Novel Dramatic and Ludic Tensions Arising from Mixed Reality Performance as Exemplified in Better Than Life

We observe that a Mixed Reality Performance called Better Than Life gave rise to novel dramaturgical and ludic possibilities that have not been observed elsewhere. Mixed Reality Performance is an emergent genre that takes many forms, in this case a live experience for a small group of physical participants (PP) and a larger group of online participants (OP). Both groups were offered individual and collective interactions that altered the narrative in real time. A mixed methodology approach to data generated during the performance has identified two key moments where both physical and online participant groups are split into many subgroups by ongoing live events. These events cause tensions that affect the trajectories of participants that make up their experience. Drawing on literary, theatre, cinema and digital game criticism we suggest that the possibilities for engagement in Mixed Reality Performance are exponentially greater than those available to previous media

Thrillology: Affective Intensities and the Everyday-Spectacular in American Literature and Culture

“Thrillology: Affective Intensities and the Everyday-Spectacular in American Literature and Culture” presents thrill as a powerful thematic component centered on immediate affective gratification informing character development and narrative. This perspective rethinks theme as always having an affective dimension that accompanies its conceptual articulations, with the former, in many cases, being the more important element. Thrilled psycho-emotional states emerge, in their own right, as legitimizations of individuality and cultural autonomy from the perspective of the passional subject. Engaging with a broad spectrum of literary and cultural sources spanning the last hundred years, this project investigates various ways in which the self-fulfilling affective intensity of thrill imparts a compelling spectacularization to everyday experience. Case studies featuring Naturalist novels by Norris, Sinclair, and Dreiser expose the pursuit of material success as an intoxicating affect that drives central figures, regardless of the attainment, and inevitable loss, of wealth. In contrast, Ishmael Reed’s MumboJumbo presents a very different frisson of social rebellion that is determined to find fulfillment within its defiance and re-appropriation of cultural identity, no matter the stacked-odds confronting protagonists. And, book-ending nearly a century of fictional engagements with the pervasiveness of fame, fortune, and celebrity in mainstream consciousness, Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust and Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama portray the pursuit of thrill as an end itself, regardless of any realization of stardom. Finally, these thrillological considerations extend into contemporary American social texts, here embodied by the recurring spectacle of the Super Bowl broadcast and the extravaganza of Apple.com’s 2010 web-based introduction of the iPad. Through its examination of thrill as a positive affective power and the capacity of such excitation to translate into modes of expression and identification, Thrillology adds new perspectives to the body of contemporary affect theoretical literary analysis that has been prominently concerned with the examination of negative affective dimensions. This project brings a variety of theoretical fields into conversation in order to achieve a versatile conception of thrill’s affect, combining literary and cultural modes of analysis that co-involve affect theory, performance studies, theorization of spectacle and The Everyday, and effects of mass-media and consumerism

Cultures and Traditions of Wordplay and Wordplay Research

This volume focuses on realisations of wordplay in different cultures and social and historical contexts, and brings together various research traditions of approaching wordplay. Together with the volume DWP 7, it assembles selected papers presented at the interdisciplinary conference The Dynamics of Wordplay / La dynamique du jeu de mots (Trier, 2016) and stresses the inherent dynamicity of wordplay and wordplay research

Performance Through an Avatar: Exploring Affect and Ideology Through Narrative in Videogames

Videogames are a major source of popular cultural narratives surpassing even Hollywood films. Videogames, however, cast the player as the active agent within the narrative as opposed to film, television, and traditional theatre where the separation between performer and audience is clearly demarcated. This dissertation investigates the affective potential of videogames realized through the relationship of the player and the avatar within the game world. Specifically, I look at the avatar as an affective conduit for the player, how the feedback between the player and avatar creates a cybernetic relationship, how this relationship changes the player, and how this change potentially augments the players interpretation of realityvirtual and otherwise. It is through this changed (and augmented) interpretation of reality that socio/political ideological meaningsintentional or notmay be absorbed by the player. Ethnographic research conducted with six volunteer participants combined with my own autoethnographic research into several recent popular videogames is intersected with theories of affect, embodiment, and ideology. My findings suggest that experience with the virtual realities of game worlds is one step removed from actual experience. Since videogames are composed of representations, the ideological positions embedded within those representations are not simply presented and understood like traditional theatre, film, and television, but are embodied by the player through the avatar as (nearly direct) experience. Theatre, film, and television have rich critical histories and this study of the players performance through the avatar as an affective conduit and receiver/transmitter of ideology joins the growing critical body of work regarding the newer storytelling medium of videogames

