Avatar And Self: A Rhetoric Of Identity Mediated Through Collaborative Role-play

This project responds to a problem in scholarship describing the relationship between virtual avatars and their physical users. In Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle identifies points of slippage wherein the persona of the avatar becomes conflated with the user‘s sense of self to create an authentic self predicated on both real and virtual experiences (Turkle 184-5). Although the conflation of the authentic self with the virtual has provided various affordances for serious games or other pedagogical projects such as classrooms hosted through the game Second Life, the processes enabling identification with an avatar have been largely overlooked. This project examines several layers of influence that affect how users play with identity to create successful social performances within an online community connected to a work of fiction. In doing so, the user must consider his or her own motivations for creating a persona, how these motivations will allow the avatar to achieve social acceptance, and how these social performances connect to the scene created by the work of fiction. Using an online role-playing forum based on a work of fiction as a site of analysis, this project will borrow from game studies, dramatism, and identity theory to create a framework for discussing processes through which users identify with their virtual avatars

A world of difference: media translations of fantasy worlds

The modern consumer has access to a massively complex entertainment world. Many of the products available reveal a visible movement of popular fantasy worlds between different media. This transmedia process creates a strong link between film, merchandising and games; with all of these mediums borrowing from each other. This borrowing takes various forms, from licensed adaptations to unofficial copying of ideas, settings and characters as well as exploiting the different aesthetics and techniques of different media. Much of the scholarship on transmedia concentrates on storytelling, where a single overarching narrative unfolds over several different media. This thesis will move away from storytelling to consider how culture producers borrow the aesthetics, narratives and fantasy worlds from other sources, including computer games. This borrowing happens because it enables them to use transmedia functionality to gain market share from an already established audience who have a vested interested in, and enthusiasm for, an established world. Most of this borrowing happens around specific genres – especially fantasy, science fiction and horror. These genres are particularly wide-ranging and emphasise the possibilities of worldbuilding, making then good sources for multi-media franchises. This thesis will examine examples from these genres to examine what elements are translated to a new medium, and what is discarded. This examination will help explain how and why different media and settings work in the way that they do

Story beats in videogames as value-driven choice-based unit operations

We present a framework of story beats, defined as microunits of dramatic action, as a tool for the ludonarrative analysis of videogames. First, we explain the Goal - Action - Reaction - Outcome model of the story beat. Then, we present six types of story beats, Action, Interaction, Inaction, Mental, Emotion, and Sensory, providing videogame examples for each category. In the second half of the paper, we contextualise this framework in the classic game studies theory of videogame narrative and player action: unit operations, gamic action, anatomy of choice, and game design patterns, wrapping it up in the most recent trends in cognitive narratology. Ultimately, we present the story beat as a ludonarrative unit, working simultaneously as a ‘unit operation’ in the study of games as systems, and as a microunit of character action in narrative analysis. The conclusion outlines prospective directions for using story beats in formal, experiential, and cultural game research.We present a framework of story beats, defined as microunits of dramatic action, as a tool for the ludonarrative analysis of videogames. First, we explain the Goal - Action - Reaction - Outcome model of the story beat. Then, we present six types of story beats, Action, Interaction, Inaction, Mental, Emotion, and Sensory, providing videogame examples for each category. In the second half of the paper, we contextualise this framework in the classic game studies theory of videogame narrative and player action: unit operations, gamic action, anatomy of choice, and game design patterns, wrapping it up in the most recent trends in cognitive narratology. Ultimately, we present the story beat as a ludonarrative unit, working simultaneously as a ‘unit operation’ in the study of games as systems, and as a microunit of character action in narrative analysis. The conclusion outlines prospective directions for using story beats in formal, experiential, and cultural game research

The arts of action

The theory and culture of the arts has largely focused on the arts of objects, and neglected the arts of action – the “process arts”. In the process arts, artists create artifacts to engender activity in their audience, for the sake of the audience’s aesthetic appreciation of their own activity. This includes appreciating their own deliberations, choices, reactions, and movements. The process arts include games, urban planning, improvised social dance, cooking, and social food rituals. In the traditional object arts, the central aesthetic properties occur in the artistic artifact itself. It is the painting that is beautiful; the novel that is dramatic. In the process arts, the aesthetic properties occur in the activity of the appreciator. It is the game player’s own decisions that are elegant, the rock climber’s own movement that is graceful, and the tango dancers’ rapport that is beautiful. The artifact’s role is to call forth and shape that activity, guiding it along aesthetic lines. I offer a theory of the process arts. Crucially, we must distinguish between the designed artifact and the prescribed focus of aesthetic appreciation. In the object arts, these are one and the same. The designed artifact is the painting, which is also the prescribed focus of appreciation. In the process arts, they are different. The designed artifact is the game, but the appreciator is prescribed to appreciate their own activity in playing the game. Next, I address the complex question of who the artist really is in a piece of process art — the designer or the active appreciator? Finally, I diagnose the lowly status of the process arts

