iPulse: April 2017

Issues: April 3, 2017 April 5, 2017 April 7, 2017 April 10, 2017 April 12, 2017 April 14, 2017 April 17, 2017 April 19, 2017 April 24, 2017 April 26, 2017 April 28, 2017https://spiral.lynn.edu/studentnews/1221/thumbnail.jp

Gameworlds

Game studies is a rapidly developing field across the world, with a growing number of dedicated courses addressing video games and digital play as significant phenomena in contemporary everyday life and media cultures. Seth Giddings looks to fill a gap by focusing on the relationship between the actual and virtual worlds of play in everyday life. He addresses both the continuities and differences between digital play and longer-established modes of play. The 'gameworlds' title indicates both the virtual world designed into the videogame and the wider environments in which play is manifested: social relationships between players; hardware and software; between the virtual worlds of the game and the media universes they extend (e.g. Pokémon, Harry Potter, Lego, Star Wars); and the gameworlds generated by children's imaginations and creativity (through talk and role-play, drawings and outdoor play). The gameworld raises questions about who, and what, is in play. Drawing on recent theoretical work in science and technology studies, games studies and new media studies, a key theme is the material and embodied character of these gameworlds and their components (players' bodies, computer hardware, toys, virtual physics, and the physical environment). Building on detailed small-scale ethnographic case studies, Gameworlds is the first book to explore the nature of play in the virtual worlds of video games and how this play relates to, and crosses over into, everyday play in the actual world

THE REALISM OF ALGORITHMIC HUMAN FIGURES A Study of Selected Examples 1964 to 2001

It is more than forty years since the first wireframe images of the Boeing Man revealed a stylized hu-man pilot in a simulated pilot's cabin. Since then, it has almost become standard to include scenes in Hollywood movies which incorporate virtual human actors. A trait particularly recognizable in the games industry world-wide is the eagerness to render athletic muscular young men, and young women with hour-glass body-shapes, to traverse dangerous cyberworlds as invincible heroic figures. Tremendous efforts in algorithmic modeling, animation and rendering are spent to produce a realistic and believable appearance of these algorithmic humans. This thesis develops two main strands of research by the interpreting a selection of examples. Firstly, in the computer graphics context, over the forty years, it documents the development of the creation of the naturalistic appearance of images (usually called photorealism ). In particular, it de-scribes and reviews the impact of key algorithms in the course of the journey of the algorithmic human figures towards realism . Secondly, taking a historical perspective, this work provides an analysis of computer graphics in relation to the concept of realism. A comparison of realistic images of human figures throughout history with their algorithmically-generated counterparts allows us to see that computer graphics has both learned from previous and contemporary art movements such as photorealism but also taken out-of-context elements, symbols and properties from these art movements with a questionable naivety. Therefore, this work also offers a critique of the justification of the use of their typical conceptualization in computer graphics. Although the astounding technical achievements in the field of algorithmically-generated human figures are paralleled by an equally astounding disregard for the history of visual culture, from the beginning 1964 till the breakthrough 2001, in the period of the digital information processing machine, a new approach has emerged to meet the apparently incessant desire of humans to create artificial counterparts of themselves. Conversely, the theories of traditional realism have to be extended to include new problems that those active algorithmic human figures present

Current, January 19, 2010

https://irl.umsl.edu/current2010s/1000/thumbnail.jp

Respawn

In Respawn Colin Milburn examines the connections between video games, hacking, and science fiction that galvanize technological activism and technological communities. Discussing a wide range of games, from Portal and Final Fantasy VII to Super Mario Sunshine and Shadow of the Colossus, Milburn illustrates how they impact the lives of gamers and non-gamers alike. They also serve as resources for critique, resistance, and insurgency, offering a space for players and hacktivist groups such as Anonymous to challenge obstinate systems and experiment with alternative futures. Providing an essential walkthrough guide to our digital culture and its high-tech controversies, Milburn shows how games and playable media spawn new modes of engagement in a computerized world

Time and Space in Video Games: A Cognitive-Formalist Approach

Video games are temporal artifacts: They change with time as players interact with them in accordance with rules. In this study, the author investigates the formal aspects of video games that determine how these changes are produced and sequenced. Theories of time perception drawn from the cognitive sciences lay the groundwork for an in-depth analysis of these features, making for a comprehensive account of time in this novel medium. This book-length study dedicated to time perception and video games is an indispensable resource for game scholars and game developers alike. Its reader-friendly style makes it readily accessible to the interested layperson

Ears in motion: designing a toolkit for the sounds of sport

Athletes hear many different sounds while playing sport: the sounds of teammates, crowds, equipment, their own body, and their mind at work. Some hear nothing at all - a complete sonic blackout. This PhD outlines the design of a new “toolkit” for describing, recording, and representing this richly varied terrain. This toolkit has two components. The first is a notation system for describing the auditory experiences of athletes. The second is a wearable microphone system for capturing these sounds in new ways. The toolkit been used by the author and other athletes to create new works of sound design that represent the body in motion. In the design of this toolkit, I draw on a variety of disciplines that each touch on a particular aspect of sound in sport, including psychoacoustics, sports studies, anthropology, and media studies. While the auditory experience of athletes exists at the margins these disciplines, this PhD is an effort to draw these disparate fields together for a more comprehensive approach. The notation system, the first element in the toolkit, draws on these varied disciplines and defines new ways to identify specific sounds and their relationship to athletic performance. The majority of the design work in this PhD is devoted to creating new microphone systems for capturing the sounds of sport. While existing technologies tend to capture these sounds from the side-lines, these new microphones are worn on the athlete’s body or mounted to the athlete’s equipment. To enable recordings from the athlete’s body itself, these new microphones have been designed from the “ground up” – from circuit design to PCB fabrication to software to industrial design to 3D fabrication. These microphones isolate specific sounds in the athlete’s environment to be re-assembled in the recording studio. This synthetic process of isolating and re-assembling sound allows listeners to examine these individual sounds in new levels of detail. For the sound designer, this presents new creative possibilities. For the athlete, this process can teach them to hear their sport in new ways. The toolkit is both diagnostic and creative. The research findings sit across three closely integrated advances: the toolkit comprising new notation and microphone design, insights into the auditory experience of athletes, and a framework for a transdisciplinary field in sport, media, and sound studies

A Player’s Sense of Place: Computer Games as Anatopistic Medium

This project works to understand how open-world computer games help generate a sense of place from the player. Since their development over a half century ago, computer games have primarily been discussed in terms of space. Yet the way we think about space today is much different than how those scientists calculated space as a construction of time, mass, and location. But as computer games have evolved, the language has failed to accommodate the more nuanced qualities of game spaces. This project aims at articulating the nuances of place through phenomenological methods to objectively analyze the player experience as performed through various behaviors. Using a conceptual model that partially illustrates sense of place, I demonstrate how players create out of place—or anatopistic—places through play. After a historical survey of play as it is manifested through interaction with miniaturized environments, I turn to computer games as they have helped embody their creators’ sense of place. The third and fourth chapters offer a pair of case studies that reflect upon the experiences of the individual player and player groups. First, I compare virtual photography with tourism to reveal an array of sensibilities suggestive of the pursuit of place. This is followed with a look at Niantic’s Pokémon Go and how player groups use the game to act out ritualistic forms of play. Positioning the player as a “ludopilgrim,” I demonstrate how players perform individual or intersubjectively meaningful places as a form of transgressive placemaking