Narrative Potential of Menus in Video Games

openNei videogiochi, il menu principale è la casella degli strumenti del giocatore. Lo scopo del menu principale di un videogioco si trova anche nella nostra realtà per cose come una borsa personale o una casa. La struttura e il contenuto di questi oggetti raccontano la vita di una persona. Queste sono cassette degli attrezzi che descrivono gli obiettivi, le azioni e gli elementi importanti di come uno sceglie vivere la sua vita. Comparativamente, il layout e il contenuto del menu principale raccontano la storia del giocatore nel gioco. Il menu principale può anticipare la narrazione e può indicizzare l'interazione con il mondo di gioco. Dimostra i controlli di base del gioco e la logica dell'interfaccia. Per questi motivi, il menu principale può essere considerato l'offerta principale del gioco. Questo estratto è legato a una tesi finale che esaminerà le narrazioni, l'importanza e la presenza di come i menu principali sono organizzati, presentati e utilizzati. Il menu principale è un elemento visivo e narrativo che è all'interno dell'interfaccia non limitato ad essere parte del codice di programmazione di un gioco. Gli obiettivi principali e lo scopo del gioco saranno presenti nel menu principale, indipendentemente se il giocatore sceglie di giocare il gioco come previsto. Quali sono le opzioni identificano gli elementi importanti del gioco. Dove e come gli elementi sono posizionati identificano la loro gerarchia e le relazioni. Come vengono utilizzate le opzioni, facendo riferimento all'input dell'utente, sono collegate all'hardware del gioco e a come il giocatore si muove all'interno del gioco. La forma del funzionamento del menu principale rifletterà e dimostrerà come viene utilizzato l'hardware e la logica dell'interfaccia. Queste considerazioni possono dimostrare come il menu principale funge da guida al gioco come offerta primaria dimostrando come giocare il gioco. Il menu principale come elemento visivo e narrativo si trova in tutti i giochi moderni, con alcune eccezioni, perché è parte integrante dell'interfaccia e della storia del gioco. La mia tesi introdurrà la mia metodologia e lo stato dell'arte sui principali menu nel campo interdisciplinare degli studi di gioco. Gli studi di casi includeranno giochi digitali del franchise Pokémon, la saga di The Legend of Zelda, Animal Crossing e Katamari Damaci. Questo studio spera di portare consapevolezza allo studio del menu principale come più di una semplice interfaccia. Si tratta di un elemento narrativo importante di un gioco che dovrebbe essere un argomento ben studiato all'interno di studi di gioco. I videogiochi possono essere classificati in base al menu principale e l'interfaccia, aggiungendo ai generi tradizionali che vengono utilizzati. Può essere possibile che le recenti tendenze e cambiamenti nei videogiochi che vengono creati dalla tecnologia più recente non sono del tutto nuovi. Questi giochi potrebbero essere realizzando modi che i vecchi giochi erano originariamente destinati ad essere giocato.In videogames, the main menu is the player’s toolbox. The purpose of the main menu to a video game is also found in our reality to things such as a personal bag or a home. The structure and contents of these objects both tell a story of a person’s life. These are toolboxes that outline the goals, actions, and important elements of how one chooses to live his life. Comparatively, the layout and contents of the main menu tell the story of the player in the game. The main menu can anticipate narrative and it can index interaction with the game-world. It demonstrates the basic controls of the game and the interface’s logic. For these reasons, the main menu can be considered the game’s primary affordance. This abstract is related of a final thesis which will look at the narratives, importance, and presence of how main menus are organized, presented, and used. The main menu is a visual and narrative element that is within the interface not limited to being part of a game’s programming code. The main objectives and purpose of play will be present in the main menu regardless if the player chooses to play the game as intended. What the options are identify the important elements of play. Where and how the elements are placed identify their hierarchy and relationships. How the options are used, referring to user input, are linked to the game’s hardware and how the player is moving within the game. The form of the main menu’s operation will reflect and demonstrate how the hardware is used and the interface’s logic. These considerations can prove how the main menu acts as a guide to the game as primary affordance by demonstrating how to play the game. The main menu as a visual and narrative element is found in all modern games, with some exceptions, because it is an integral part of the game's interface and story. My thesis will introduce my methodology and the state of art about main menus in the interdisciplinary field of game studies. Case studies will include digital games from the Pokémon franchise, the saga of The Legend of Zelda, Animal Crossing, and Katamari Damaci. This study hopes to bring awareness to studying the main menu as more than just an interface. It is an important narrative element of a game that should be a well-studied topic within game studies. Videogames can be categorized based on main menu and interface, adding to the traditional genres that are used. It may be possible that recent trends and changes in videogames that are created from newer technology are not entirely new. These games could be realizing ways that older games were originally intended to be played