Spartan Daily, October 2, 1981

Volume 77, Issue 22https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/6798/thumbnail.jp

The social poetics of analog virtual worlds : toying with alternate realities

textWhile online virtual worlds draw increasingly wider audiences of players and scholars alike, offline games continue to evolve into more complex and socially layered forms as well. This dissertation argues that virtual worlds need not exist as online, digital environments alone and probes three genres of non-digital gaming for evidence of the virtual: tabletop role-playing games, murder-mystery events, and localized alternate reality games. More broadly, then, this dissertation is about deliberate make-belief: practiced by adults, taken seriously by participants, engaged with for long hours at a time, performed in public, and integrated into everyday social relationships. Drawing on scholars who study games as social activities (McGonigal 2006, Montola 2012) and social institutions (Goffman 1974, Searle 1995), I present three ethnographic case studies that illustrate how complex forms of social gaming can conjure and sustain environments best understood as analog virtual worlds. Through the widespread use of mobile technologies and the concerted efforts of innovators, game spaces are increasingly permeating our everyday lives on- and offline. This dissolving boundary demands anthropologists to revisit questions of how, where, and with whom we play games. Dovetailing Martin Heidegger’s notions of worlding and poiesis to the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, this dissertation investigates how new forms of social gaming demonstrate the same qualities of shared intentionality, intersubjectivity, and performance essential to the production of new social meaning and cultural forms. Following, I situate the bold ethnographic case studies of make-belief in dialogue with scholars who figure exclusively online virtual worlds (Castronova 2005, Taylor 2006, Boellstorff 2008) and argue that analyzing both on- and offline virtual worlds together can help scholars better understand the fundamental nature of social interaction and shared intentionality, those everyday mechanisms that both sustain personal relationships on the one hand and maintain our broadest and most serious social institutions on the other.Anthropolog

Queering the Zombie

This article starts with the observation that all monsters are created by humans and thus they serve specific cultural and sociopolitical purposes. The study is set to finding out, first, how the traditional figure of the zombie works as a monster in popular culture, and second, how digital games open up new possibilities for it to exist and to act. Even if the zombie has symbolic power that makes it an ideal antagonist in games, assigning individual agency to it is very unlikely. From this follows that playing (as) the zombie in games is actively discouraged. The analysis presented here differs from earlier research on the zombie as a posthuman figure in that it seeks to understand the functions and the usability of the monster specifically as a digital game character through analyzing examples such as Stubbs the zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse (Wideload Games, 2005). In the end, this article is aimed at investigating the zombie as a queer figure that transgresses several boundaries in games, and ultimately offers us the possibility of transcending the human condition.©2019 Taylor & Francis. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in The Playful Undead and Video Games: Critical Analyses of Zombies and Gameplay on July 23, 2019, available online: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315179490fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

The wolf and literature

This thesis explores how wolves, and other animals, are represented in a variety of literary texts. At stake in these explorations is the shifting and problematic border between the human and the animal, culture and nature, civilisation and the wild. Because of its biological proximity to the domestic dog, as well as the ways in which it has been figured as both the ultimate expression of wild savagery and of maternal love, the wolf is an exemplary guide to this border. The wolf traces the ways in which the human/animal border has been constructed, sustained and transgressed. These border crossings take on a special resonance given the widespread sense of a contemporary environmental crisis. In this respect this thesis amounts to a contribution to the field of ecocriticism and pays special attention to the claim that the environmental crisis is also a 'crisis of the imagination', of our ideational and aesthetic relationship to the nonhuman world. With this in mind I look closely at some of the main currents of ecocriticism with a view to showing how certain psychoanalytic and poststructuralust approaches can enhance an overall ecocritical stance. It is an analysis which will also show how the sense of environmental emergency cannot be divorced from other critical and political concerns, including those concerns highlighted by feminist and postcolonial critics. In the words of a much favoured environmentalist slogan, 'everything connects to everything else'. Ultimately this thesis shows that how we imagine the wolf, and nature in general, in literary texts, is inextricably bound up with our relationship to, and treatment of, the natural world and the animals, including human beings, for whom that world is home