Reading Playfully: A New Branch of Criticism for The Digital Age

This senior project applies the tools of traditional literary analysis to video games. Through this frame, it seek to foster a type of video game literacy amongst its readers. Each chapter corresponds to what it’s author sees as a foundational aspect of literature. The first chapter, ‘Perspective’, puts Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness into contact with The Last of Us (2013), and explores how each work uses medium specific mechanisms to alienate their protagonists. The second chapter, ‘Setting’, surveys the relationship between Thief (1999) and Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. The final chapter, ‘Characterization’, investigates the unique potential offered by the video game Firewatch (2016) as an example of this interactive medium’s ability to collaboratively build verisimilar characters. It concludes by making an argument for two separate, but connected, fields of video game study

The Production of Multiform Narratives in the Heterotopic Space of Technoscience: A Critical Instance Case Study of a Western Canadian Genomics Research Facility

Broadly speaking, this thesis explores the practices used by employees of a Western Canadian genomics research facility to build four-dimensional models of the human body; models which will be used to study genetic diseases. Usiiig actor-network theory as both a theoretical and methodological foundation, I consider the ways in which both the social (human) and the technical (nonhuman) actors that comprise the genomics research facility work together to construct these models. The work is divided into two sections. First, I investigate the setting of the genomics research facility. I argue that the genomics research facility constitutes a heterotopic site of cultural production. Second, I question what the genomics research facility produces. Ultimately I argue that by using fully immersive virtual environments, and building generic and extendible virtual models of the human body, employees at the genomics research facility are able to produce complex, multiform narratives of biological processes

Techno-historical limits of the interface: the performance of interactive narrative experiences

This thesis takes the position that current analyses of digitally mediated interactive experiences that include narrative elements often lack adequate consideration of the technical and historical contexts of their production.From this position, this thesis asks the question: how is the reader/player/user's participation in interactive narrative experiences (such as hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, computer games, and electronic art) influenced by the technical and historical limitations of the interface?In order to investigate this question, this thesis develops a single methodology from relevant media and narrative theory, in order to facilitate a comparative analysis of well known exemplars from distinct categories of digitally mediated experiences. These exemplars are the interactive fiction Adventure, the interactive art work Osmose, the hypertext fiction Afternoon, a story, and the computer/video games Myst, Doom, Half Life and Everquest.The main argument of this thesis is that the technical limits of new media experiences cause significant ‘gaps’ in the reader’s experience of them, and that the cause of these gaps is the lack of a dedicated technology for new media, which instead ‘borrows’ technology from other fields. These gaps are overcome by a greater dependence upon the reader’s cognitive abilities than other media forms. This greater dependence can be described as a ‘performance’ by the reader/player/user, utilising Eco’s definition of an ‘open’ work (Eco 21).This thesis further argues that the ‘mimetic’ and ‘immersive’ ambitions of current new media practice can increases these gaps, rather than overcoming them. The thesis also presents the case that these ‘gaps’ are often not caused by technical limits in the present, but are oversights by the author/designers that have arisen as the product of a craft culture that has been subject to significant technical limitations in the past. Compromises that originally existed to overcome technical limits have become conventions of the reader/player/user’s interactive literacy, even though these conventions impinge on the experience, and are no longer necessary because of subsequent technical advances. As a result, current new media users and designers now think of these limitations as natural.This thesis concludes the argument by redefining ‘immersion’ as the investment the reader makes to overcome the gaps in an experience, and suggests that this investment is an important aspect of their performance of the work

Actas do 10º Encontro Português de Computação Gráfica

Actas do 10º Encontro Portugês de Computação Gráfica, Lisboa, 1-3 de Outubro de 2001A investigação, o desenvolvimento e o ensino na área da Computação Gráfica constituem, em Portugal, uma realidade positiva e de largas tradições. O Encontro Português de Computação Gráfica (EPCG), realizado no âmbito das actividades do Grupo Português de Computação Gráfica (GPCG), tem permitido reunir regularmente, desde o 1º EPCG realizado também em Lisboa, mas no já longínquo mês de Julho de 1988, todos os que trabalham nesta área abrangente e com inúmeras aplicações. Pela primeira vez no historial destes Encontros, o 10º EPCG foi organizado em ligação estreita com as comunidades do Processamento de Imagem e da Visão por Computador, através da Associação Portuguesa de Reconhecimento de Padrões (APRP), salientando-se, assim, a acrescida colaboração, e a convergência, entre essas duas áreas e a Computação Gráfica. Este é o livro de actas deste 10º EPCG.INSATUniWebIcep PortugalMicrografAutodes