Where are all the climate change games? Locating digital games' response to climate change

The burgeoning genre of climate fiction, or ‘cli-fi’, in literature and the arts has begun to attract both scholarly and popular attention. It hasbeen described as ‘potentially [having] crucial contributions to make toward full understanding of the multiple, accelerating environmental challenges facing the world today.’ (Buell, 2014) Implicitly, these works confront the current orthodoxy about where exactly the issue of climate change sits in domains of knowledge. As Jordan (2014) notes: ‘climate change as ‘nature’ not culture is still largely perceived as a problem for the sciences alongside planning, policy, and geography.’ In this paper we ask where is, or alternatively what does or could climate fiction within the field of digital games look like? Even a passing familiarity with the cultural output of the mainstream game industry reveals the startling omission of the subject–with scant few games telling stories that engage with climate change and the unfolding ecological crisis. (Abraham, 2015) Finding a relative dearth of explicit engagement, this paper offers an alternative engagement with climate change in games by focussing on the underlying ideas, conceptions and narratives of human-environment relationships that have been a part of games since their earliest incarnations. We argue that it is possible to read games for particular conceptualisations of human relationships to nature, and offer a description of four highly prevalent ‘modes’ of human-environment engagement. We describe and analyse these relationships for their participation in or challenge to the same issues and problems that undergird the current ecological crisis, such as enlightenment narratives of human mastery and dominion over the earth

The Invention of Good Games: Understanding Learning Design in Commercial Videogames

This work sought to help inform the design of educational digital games by the studying the design of successful commercial videogames. The main thesis question was: How does a commercially and critically successful modern video game support the learning that players must accomplish in order to succeed in the game (i.e. get to the end or win)? This work takes a two-pronged approach to supporting the main argument, which is that the reason we can learn about designing educational games by studying commercial games is that people already learn from games and the best ones are already quite effective at teaching players what they need to learn in order to succeed in the game. The first part of the research establishes a foundation for the argument, namely that accepted pedagogy can be found in existing commercial games. The second part of the work proposes new methods for analysing games that can uncover mechanisms used to support learning in games which can be employed even if those games were not originally designed as educational objects. In order to support the claim that ‘good’ commercial videogames already embody elements of sound pedagogy an explicit connection is made between game design and formally accepted theory and models in teaching and learning. During this phase of the work a significant concern was raised regarding the classification of games as ‘good’, so a new methodology using Borda Counts was devised and tested that combines various disjoint subjective reviews and rankings from disparate sources in non-trivial manner that accounts for relative standings. Complementary to that was a meta-analysis of the criteria used to select games chosen as subjects of study as reported by researchers. Then, several games were chosen using this new ranking method and analysed using another new methodology that was designed for this work, called Instructional Ethology. This is a new methodology for game design deconstruction and analysis that would allows the extraction of information about mechanisms used to support learning. This methodology combines behavioural and structural analysis to examine how commercial games support learning by examining the game itself from the perspective of what the game does. Further, this methodology can be applied to the analysis of any software system and offers a new approach to studying any interactive software. The results of the present study offered new insights into how several highly successful commercial games support players while they learn what they must learn in order to succeed in those games. A new design model was proposed, known as the 'Magic Bullet' that allows designers to visualize the relative proportions of potential learning in a game to assess the potential of a design