Cultures and Traditions of Wordplay and Wordplay Research

This volume focuses on realisations of wordplay in different cultures and social and historical contexts, and brings together various research traditions of approaching wordplay. Together with the volume DWP 7, it assembles selected papers presented at the interdisciplinary conference The Dynamics of Wordplay / La dynamique du jeu de mots (Trier, 2016) and stresses the inherent dynamicity of wordplay and wordplay research

Ludic yūgen: aesthetic as method in the art of recording

This doctorate has been conducted as a practice-as-research based project, resulting in the submission of the 2 hours of recordings of creative work for examination. The written thesis that accompanies the creative work has a tripartite structure, and follows the model described by Robin Nelson in the text Practice as research in the arts: principles, protocols, pedagogies, resistances (Nelson 2013, p.34). The first section, A Conceptual Framework, outlines the history and theoretical implications of the aesthetic of yūgen, surveying the evolution and etymology of the term and describing the traditional techniques used in classical and medieval Japan to evoke the aesthetic in the fields of poetry, painting and garden design. This section concludes with an investigation of the author‘s creative translation of the aesthetic of yūgen into the methods of ludic yūgen, as used in the author‘s creative praxis. These methods involve the use of miegakure, improvisation, omission, limitations, sparse means and the manipulation of shadows and darkness. The second section, A Location in a Lineage, reviews historical practice in the art of recording which has involved the use of the methods of ludic yūgen. The locating of these methods in the rock genre, specifically in the recordist tradition, is elucidated. The use of the methods of ludic yūgen by recording artists such as The Beatles, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Robert Pollard, the Bomb Squad, Beck, Pixies and others is described, and the researcher‘s creative work is revealed as belonging to an unacknowledged tradition of ludic recordists working in the realm of popular music. In addition, the role of humour in ludic yūgen, the ludic approach to music and the importance of the artist‘s unique voice are delineated. The third and final section of the written thesis is essentially a diary of creative practice, functioning as a linear exegesis that traces the development of the creative work and the evolution of the intellectual context in which that praxis takes place

From DotA to MOBA: The emergence and crisis of playful co-creativity in multiplayer online battle arena games

The Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre represents one of the most popular, dynamic and influential spaces of digital play. Since the genres first commercial release in 2009 with the title League of Legends (2009 – present, Riot Games), MOBAs have played an integral role in pioneering ‘fair’ models of free-to-play, live streaming as a ubiquitous spectator activity and e-sports as an increasingly recognised mainstream industry. This thesis posits each of these trends as connected to the influence of MOBAs as a genre with a rich history in grassroots spaces of non-commercial play and participation. Adopting an online ethnographic approach, the thesis describes how the transition of the genre away from its non-commercial and collectivised origins has introduced an influential model of hybrid power relations characteristic of the affective economics that underpin many wider digital platforms. Central to this thesis is the introduction of playful co-creativity as a conception for describing the productive role that play and closely related participatory activities exert in the vibrant activities of MOBAs. Through framing play as a co-creative practice that informs design, spurs participation, creates professions and sustains vast sums of affective value, the thesis asks how the political economy of playful co-creativity in MOBAs can be critically approached. The research mobilises approaches from game, fan and Internet studies to approach the complex set of relations encompassed by MOBAs. The online ethnography of this research comprises observations, personal experiences, in-depth case studies and player responses from online open discussions on Reddit. In particular, the research focuses on three influential examples of MOBAs in the original Warcraft III (Blizzard Entertainment, 2003) custom game DotA, League of Legends and Dota 2 (Valve Corporation, 2013 – present). Through grasping the differing modes of governance in each of these games, the aim of this thesis is to exemplify how MOBAs are a genre imbricated with affective forms of playful interaction that both sustain and at times threaten the hybrid power dynamics of this heterogeneous genre

