"Hegelian Buddhist Hypertextual Media Inhabitation, or, Criticism in the Age of Electronic Immersion"

What can it mean to criticize when you are inside the work itself? In a immersive electronic or digital environment critic is not distanced on a platform based on firm principles. Yet criticism self-awareness and commentary remain possible. This essay examines various techniques for dealing with immersive environments critically

Smartphone chronic gaming consumption and positive coping practice

Purpose: Chronic consumption practice has been greatly accelerated by mobile, interactive and smartphone gaming technology devices. This study explores how chronic consumption of smartphone gaming produces positive coping practice. Design/methodology/approach: Underpinned by cognitive framing theory, empirical insights from eleven focus groups (n=62) reveal how smartphone gaming enhances positive coping amongst gamers and non-gamers. Findings: The findings reveal how the chronic consumption of games allows technology to act with privileged agency that resolves tensions between individuals and collectives. Consumption narratives of smartphone games, even when play is limited, lead to the identification of three cognitive frames through which positive coping processes operate: (a) the market generated frame, (b) the social being frame, and (c) the citizen frame. Research limitations/implications: This paper adds to previous research by providing an understanding of positive coping practice in the smartphone chronic gaming consumption. Originality/value: In smartphone chronic gaming consumption, cognitive frames enable positive coping by fostering appraisal capacities in which individuals confront, hegemony, culture and alterity-morality concerns

Playing with Play: Machinima in the Classroom

“So, machinima is really a genre, and not a medium?” The students in my Digital Media and Rhetoric course are grappling with both how to define machinima and how to evaluate whether one is “good” or not. I frustrate them by refusing to provide a definitive answer to this and other similar questions they have asked about the form. This intentional frustration continues as, after watching a few examples they ask me what grade I would give those machinima, if they were turned in for this assignment. Rather than providing a simple answer I redirect, asking them what criteria they would use to evaluate machinima and how the examples we’ve seen in class stand up to this scrutiny. At the beginning of this particular unit, when I announced that we wouldn’t be writing another research paper, they were exuberant. Now, however, the complexity of the task before them is slowly unveiling itself. While a majority of these students are gamers, few of them have experience in video production. None of them have previously looked at fan culture as a source of meaning and knowledge production. We are in unfamiliar territory, and they are getting restless

Apportioned Commodity Fetishism and the Transformative Power of Game Studies

This chapter explores the ways in which the field of Game Studies helps shape popular understandings of player, play, and game, and specifically how the field alters the conceptual, linguistic, and discursive apparatuses that gamers use to contextualize, describe, and make sense of their experiences. The chapter deploys the concept of apportioned commodity fetishism to analyze the phenomena of discourse as practice, persona, and vagaries of game design, recursion, lexical formation, institutionalization, systems of self-effectiveness, theory as anti-theory, and commodification

Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture

This book is not about the future of video games. It is not an attempt to predict the moods of the market, the changing profile of gamers, the benevolence or malevolence of the medium. This book is about those predictions. It is about the ways in which the past, present and future notions of games are narrated and negotiated by a small group of producers, journalists and gamers, and about how invested these narrators are in telling the story of tomorrow. In Future Gaming Paolo Ruffino suggests the story could be told another way. Considering game culture, from the gamification of self-improvement to GamerGate’s sexism and violence, Ruffino lays out an alternative, creative mode of thinking about the medium: a sophisticated critical take that blurs the distinctions among studying, playing, making and living with video games. Offering a series of stories that provide alternative narratives of digital gaming, Ruffino aims to encourage all of us who study and play (with) games to raise ethical questions, both about our own role in shaping the objects of research, and about our involvement in the discourses we produce as gamers and scholars. For researchers and students seeking a fresh approach to game studies, and for anyone with an interest in breaking open the current locked-box discourse, Future Gaming offers a radical lens with which to view the future

”I did not really get anything out of it”:a nexus analysis of non-gamer perspectives regarding video games