Sandspur, Vol 112, No 05, September 23, 2005

Rollins College student newspaper, written by the students and published at Rollins College. The Sandspur started as a literary journal.https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cfm-sandspur/2793/thumbnail.jp

Immaterial Materiality: Collecting in Live-Action Film, Animation, and Digital Games

This dissertation analyzes depictions of collecting and collectors in visual media, arguing that cultural conceptions which have long been reinforced by live-action film and animation are now being challenged by digital video games. The older notion of collectors as people dissociated from present-day society and unhealthily obsessed with either the past or the minutiae of inanimate objects are giving way to a new conception of the collector as an active manipulator of information in the present moment. The dissertation argues that this shift is partly influenced by the ontology of each media form. It focuses primarily on the rise of digital technology from the mid-1980s to the present, 1985 being the year the Nintendo Entertainment System was first introduced in the United States, reviving the flagging video game industry and posing a threat to the dominance of the cinema in visual entertainment media. Beginning with an overview of collecting in the Western hemisphere, it argues that popular stereotypes of collecting are out of step with the actuality of the practice. Analysis of the ontology of film links the tendency to portray the figure of the collector as a socially inept male, while the museum is a source of monsters and mystery. The animated film aligns itself with change and transformation and thus rejects the stasis implied by traditional notions of collection. The interactive nature of digital games embraces colleting as a game activity, making the player a collector of digital objects, and the game collection a positive indicator of progress in the game

Resolutely Inclusive: Merz Art Practice and Einfühlung

Through creative practice and exegetical writing this research investigates a possibility for continual engagement in aesthetic appreciation and a particular way of noticing that artists and viewers of artwork may share. Merz, invented by artist Kurt Schwitters, is a type of accumulative art practice that could include any material or method. Viewing and producing this type of artwork is examined via a theory of aesthetic appreciation called Einfühlung: a study of spectator’s embodied experiences with aesthetic works

Heartbeat, Heartbreak: Persona 4, Reparative Reading, and Queer Identity in the Japanese Countryside

M.A

Going and going : a contemporary search for meaning

Thesis (S.M. in Art, Culture and Technology)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 111-118).Meaning provides the individual with a sense of a purpose to live, being himself, and feeling at ease. Finding meaning on a daily basis is paramount. Yet, the search is constant since meaning is lost and regained persistently. Humans strive to find it, especially in the XXIst century. The high demands of productivity, and the repetitions or monotony of everyday living can cause this loss of meaning. Moreover, the accelerated pace of time and the overwhelming amount of information produced by telecommunication and computer technologies cause the loss, too. Considering the above problems, the questions they pose are: How and where to find meaning? Where can the technologized individual find a dose of it? This thesis aims to present the resolution of these questions through the chronological and epistemological trajectory of my own search for meaning. Also, this thesis presents a variety of cases in which the loss of, the search for, and the discovery of meaning happen in the context of contemporary life. Tracing the path for the meaningfulness of my art practice through the understanding of boredom, and my fascination of video games, as a medium, drove this work. My exploration towards meaning generated an intuitive, and subjective methodology that blended artistic and scientific methods (phenomenological, ethnographic, philosophical, psychological, analytical...) that rendered an unconventional series of sequential findings. These discoveries show that the search for meaning has the form of a mental journey or vacation to the worlds of the self. For example, daydreaming and dreaming are natural means to go on an excursion to our inner lands. In the modern world, meaningful mental expeditions can come about when learning or perfecting skills for play or sports, with the body or with the aid of technological tools (meaning is in action not in production). This work explains how driving real or virtual race cars transport drivers to inner locations where they spend quality time with themselves. I argue that these mediums perform as vehicles of self-exploration and self-reflection that bring about self-knowledge. Consequently, racing's particularity offers the experience of speed, which sets the conditions for the optimal mental state to find the self. This state provides a sense of time, freedom, and oneness that suspends the individual temporarily from mundane contemporary life: he finds himself in a dream with the eyes wide open and clear mind.by Elba Fabiola Alvarado Beltran.S.M.in Art, Culture and Technolog