Zur Ökonomie der Unterhaltungsproduktion

Zur Ökonomie der Unterhaltungsproduktio

Making data playable: A game co-creation method to promote creative data literacy

This article explores how making data playable, i.e. developing exploratory co-creation techniques that use elements of play and games to interpret small to mid-sized datasets beyond the current focus on visual evidence, can help a) promote creative data literacy in higher education, and b) expand existing definitions of data literacy. The article briefly investigates playful characteristics in existing data practices, and discusses how this perspective compares to existing frameworks that define data literacy. In a second step, we present a Discursive Game Design technique to promote creative data literacy. The article reports on findings from a sample workshop, during which students explored how modifying small, hybrid games based on real-world datasets can alter players’ interpretation of the data, but also their perception of how the games operate as epistemic objects within data analysis. Finally, we formulate recommendations on how to adapt the technique to different educational settings

Ludic Cyborgism: Game Studies, Cyborgization, and the Legacy of Military Simulation in Videogames

This article develops and critiques the concept of ludic cyborgism: the notion that playing videogames allows players a free, non-committal, yet strongly embodied pedagogical engagement with cyborg-being. The article argues that videogame play is a form of cyborgization—the act of becoming a metaphorical cyborg through participation in cybernetic feedback loops. Game Studies has so far neglected to deal with the historical and political implications of this cybernetic engagement, having chosen instead to focus on the supposedly educational and emancipatory aspects of the phenomenon. The history of videogames as simulations is intimately entangled with the development of training simulations in the military-entertainment complex of the late twentieth century United States (Crogan, 2011; Lenoir, 2000), and so what players are principally being taught through videogame play is how to operate military technologies like weapons targeting systems without critiquing the violent nature of those technologies. Moreover, the “cyborg-utopian” reading by game scholars of Donna Haraway’s (1985/1991) “Cyborg Manifesto,” which underlies most of the theoretical framework of ludic cyborgism, facilitates an uncritical understanding of cybernetic videogame play as an ideologically neutral phenomenon. If we wish to bring emancipatory movements into videogames, we should see the simulatory nature of videogames as an inherently conservative force with strong ties to military violence, imperialism, and economic injustice, meaning that these frameworks would require significant transformation in order to become neutral or progressive in any sense

Introduction: Storytelling in the Margins

One of the most pervasive topics across the Humanities is storytelling. Whether we are seeking to understand the development of shared identities, cultural beliefs and practices throughout history, or grappling with pressing contemporary concerns like anthropogenic climate change and accelerating globalization, the centrality of narrative(s) to much of our work on these issues—and to the issues themselves—is undeniable. As Haraway points out in Staying with the Trouble (2016), stories matter, and thus it also matters how we tell them. The ever-increasing attention given to voices and perspectives that challenge established canons and hegemonic discourses, both within and outside of academia, is gradually destabilizing the common notion of one “central”, linear narrative and creating space for narratives which thrive in complexity, multiplicity, and non-linearity. At the same time, contemporary artistic practices and emerging media platforms are producing new kinds of texts, thereby giving rise to new forms of storytelling. Ultimately, what is placed in the margins need no longer be marginal. However, this last statement also prompts several critical questions. Who gets to tell the story of the margins? Who decides what is marginal? How is such marginalization established and perpetuated? How does the margin assert itself in relation to the center? Can we rethink the margins as not simply surrounding, but as irreducibly part of the text? Why should we be so preoccupied with the margins to begin with

Taking Playful Scholarship Seriously: Discursive Game Design as a Means of Tackling Intractable Controversies