Abstract. The growing status of video games as a form of entertainment is evident in multiple sectors in today’s culture. However, their influence and points of access to gaming are rarely investigated from the perspective of non-gamers and what they think about video games. Their perspectives are important to take into account as an addition to the video game discourse for what factors video games may be considered unappealing and to deter non-gamers from wanting to play them altogether. This thesis will approach this issue by interviewing a group of non-gamers individually and analyzing their ideas with nexus analytical tools to find out what constraints they face from engaging with video games. As a secondary source, the interviewed non-gamers’ perspectives are contrasted with Yle news network articles about video games for broader understanding of the nexus of practice non-gamers situate video games in. The online articles add further illustrative examples of video games as an influential phenomenon for how they appear in a growing number of contexts and are, contrary to early perceptions of them as juvenile and wasteful activity, considered to be exciting and newsworthy. The interviewees consider video games to not be necessary to engage with because of their prior experiences with games having been too demanding of their skills, requiring too much time to get properly engaged with them and not having easily recognizable benefits form the act of playing them. While the interviewees do not see video games as personally beneficial for them, they acknowledge their potential to be a source of many good things and experiences if their implementation and moderation are taken sufficiently into account. The findings suggest that non-gamers mostly view gaming as unimportant for themselves, but they equally recognize their value in other contexts and are aware of their effects.”En saanut siitä mitään irti” : neksusanalyysi pelaamattomien näkökulmista videopeleihin. Tiivistelmä. Videopelit ovat kasvaneet viihteen muotona monella sektorilla näkyvillä olevaan asemaan nykykulttuurissa. Tästä huolimatta pelien vaikutuksia ja keinoja päästä pelaamisesta mukaan harvoin tutkitaan niitä pelaamattomien näkökulmasta, ja mitä he ajattelevat videopeleistä. Heidän näkökulmiansa on tärkeä ottaa huomioon täydentävänä osana diskurssia videopeleistä, mitä asioita he kokevat videopeleissä epämieluisiksi, ja mikäli ne estävät heitä haluamasta pelata ylipäänsä. Tämä tutkielma lähestyy tätä aihetta haastattelemalla yksittäisten haastattelujen kautta pelaamattomia ja analysoimalla heidän ideoitaan neksusanalyysin periaatteiden mukaisesti. Tällä tavalla selviäisi, mitkä rajoitteet estävät heitä kiinnostumasta videopeleistä. Lisäksi haastateltavien pelaamattomien näkökulmia verrataan laajemmin Yleisradion verkkoartikkeleihin videopeleistä, jotta pelaamiseen liittyvät diskurssit tulisivat laajemmin ymmärretyksi, ja millä tapaa pelaamattomat suhtautuvat peleihin. Verkkoartikkelit täydentävät havainnollistavien esimerkkien kautta videopelien roolia vaikutusvaltaisena ilmiönä, kun ne ovat esillä yhä useammassa aiheyhteydessä. Varhaisiin ajatuksiin verrattuna, kun videopelit nähtiin lähinnä lapsellisena ajanhukkana, videopelit koetaan jännittävinä ja uutisoimisen arvoisina. Haastateltavat eivät koe videopelejä vaivannäön arvoisiksi, koska heidän aiemmat pelikokemuksensa ovat olleet liian vaativia, pelaamisen opettelu ja niistä kiinnostuminen vievät liikaa aikaa, ja he eivät tunnista pelaamisesta saatavia hyötyjä helposti. Vaikka haastateltavat eivät koe videopelien olevan hyödyllisiä heille itselleen, he tunnistavat pelaamisen sisältävän monia etuja, ja antavan hyviä kokemuksia, kunhan niiden käytön valvonta otetaan huomioon riittävän vahvasti. Tutkimustulosten mukaan pelaamattomat enimmäkseen kokevat videopelit mitättömiksi heille itselleen, mutta he tunnistavat niiden arvon muissa aiheyhteyksissä ja ovat tietoisia niiden monista vaikutuksista

Toward an Ecology of Gaming

In her introduction to the Ecology of Games, Salen argues for the need for an increasingly complex and informed awareness of the meaning, significance, and practicalities of games in young people's lives. The language of the media is replete with references to the devil (and heavy metal) when it comes to the ill-found virtues of videogames, while a growing movement in K-12 education casts them as a Holy Grail in the uphill battle to keep kids learning. Her essay explores the different ways the volume's contributors add shades of grey to this often black-and-white mix, pointing toward a more sophisticated understanding of the myriad ways in which gaming could and should matter to those considering the future of learning

Avatars Going Mainstream: Typology of Tropes in Avatar-Based Storytelling Practices

Due to the growing popularity of video games, gaming itself has become a shared experience among media audiences worldwide. The phenomenon of avatar-based games has led to the emergence of new storytelling practices. The paper proposes a typology of tropes in these avatar-based narratives focusing on non-game case studies. Suggested tropes are also confronted with the latest research on avatars in the area of game studies and current knowledge of the issues concerning the player-avatar relationship. Some of the most popular misconceptions regarding the gameplay experience and its representation in non-game media are exposed as a result of this analysis. The research confirms that popular culture perceives gaming experience as closely related to the player identity, as the latter inspires new genres of non-game narratives

Counter strike 1.6 calls to play: a multimodal analysis of the game couver

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Programa de Pós-graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura Correspondente, Florianópolis, 2010Vídeo jogos, considerados um fenômeno de entretenimento de massa contemporâneo, vem sendo estudados e utilizados nas mais diversas áreas. Na Educação, cada vez mais docentes se aderem a esta prática como um meio de interação com as tecnologias de informação (Aarseth, 1997, Lemke, 2002) e os utilizam como uma ferramenta potencial para promover pensamento crítico (Frasca, 2001). No Brasil, o uso de vídeo jogos na Educação é ainda uma prática nova e restrita. Contudo, o rico conteúdo semiótico destes jogos e a familiaridade generalizada dos estudantes com este meio fazem com que sejam incluídos entre as fontes de material para o multiletramento (Unsworth, 2007, 2001; Christie, 2005; Gee, 2005; Jenkins & Squire, 2003). Esta situação levanta questões referentes às representações semióticas dos vídeo jogos, como assim também, à criação de aplicativos adequados ao multiletramento. Esta pesquisa tem por objetivo compreender e interpretar a representação multimodal do discurso de guerra como entretenimento, na capa do jogo de tiro Counter Strike 1.6. O estudo, baseado principalmente nos trabalhos de Kress e van Leeuwen (1996), Unsworth (2001; 2006) e Machin e van Leeuwen (2009), revela que: 1) o propósito ou função da capa sugere ter influenciado nas escolhas feitas para a composição da mesma. Nela se dá ênfase à representação glamurizada do soldado da força antiterrorista e são abstraídas possíveis representações explicitas de guerra; 2) as funções Representacional, Interativa e Composicional (GDV) articulam-se através dos modos de representação e realizam o trabalho conjunto de tentar fundir, visualmente falando, as fronteiras entre a representação da guerra na realidade da vida e na realidade do jogo; 3) efeitos de áudio e som contextualizam o jogo em um determinado gênero como assim também, a espacialização dos ambientes criados em mapas locais; 4) o tipo de letra escolhido para facilitar a compreensão de textos enquanto se joga sob pressão de tempo, pode espelhar uma mudança nos hábitos de leitura na era da computação. Concluo o presente trabalho refletindo sobre o uso de vídeo jogos, mesmo quando o tema for controvertido, e, sugiro possíveis atividades que incluam vídeo jogos como material para uma abordagem critica ao letramento multimodal