‘You Are the Old Entrapped Dreams of the Coyote’s Brains Oozing Liquid Through the Broken Eye Socket’: Ecomonstrous poetics and weird bioregionalism in the fiction of R. A. Lafferty (with a comparative reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian)

The fiction of R. A. Lafferty (1914-2002) is at once deeply ecological and deeply strange. Its incessant narrative inclusion of the nonhuman beings, places, and forces of Lafferty’s Oklahoman and otherwise (south)western bioregion evinces an imagination profoundly porous to the local specificities and abundance of one’s more-than-human context. In this way it is deeply ecological. Lafferty’s fiction is also known (among his small devoted readership, which includes such luminaries as Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison) as one of the most uniquely off-kilter, wildly imaginative, and arcanely erudite bodies of work in U.S. literature. In this way it is deeply strange. While it is often acknowledged that Lafferty transcends the genre of science fiction (the industry in which most of his early work was published) and that his work is sui generis, little has been done to place him as either a U.S. author generally or an author of regional place more specifically. This thesis attempts to initiate the placement of Lafferty as a bioregional writer of the Great Plains and Southwest, whilst placing equal emphasis on Lafferty’s literary mode as not so much science-fictional as weird, or monstrous (in what we will call a horror-comic or monstro-ludic key). The fusion of these concerns leads this thesis to declare Lafferty a purveyor of American Weird Bioregionalism. Toward this end, we herein assemble insights from regional western U.S. narrative traditions (the frontier tall tale and Native American storytelling) together with recent ecocritical and ecophilosophical discourses (New Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology) to reconfigure contemporary Monsters Studies toward a more-than-human construal of monsters and the monstrous that reads Lafferty’s weird bioregional fiction through the lens of what this thesis terms an Ecomonstrous Poetics. A chapter devoted to an ecomonstrous reading of Cormac McCarthy’s southwestern novel Blood Meridian provides a canonical comparison to Lafferty with surprising overlap. A final chapter on Lafferty’s implicit ecotheology rounds out the thesis and opens it up to further research

In Gameplay : the invariant structures and varieties of the video game gameplay experience

