Sex, lies, and video games::An interactive storytelling prototype

The authors describe a first prototype of an Interactive Storytelling system, whose objective is to allow user intervention within a pre-defined storyline. The system is character-based rather than plot-based, each character’s role being dynamically computed using HTN planning. The interaction between characters creates various instantiations of the baseline narrative, with which the user can interfere at any time. After introducing the basic AI techniques used in the prototype, the authors discuss the modalities of user intervention and present an example story produced by the system

Papers, Please and the systemic approach to engaging ethical expertise in videogames

Papers, Please, by Lucas Pope (2013), explores the story of a customs inspector in the fictional political regime of Arstotzka. In this paper we explore the stories, systems and moral themes of Papers, Please in order to illustrate the systemic approach to designing videogames for moral engagement. Next, drawing on the Four Component model of ethical expertise from moral psychology, we contrast this systemic approach with the more common scripted approach. We conclude by demonstrating the different strengths and weaknesses that these two approaches have when it comes to designing videogames that engage the different aspects of a player’s moral expertise

Skyrim as a Representation of the American Dominant Culture

This thesis aims to give pictures of the American values in an American cultural product, Bethesda\u27s Elder Scroll V: Skyrim. I will use ideology as the concept to show that cultural products contain ideologies or values of the dominant group. The study shows that in the games, traditional American values serve as the standard values of the American dominant group. Furthermore, I show that American values in the video game are the same, although some values are shifting. In conclusion, I find out that Elder Scroll V: Skyrim has all of the American traditional values. The medieval setting of the game somehow shifts some values like material wealth since bloodline status is appreciated. Thus, Elder Scroll V: Skyrim does represent the American society and how it should be

Wolves among us: some brief reflections on the bona fides of gendered violence in computer game art

The classification of computer games in Australia is a subject of expert discourse, but is not, itself, an expert function. It is carried out by community representatives (the classifiers), speaking for the community of reasonable people and applying their standards, while assessing the impact of classifiable elements on both reasonable people and the especially vulnerable. It is an inherently personal analysis, but the personal is an imagined space (the reasonable person or reasonable adult ). This blog or reflection-type article brings the personal back to a real space, of flesh and blood: the author\u27s. It starts from the author\u27s experience of discomfort playing three computer games featuring violence against women or girls: The Wolf Among Us, The Walking Dead: Season Two, and The Last of Us. It breaks down the author\u27s response to understand why he reacted the way he did, focusing, in particular, on his assessment of whether the violence was justified. It then offers some brief suggestions on how such a response could influence classification, given the existing rules: at least if the author\u27s experience is identifiable with the, or a, reasonable person

The différance engine: videogames as deconstructive spacetime

The purpose here is to intervene within some dominant strands of videogame scholarship and propose a more problematic relation to our object. The two dominant tendencies taken-up here represent what has come to be self-styled as a media studies 2.0 model, over and against a supposedly previously dominant (and retroactivated as outmoded) 1.0. Proposed in opposition to these somewhat sweeping positions will be a deconstructive model which, while disagreeing with these theoretical ‘algorithms’, would not believe itself to be leading a charge toward any notionally more thoroughgoingly circumnavigating 3.0 account. Specifically, while the 2.0 account proposes a “new” active first-person Performative framework versus an “old” third-person indicative Constative, we would recommend a reworked iterative-Performative as propounded in the works of Derrida and Butler

Four Lenses for Designing Morally Engaging Games

Historically the focus of moral decision-making in games has been narrow, mostly confined to challenges of moral judgement (deciding right and wrong). In this paper, we look to moral psychology to get a broader view of the skills involved in ethical behaviour and how they may be employed in games. Following the Four Component Model of Rest and colleagues, we identify four “lenses” – perspectives for considering moral gameplay in terms of focus, sensitivity, judgement and action – and describe the design problems raised by each. To conclude, we analyse two recent games, The Walking Dead and Papers, Please, and show how the lenses give us insight into important design differences between them

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Processing (Post)humanism, Mediating Desire: Technology in the Works of Three Border Playwrights

New electronic technology, such as personal video cameras, videotape players, and the internet, has increasingly sparked interest from Northern Mexican border authors across genres. In Juan Ríos’s Generación Atari, Francisco J. López´s Cibernauta: cómo vivir atrapado en la red, and Bárbara Colio’s Teoría y práctica de la muerte de una cucaracha (sin dolor) and La habitación, technological innovations play a key role in the development of the central emotional conflicts. The four dramatic works relate new technology to an increased social openness regarding more diverse expressions of sexuality, yet they also portray existing hierarchies, fraught relationships, and tragic events that signal the limits and interruptions involved in the technological mediation of desire. Rather than any wholesale condemnation or celebration of technology, these works pose human-machine relations as an open question to be shared with and pondered by the audience