129 research outputs found

    The complexity of speedrunning video games

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    Speedrunning is a popular activity in which the goal is to finish a video game as fast as possible. Players around the world spend hours each day on live stream, perfecting their skills to achieve a world record in well-known games such as Super Mario Bros, Castlevania or Mega Man. But human execution is not the only factor in a successful speed run. Some common techniques such as damage boosting or routing require careful planning to optimize time gains. In this paper, we show that optimizing these mechanics is in fact a profound algorithmic problem, as they lead to novel generalizations of the well-known NP-hard knapsack and feedback arc set problems. We show that the problem of finding the optimal damage boosting locations in a game admits an FPTAS and is FPT in k + r, the number k of enemy types in the game and r the number of health refill locations. However, if the player is allowed to lose a life to regain health, the problem becomes hard to approximate within a factor 1/2 but admits a (1/2 - epsilon)-approximation with two lives. Damage boosting can also be solved in pseudo-polynomial time. As for routing, we show various hardness results, including W[2]-hardness in the time lost in a game, even on bounded treewidth stage graphs. On the positive side, we exhibit an FPT algorithm for stage graphs of bounded treewidth and bounded in-degree

    Toward A Theory Of Procedural Rhetorical Systems: Demonstrations Of Player Agency In Uptake Of Rules In Video Games

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    This paper expands Ian Bogost’s (2007) procedural rhetoric by broadening the rhetorical view of games to encompass the arguments that they make not just about the material, but about themselves. The theory of procedural rhetorical systems (PRSes) views game systems as arguing toward how players should be following their rules, and like in any form of rhetoric, players possess agency in how they take up these arguments and how closely they follow rules. To demonstrate this, this paper analyzes a specific game, the 1996 platformer Super Mario 64, alongside various digital artifacts demonstrating how players have taken it up, including videos, forum discussions, wiki entries, and comments. This paper divides the different ways players can view PRSes into three uptake lenses (ULs), which are standard, speedrunner, and modder uptake. Where standard uptake represents taking up a game’s PRSes according to their exact argument, speedrunner and modder uptake represent taking them up in alternative ways, either with intent of beating the game as fast as possible or with the knowledge that rules can be modified and even transplanted from one place to another. These varied ULs prove that game rules are argued to players via PRSes and that players have agency in how they take them up

    Playing with Identity. Authors, Narrators, Avatars, and Players in The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide

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    This article offers a comparative analysis of Davey Wreden’s The Stanley Parable (Wreden 2011 / Galactic Cafe 2013) and The Beginner’s Guide (Everything Unlimited Ltd. 2015) in order to explore the interrelation of authors, narrators, avatars, and players as four salient functions in the play with identity that videogames afford. Building on theories of collective and collaborative authorship, of narratives and narrators across media, and of the avatar-player relationship, the article reconstructs the similarities and differences between the way in which The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide position their players in relation to the two games’ avatars, narrators, and (main) author, while also underscoring how both The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide use metareferential strategies to undermine any overly rigid conceptualization of these functions and their interrelation

    Playing on the periphery: Metagaming and transgressive play

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    Gaming and play exist in connection to forces outside of the game systems themselves. Together, all these intersecting forces make up a meta game that informs and enables variance in play as well as creates barriers to entering play. This thesis fleshes out the framework of a metagame and shows how players can take a metagame perspective to transform, transcend, or even transgress barriers. This thesis discusses sources of metagaming and encompasses examples from video and traditional games

    Computers Can’t Get Wet: Queer Slippage and Play in the Rhetoric of Computational Structure

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    This dissertation takes up the argument that computers are rhetorical structures that can be queered. Using cross-disciplinary methods, it examines the interplay that occurs between the layers of the computational stack – focusing in particular on the slippage between materiality, code, interface, and the resulting software – and analyzes the narratives that each layer perpetuates individually and in tandem. It applies a multi-faceted approach to queer theory in order to reveal the ways in which anti-normative computer users critique, resist, and subvert these narratives. When computers are approached as always already queer, the possibilities for disruption that exist within their limits materialize and present themselves as opportunities for intersectional exploitation. Praxis is at the heart of this project. In it, the author strives to interact with, build, and embody the technology that also serves as the object of study

    Performing Both Sides of the Glass: Videogame Affordances and Live Streaming on Twitch

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    This thesis examines the performative dimensions videogame affordances assume within online, live streaming environments. This approach considers how streamers configure their videogame play in terms of a potential audience, drawing on five semi-structured, in-depth interviews with Australian-based Twitch streamers to analyse how streamers leverage videogame affordances to produce “meaningful moments”. Guiding this thesis is the question of how the player-videogame relationship is maintained, fractured or altered within live-streaming environments such as Twitch

    Why Speed Matters: Collective Action and Participation in Speedrunning Groups

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    This major research paper focuses on the practice of speedrunning a videogame and how speedrunning’s interactive and cooperative nature establishes groups through alternative forms of social interaction and participation. In challenging traditional ideas of a hegemonic, unified community, I seek to bring in theories outside of community formation to present different ways to think about and with community formation. By interviewing speedrunners, I highlight how speedrunning does not form concrete communities with rigid social structures, but instead assemblages of individuals that co-create through a collaborative practice. Looking at social groups in this way can help us better understand how people in these groups can remain an individual collaborating with other individuals without being forced to conform to predetermined social expectations or structures

    All Your Works Are Belong to Us: New Frontiers for the Derivative Work Right in Video Games

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    In copyright law, the author of an original work has the exclusive right to prepare further works derivative of that original. Video game developers’ works are protected by the Copyright Act. As video games take advantage of more advanced technology, however, players are doing more creative, interesting, and original things when they play games. Certain things players do create independent economic value and are the kinds of acts of original authorship our copyright system is designed to encourage. However, since the author of the video game is entitled to the full panoply of rights under the laws of the American copyright regime, they own the exclusive right to prepare works “derivative” of that game. This Article has both descriptive and normative goals. Its descriptive goals are to outline the current legal trends in the video game space and to demonstrate the huge economic stakes at play. Its normative goals are to offer a number of different ways of explaining how derivative works of video games are created and to suggest several modes of understanding how cases where ownership of these works is disputed should be decided. These modes include philosophical thought experiments, critical analysis of what exactly a game is, analysis of what kind of game underlies the second order work in question, and application of the liability/property rule framework from law and economics literature

    The right way to play a game

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    Is there a right or wrong way to play a game? Many think not. Some have argued that, when we insist that players obey the rules of a game, we give too much weight to the author’s intent. Others have argued that such obedience to the rules violates the true purpose of games, which is fostering free and creative play. Both of these responses, I argue, misunderstand the nature of games and their rules. The rules do not tell us how to interpret a game; they merely tell us what the game is. And the point of the rules is not always to foster free and creative play. The point can be, instead, to communicate a sculpted form of activity. And in games, as with any form of communication, we need some shared norms to ground communicative stability. Games have what has been called a “prescriptive ontology.” A game is something more than simply a piece of material. It is some material as approached in a certain specified way. These prescriptions help to fix a common object of attention. Games share this prescriptive ontology with more traditional kinds of works. Novels are more than just a set of words on a page; they are those words read in a certain order. Games are more than just some software or cardboard bits; they are those bits interacted with according to certain rules. Part of a game’s essential nature is the prescriptions for how we are to play it. What’s more, we investigate the prescriptive ontology of games, we will uncover at least distinct prescriptive categories of games. Party games prescribe that we encounter the game once; heavy strategy games prescribe we encounter the game many times; and community evolution games prescribe that we encounter the game while embedded in an ongoing community of play
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