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

We beat the cops in GTA: Po(ludic)al activism in the age of video games

This article explores how individuals reflect on their digital experiences of actualizing fantasies to make sense of their everyday actions, particularly in the context of video gaming. Our study takes a qualitative approach to understanding the context of materializing consumer fantasies, as initially experienced and actualized in video games, and how these fantasies are transformed into material reality, through an investigation of an illustrative case of mass street protests, the 2013 Gezi Protests in Turkey. The findings suggest that digital virtual experiences in video games have obvious manifestations in the material world, as consumers travel on the borders of reality, moving back and forth into the liminoid terrain of the digital virtual, and provide a deeper understanding of how the blurred boundaries between the virtual and material are established in practice