The article at hand explores the concept of playful scholarship, focusing specifically on the use of playfulness in re-assessing the collaboration between academia and societal partners to tackle “intractable policy controversies” (Schön and Rein 1994, p. 23)—i.e., challenges in which opposing parties operate with conflicting frames (often without even noticing). After arguing that earlier attempts at using games in academia often only evoke the rhetoric rather than the spirit of play (Sicart 2014) and thereby limit spaces for actually playful scholarship, we emphasize how the heuristic of playful game design (rather than game play) can help address this issue. To illustrate our point, we draw on a recent research project about drug policies in the Netherlands, in which concerns of (among others) law enforcement, policy-makers and healthcare workers are characteristically entangled. In this project, we first we defined the societal context of drug policies as an “ecology of games” (Long 1958; Lubell 2013) and proposed two ‘base games’—one created from scratch and the other inspired by the CIA-developed card game Collection Deck. These games were iteratively played by a diverse group of academic and non-academic stakeholders using self-modifying rules that allowed participants themselves to engage in “playful design” (Flanagan 2014), changing, adding or removing rules in order to identify where the game-as-model deviated from their lived experience (and how they might translate their experiences into the ‘language’ of the game). Drawing on ethnographic data collected over the course of six months, we investigate how the contingent ‘versions’ of the game as boundary objects (Leigh Star 2010) facilitated a playful attitude towards the otherwise characteristically entrenched discourse on Dutch drug policies. As a basic frame of reference, we use and adapt Lieberman’s original definition of playfulness, based on “physical, social, and cognitive spontaneity, manifest joy, and sense of humor” (2014, p. 23), and Shen’s differentiation between “situations for play” (2020, p. 540) and “playful states” (2020, p. 542) to interpret the processes in our community of practice. More specifically, we observe the impact of playful objects and object play (Riede et al. 2018) as well as bricolage (Antonijevic and Cahoy 2018) on playful attitudes within the group. This showed the constant tension between, on the one hand, expectations that the game itself should ‘produce’ new insights and, on the other, as Sicart recommends, “carnivalesque” (2014, p. 23) attempts at resisting ‘utilitarian’ play (e.g., exploring ideas that would be ruled out by conventional wisdom as optional in-game scenarios or events). Finally, we conclude with how adopting a playful game designer’s rather than a player’s perspective may challenge habitualized practices and corresponding roles inherent in public-private partnerships within academia. This makes different preconceptions amongst stakeholders visible, facilitates perspective change, and acknowledges the interconnected frames within intractable controversies by continually re-designing the base games

Ecomodding. Understanding and Communicating the Climate Crisis by Co-Creating Commercial Video Games

This article explores how the climate crisis and specifically the underlying “crisis of the imagination” (Bendor 2018, 132) exacerbate the entrenchment of environmental communication, and how modifying commercial video games (ecomodding) can facilitate the use of games as effective communication infrastructures to address this issue. Environmental communication challenges are well-studied, but remain difficult to tackle in practice. Timothy Morton summarizes these challenges by defining climate change and related phenomena as “hyperobjects” (Morton 2013), which appear tangible but are always only partially knowable and communicable. In recent years, games have been increasingly regarded as a potential solution to these problems (e.g. Chang 2013); as games provide agency to players, they can be specifically effective as “tools to communicate about climate (change) uncertainty” (van Pelt et al. 2015). More recently, though, the promises of ecogames are offset against more critical questions. For example, (Asplund 2020) addresses “credibility aspects in research-based gaming”, and researchers become more aware of the inequities of “discursive gaming” (Voorhees 2012) like the carbon footprint of contemporary gaming technology and the disproportionate influence of larger publishers and platform owners. To address this issue, the article develops a comparative perspective on “ecocritical” (Bohunicky 2017) modifications of commercial games (ecomods) as an ongoing discursive process. Ecomods for two major game franchises – The Sims and Civilization – are analyzed as communicative acts over time, quoting, re-phrasing or outright challenging the procedural rhetoric of the original games. The definition of eco games as boundary objects (van Pelt et al. 2015) is thereby adapted to the characteristic multiplicity and redundancy of ecomods. This perspective acknowledges how modding can affect the games as communication infrastructure, e.g. considering that both franchises recently ‘responded’ with official expansions including environmental themes, Civilization VI: Gathering Storm (2019) and The Sims 4: Eco Lifestyle (2020). To conclude, the article briefly reports on an exploratory workshop, in which students applied ecomodding techniques to repurpose Epic Games’ Fortnite (2017-) as a platform for academic communication on the climate crisis. Due to the game’s immense popularity, climate researchers and activists have tentatively used Fortnite, e.g. via the ‘ClimateFortnite’ channel , where players can “find climate researchers and others discussing global warming while they play” (Boykoff 2019, 22), or a 2019 WWF ad campaign . These approaches, however, are characteristically relegated to small existing ‘niches’ within the “ecology of communication” (Altheide 2019) surrounding the game because they cannot modify or otherwise appropriate its contents. The workshop outlines how ecomodding not only constitutes a uniquely productive site for societal debate, but may also hold potential for augmenting academic communication on the climate crisis