This dissertation is a multidisciplinary study on video game gameplay as an autonomous form of vernacular experience. Plays and games are traditional research subjects in folkloristics, but commercial video games have not been studied yet. For this reason, methods and concepts of the folkloristic research tradition have remained unknown in contemporary games studies. This thesis combines folkloristics, game studies and phenomenological enactive cognitive science in its investigations into player–game interaction and the video game gameplay experience at large. In this dissertation, three representative survey samples (N=2,594, N=845, N=1,053) on “Rewarding gameplay experience” are analyzed using statistical analysis methods. The samples were collected in 2014–2017 from Finnish and Danish adult populations. This dissertation also analyzes data from 32 interviews, through which the survey respondents’ gameplay preferences, gaming memories, and motivations to play were further investigated. By combining statistical and qualitative data analyses, this work puts forward a mixed-methods research strategy and discusses how the findings relate to prior game research from several disciplines and schools of thought. Based on theoretical discussions, this dissertation argues that the video game gameplay experience as a cultural phenomenon consists of eight invariants in relation to which each individual gameplay experience can be interpreted: The player must demonstrate a lusory attitude (i), and a motivation to play (ii). The gameplay experience consists of explorative and coordinative practices (iii), which engender a change in the player’s self-experience (iv). This change renders the gameplay experience inherently emotional (v) and performative (vi) in relation to the gameworld (vii). The gameplay experience has the dramatic structure of a prototypical narrative (viii) although a game as an object cannot be regarded a narrative in itself. As a key result of factor analytical studies and qualitative interview analyses, a novel approach to understanding player–game interaction is put forward. An original gameplay preference research tool and a player typology are introduced. This work argues, that, although video games as commercial products would not be intuitive research subjects for folkloristics, video game gameplay, player–game interaction, and the traditions in experiencing and narrating gameplay do not differ drastically from those of traditional social games. In contrast to this, all forms of gameplay are argued to be manifestations of the same vernacular phenomenon. Indeed, folkloristic research could pay more attention to how culture is experienced, modified, varied and expressed, regardless of whether the research subject is a commercial product or not.Käsillä oleva väitöskirja on monitieteellinen tutkimus videopelien pelaamisesta itsenäisenä kansanomaisen kokemuksen muotona. Pelien ja leikkien tutkimus on perinteikäs tutkimusaihe folkloristiikassa, mutta kaupallisten videopelien tutkimusta ei ole juuri tehty. Tästä syystä folkloristiikan tutkimusmenetelmät ja -käsitteet ovat jääneet tuntemattomaksi nykyaikaisessa pelitutkimuksessa. Tutkimus yhdistää folkloristiikan ja pelitutkimuksen näkökulmien lisäksi enaktiivisen kognition fenomenologista teoriaa pelaaja–peli-vuorovaikutuksen tutkimukseen sekä pelikokemuksen analyysiin. Tutkimuksessa analysoidaan tilastotieteellisin menetelmin kolmea aikuisväestöä edustavaa ”Palkitseva pelikokemus” -kyselytutkimusaineistoa (N=2,594, N=845, N=1,053), jotka kerättiin Suomesta ja Tanskasta vuosina 2014–2017. Kyselytutkimusaineiston rinnalla analysoidaan 32 teemahaastattelun aineistoa. Haastatteluilla tuotettiin syvempää ymmärrystä kyselyyn vastanneiden henkilöiden pelimieltymyksistä, pelimuistoista ja pelimotivaatioista. Tilastoaineiston ja haastatteluaineiston analyysi tuodaan yhteen monimenetelmällisellä ja dialogisella tutkimusotteella, joka yhdistää havainnot usealla eri tutkimusalalla tehtyyn pelitutkimukseen. Teoreettisen analyysin tuloksena argumentoidaan, että videopelien pelikokemusta ilmiönä määrittää kahdeksan muuttumatonta ominaisuutta, joiden suhteen kunkin yksittäisen pelikokemuksen ainutlaatuisuutta voidaan tarkastella: Pelaajalla tulee olla leikkisä asenne (i) ja motivaatio pelaamiseen (ii). Pelaamisen kokemus rakentuu tutkivista ja suorittavista käyntänteistä (iii), jotka tuovat väliaikaisen muutoksen pelaavan henkilön minäkokemukseen (iv). Tämän muutoksen myötä pelaajuudesta muodostuu emotionaalinen (v) ja performatiivinen (vi) positio suhteessa pelimaailmaan (vii). Näin syntyvän omakohtaisen pelikokemuksen rakenne vastaa kertomuksen dramaattista perusrakennetta (viii), vaikka peliä itsessään ei voida pitää kertomuksena. Tutkimuksen empiirisenä tuloksena esitellään faktorianalyyttisiin tapaustutkimuksiin ja laadullisten aineistojen analyysiin perustuva uudenlainen näkökulma ja menetelmä pelaaja–peli-vuorovaikutuksen ja pelimieltymyksen tutkimukseen, sekä edelliseen perustuva pelaajatyyppiluokittelu. Samalla väitetään, että vaikka videopelit kaupallisina esineinä eivät olisi folkloristiikan tutkimuskohteita, videopelien pelaaminen, pelaaja–peli-vuorovaikutus ja pelien kokemisen tavat eivät eroa ratkaisevasti pihaleikeistä vaan ovat saman kansanomaisen ilmiön esiintymiä. Folkloristisen tutkimuksen soisikin kiinnittävän nykyistä painokkaampaa huomiota kulttuurin kokemisen, muokkaamisen ja ilmaisun tapoihin riippumatta siitä, onko tarkastelun kohteena kaupallinen tuote vai ei