Split-Screen : Videogame History through Local Multiplayer Design

By looking at videogame production through a two-vector model of design – a practice determined by the interplay between economic and technological evolution – we argue that shared screen play, as both collaboration and competition, originally functioned as a desirable pattern in videogame design, but has since become problematic due to industry transformations. This is introduced as an example of what we call design vestigiality: momentary loss of a design pattern’s contextual function due to techno-economical evolution

From Rogue to lootboxes: two faces of randomness in computer games

In this paper I try to look at two opposite ways that randomness is employed and, more importantly, evaluated in computer games. It seems fascinating that the same mathematical and statistical phenomenon could lay at the roots of some of the most acclaimed and despised design principles of contemporary games. On the face of it, this may not seem to be paradoxical at all as it could be argued to be true of many other objects and processes. After all, the same knife could be used to prepare a meal and to hurt people. What makes the case of randomness interesting however is that this connection between its heralded and criticized sides is never examined and that they are often treated as completely separate phenomena.One initial clarification that may be needed is that the paper does not cover instances in which randomness has been used only during production of the game. In other words – I am interested only in cases where random values and patterns appear during the game execution. To see this difference, think of any game which contains a map generated in random or partially random manner via some additional development tools, but where the game itself uses the map as a fixed asset. To use a concrete example, compare Just Cause 2 and Minecraft. The former contains a fixed map which has been (at least partially) procedurally generated by the developers (Blomberg 2013), the latter contains a map which is generated by the game itself, whenever it is started anew

Can memes explain comprehension?

The paper is a polemic with Daniel Dennett’s account of memes presented in his latest book From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. This latest attempt at explaining the idea of memes ties it to the recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and tries to show how the mechanism of meme transmission affected the birth of human intelligence (which Dennett calls “comprehension”). I argue that even though the new version of the theory is not without its merits, it comes with two fatal flaws. First of all, even though on the surface Dennett talks only about words, gestures signs etc., he seems to smuggle in an additional notion of linguistic meaning which remains unexplained. Second of all, he does not provide identity conditions for memes which makes the whole idea of their transmission completely vague

The past through stereoscopic lenses. Video games nostalgia in virtual reality

The paper examines the phenomenon of retrogaming in the context of virtual reality. Author begins by introducing two categories of gaming nostalgia (homo- and hetero-medial) and argues that almost none of the existing VR experiences belong to the former category. In the next part of the paper, he applies two distinctions used by scholars to analyze nostalgia and discuss four case studies illustrating each of them. Author argues that in all of these cases the main focus of the developers concerns the external circumstances that the games of the past were played and not the games themselves (a factor that Mark P. Wolf called a “mode of exhibition”). He finishes the paper by discussing two problematic cases of retro VR experiences that do not fit the classification used previously. He argues that both of these cases simulate the mode of exhibition of contemporary retro practices

Split-Screen: Videogame History through Local Multiplayer Design

By looking at videogame production through a two-vector model of design – a practice determined by the interplay between economic and technological evolution – we argue that shared screen play, as both collaboration and competition, originally functioned as a desirable pattern in videogame design, but has since become problematic due to industry transformations. This is introduced as an example of what we call design vestigiality: momentary loss of a design pattern’s contextual function due to techno-economical evolution.peerReviewe

An Ontological Meta-Model for Games Research

The subfield of game ontology has seen many models and structural hierarchies, but few that actively build on each other, or even attempt comparisons. This paper introduces ameta-model, which in addition to being an ontological model of its own, also offers a method for comparison between competing or isolated models and concepts. It does so by treating games as mechanisms (Craver 2007) with multiple levels of description, anddifferentiates between four main layers of the game-mechanism. In the first part of the paper we present the model in detail. In the second part of the paper we show applications of the model - we present how some of the existing approaches to game ontology can be compared within it and how it can be used to describe two case examples: the ancient Egyptian funeral game Senet and the difference between game mechanics and game rules