Vocal disruptions in the aural game world: The female entertainer in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Transistor and Divinity: Original Sin II

The voice as disruption is not a new concept. Disruptions to discourses, relationships and lifestyles can be caused by the insertion of the voice. In video games, voices can be disruptive to player progressions, gameplay and character relationships through dialogue and performances. The female entertainer frequently disrupts the aural space of a game through her uniqueness as a performer at the forefront of the diegetic space, using song to tell her own story. The video games The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), Transistor (2014) and Divinity Original Sin II (2017) use diegetic female entertainer voices to disrupt the video game’s continuity. These case studies consider performance as disruption to gameplay, which is significant for the growth of the story and its characters, alongside the player’s understanding of the game’s musical meanings

Thinking and Doing: Challenge, Agency, and the Eudaimonic Experience in Video Games

The nascent growth of videogames has led to great leaps in technical understanding in how to create a functional and entertaining play experience. However, the complex, mixed-affect, eudaimonic entertainment experience that is possible when playing a video game—how it is formed, how it is experienced and how to design for it, has been investigated far less than hedonistic emotional experiences focusing on fun, challenge and ‘enjoyment.’ Participants volunteered to be interviewed about their mixed-affect emotional experiences of playing avant-garde videogames. New conceptions of agency emerged (Actual, Interpretive, Fictional, Mechanical) from the analysis of transcripts and were used to produce a framework of four categories of agency. This new framework offers designers and researchers the extra nuance in conversations around agency, and contributes to the discussion of how we can design video games that allow for complex, reflective, eudaimonic emotional experiences