reception based view usually examines the process of game usage and its environment, there are still several different entries into the field. Many theoretical approaches and empirical studies concentrate on single phases or theoretical constructs of game reception. Sometimes this is done very detailed, sometimes in a more superficial way. This article delivers a more holistic model for reception based gaming research called MUsE, which describes a whole cycle of game usage and also can be used in longitudinal study designs. Additionally, results of a first prototype study are presented at a glance

“Entertainment for Retirement?”: Silvergamers and the Internet

In recent years, Internet video gaming has grown exponentially amongst a non-traditional and non-targeted group of gamers: those over 50 years of age. In the United States alone, elderly gamers have grown from nine percent of all gamers in 1999 to over 25 percent of all gamers as of 2009. The current study specifically examines elderly peoples’ usage behaviors with Internet-based video games. Such participation has been aided by the fact that games are social in nature and are accessible in terms ownership and operation. The process of becoming an Internet gamer therefore requires little more than a simple computer, an Internet connection, and a desire to be entertained. Results show that so-called “silvergamers” prefer casual games as opposed to more complex and persistent games. In addition, this paper raises further insights into their behaviour as users, including usage time and expenses for game usage, and situates them within the context of elderly gamers as an economic potential group to be targeted more

PhysioVR: a novel mobile virtual reality framework for physiological computing

Virtual Reality (VR) is morphing into a ubiquitous technology by leveraging of smartphones and screenless cases in order to provide highly immersive experiences at a low price point. The result of this shift in paradigm is now known as mobile VR (mVR). Although mVR offers numerous advantages over conventional immersive VR methods, one of the biggest limitations is related with the interaction pathways available for the mVR experiences. Using physiological computing principles, we created the PhysioVR framework, an Open-Source software tool developed to facilitate the integration of physiological signals measured through wearable devices in mVR applications. PhysioVR includes heart rate (HR) signals from Android wearables, electroencephalography (EEG) signals from a low cost brain computer interface and electromyography (EMG) signals from a wireless armband. The physiological sensors are connected with a smartphone via Bluetooth and the PhysioVR facilitates the streaming of the data using UDP communication protocol, thus allowing a multicast transmission for a third party application such as the Unity3D game engine. Furthermore, the framework provides a bidirectional communication with the VR content allowing an external event triggering using a real-time control as well as data recording options. We developed a demo game project called EmoCat Rescue which encourage players to modulate HR levels in order to successfully complete the in-game mission. EmoCat Rescue is included in the PhysioVR project which can be freely downloaded. This framework simplifies the acquisition, streaming and recording of multiple physiological signals and parameters from wearable consumer devices providing a single and efficient interface to create novel physiologically-responsive mVR applications.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

“Entertainment for Retirement?”: Silvergamers and the Internet

In recent years, Internet video gaming has grown exponentially amongst a non-traditional and non-targeted group of gamers: those over 50 years of age. In the United States alone, elderly gamers have grown from nine percent of all gamers in 1999 to over 25 percent of all gamers as of 2009. The current study specifically examines elderly peoples’ usage behaviors with Internet-based video games. Such participation has been aided by the fact that games are social in nature and are accessible in terms ownership and operation. The process of becoming an Internet gamer therefore requires little more than a simple computer, an Internet connection, and a desire to be entertained. Results show that so-called “silvergamers” prefer casual games as opposed to more complex and persistent games. In addition, this paper raises further insights into their behaviour as users, including usage time and expenses for game usage, and situates them within the context of elderly gamers as an economic potential group to be targeted more

Introduction: Popularizing Instability (Chapter 1), Introducing Narrative Instability (Chapter 2)

The following text is an excerpt from the book Narrative Instability: Destabilizing Identities, Realities, and Textualities in Contemporary American Popular Culture, which was originally published in 2019 with Universitätsverlag Winter as part of the series American Studies – A Monograph Series. The book introduces the concept of ‘narrative instability’ in order to make visible a new trend in contemporary US popular culture, to analyze this trend’s poetics, and to scrutinize its textual politics. It identifies those texts as narratively unstable that consciously frustrate and obfuscate the process of narrative understanding and comprehension, challenging their audiences to reconstruct what happened in a text’s plot, who its characters are, which of its diegetic worlds are real, or how narrative information is communicated in the first place. Despite—or rather, exactly because of—their confusing and destabilizing tendencies, such texts have attained mainstream commercial popularity in recent years across a variety of media, most prominently in films, video games, and television series. Focusing on three clusters of instability that form around identities, realities, and textualities, the book argues that narratively unstable texts encourage their audiences to engage with the narrative constructedness of their universes, that narrative instability embodies a new facet of popular culture, that it takes place and can only be understood transmedially, and that its textual politics particularly speak to white male middle-class Americans