A Typographic Dilemma: Reconciling the old with the new using a new cross-disciplinary typographic framework

Current theory and vocabulary used to describe typographic practice and scholarship are based on a historically print-derived framework. As yet, no new paradigm has emerged to address the divergent path that screen-based typography is taking from its traditional print medium. Screen-based typography is becoming as common and widely used as its print counterpart. It is now timely to re-evaluate current typographic references and practices under these environments, which introduces a new visual language and form. This paper will attempt to present an alternate typographic framework to address these growing changes by appropriating concepts and knowledge from different disciplines. This alternate typographic framework has been informed through a study conducted as part of a research Doctorate in the School of Design at Northumbria University, UK. This paper posits that the current typographic framework derived from the print medium is no longer sufficient to address the growing differences between the print and screen media. In its place, an alternate cross-disciplinary typographic framework should be adopted for the successful integration and application of typography in screen-based interactive media. The development of this framework will focus mainly on three key characteristics of screen-based interactive media ¬¬– hypertext, interactivity and time-based motion – and will draw influences from disciplines such as film, computer gaming, interactive digital arts and hypertext fictions

Principles of ecological construction

The gamification can be organized to disseminate the cognitive sense by ecological way of the joystick, hardware, software and storyboard. This can help spread the cognitive exercise, shaping the architecture of the gaming function, consoles and device in self-paced so that the games can allow the activation of strategies, creating a real training, to relaunch cognitive, organizational and planning potentials

Manifestations of hard and soft technologies in immersive spaces

Immersive spaces are innately flexible. However, for learners, some constraints and scaffolding may often be valuable. This paper looks at immersive spaces as soft and hard technologies. Soft technologies are technologies enabling creative and flexible use, while hard technologies embed processes that limit creativity but provide efficiency and freedom from error. Technologies may be softened or hardened by assembly. For instance, if your Learning Management System (LMS) has no wiki, then it may be softened by adding one from outside the system. If your wiki has no assessment management system, then it may be hardened by using a LMS. For learning, the intrinsically soft nature of immersive spaces sometimes requires scaffolded hardening. This paper provides an example of an ongoing project that realizes these soft and hard technologies in an immersive virtual space and discusses the rich potential of such spaces for technology assembly

Procedural identification : algorithmic role-playing in video games

Video games and role-playing games both possess the ability to structure the player’s experience of themselves around their underlying and internal structures. Tabletop role-playing games do so through complex rules involving random dice rolls whereas video games do so through their basic algorithmic and software structure. This thesis investigates how the combination of properties from both media in the form of video role-playing games, or vRPGs, can impact and structure the player’s sense of identification with the player character. This thesis draws heavily on Wendy Chun, Alexander Galloway and Ian Bogost’s theories of procedurality in games as well as both modern and post-modern theories of identity and identification in order to argue that vRPGs have the ability to actively guide and construct the player’s identification. When looked at as procedural media, one quickly discovers that games are capable of interacting and responding to the player. I chose to call this quality of games “procedural identification”. This thesis also foregrounds the importance of the played aspect of games in order to highlight the fact that the sense of identification that comes from playing a game is both active and the result of the player’s interactions with the game’s programmatic interface. In essence, the meaning of a game emerges only during and after play. By structuring this play according to underlying algorithmic processes, games are capable of structure the player’s interaction and experience in unique and incredibly rich ways.Radio-Television-Fil

Point cloud management for a holographic visualization

This document aims to describe and verify the workflow from a digital survey of a building of historical value to its set up in an innovative holographic view. Via Lulli is a low-cost building of the beginning of the century organized in a closed-block part of a complex with rather small courtyards; the research topic concerns the verification of the process from acquisition with digital survey to convert the survey dataset into a hologram, considering the huge potential of this display system. Comparison among different point clouds, with different accuracy and dimension are related to the final navigation when transformed in holograms; several tests have been carried out to compare cloud density with the ability to see holograms in details with different zooms in to display small details, and zooms out in real time to view the entire model. First possibility to extend workflow with unity support and other plug-ins are supposed