| 1. |
- Holloway-Attaway, Lissa, et al.
(författare)
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Performing Heritage and Creating Community Through Digital Games, Narrative Agency and Critical Play
- 2020
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Interactive digital media, and in particular digital games, are an increasingly prevalent component of museums and other public cultural spaces to help engage visitors. However, despite their growing presence, they remain under-explored in the ways they mediate a wide variety of cultural expressions and interactions through their differing and unique narrative affordances. Such storytelling differences must be accounted for in order to understand how they may be facilitated and curated with visitors/players in mind. The medium is defined by diminished authorial control in favor of free play and individual agency of expression for players. As such games for heritage present interesting challenges for those who may want to develop, facilitate, and curate them in cultural contexts and with historically accurate content. In fact, the lack of control over content once it becomes interactive and playful can present significant challenges to museum curators, pedagogues and guides. As facilitators of cultural knowledge, they often need to strike a balance between informing visitors/players about cultural heritage and history through deliberately crafted narratives - something museums are well equipped to do - while also providing players with more agency to individually express themselves and to re-write cultural heritage stories and histories through narrative play. In this paper, we present three case studies that exemplify how digital games can be used to give children a less restrictive narrative framework in which they can perform and express history and cultural heritage, rather than by merely re-enacting it. Through these three cases, we describe the processes involved in using digital games as a collaborative stage, or performative platform, on which participants can craft their own narratives to experience and express their own histories and build connections to others in a shared community of play.
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| 2. |
- Rambusch, Jana, et al.
(författare)
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A pre-study on spectatorship in eSports
- 2017
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- A pre-study of spectators' perspectives on eSports was conducted in collaboration with two Swedish game development companies. The main goal was to identify factors that contribute to qualitative spectator experiences and how they can influence game design. A qualitative approach was chosen to explore spectators' perspectives on eSports through observations and focus-group interviews of 28 participants in total. Results indicate that spectatorship is a complex issue that goes beyond the mere watching of a game. We identified four themes that are important for qualitative spectator experiences: the need for an overview of game events; highlighting and exposing hidden objects and events; viewer- and commentator-friendly game pacing; the importance of professional commentators and casters. Based on the results, we present design guidelines and recommendations for the development of games in eSports.
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| 3. |
- Svensson, Torbjörn, Adjunkt, 1969-
(författare)
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From games to news : Creating an engagement model for digital local news
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The transition of local news from the analog, printed format to a digital format, fit for our increasingly digitized media technology society, has not been as straight-forward as was imagined at the dawning of the World Wide Web. Newspapers, in particular local newspapers, were quite fast in trying to adapt to the new technology platform and put their content on the web. User experiences of reading news have certainly evolved since 1995, with the introduction, for example, of the smartphone and proprietary news apps. However, there has been no deep or consistent commitment to understanding more specifically how the digital format can provide a means of interactivity for users and support a range of content and means to engage it. The digital news format does enable interaction between readers and news staff, and, not least, between users in real-time. However, many features for engagement are currently under-explored. Other media, for example computer games, have developed new ways to engage their audience of players both in terms of how the media is distributed and also how the content is personally adaptive, for example, to the unique skill level of players, or by offering them freedom of action to explore content, and/or by enabling increasing communication among player groups.The main knowledge contribution of this research is a novel model for reader engagement in digital local news. The model is constructed by transferring features for user needs satisfaction and engagement in digital games to the realm of digital local news. Self Determination Theory, which establishes ways of describing user engagement in general, and when applied to computer games specifically, forms the basis of the research. Additionally detailed knowledge about user types counters a traditional ‘one to many’ broadcast logic and supports greater understanding of heterogeneity within reader groups. The model also defines the digital maturity of the different features across a spectrum, from substitution via modification to disruption (Su-Mo-Di). For example, some digital features replicate those from the analog printed version II of the newspaper (substitution), while some are impossible to implement in a paper format (disruption).The aim of the research is to outline a unique model of engagement and illustrate how to apply the varied and detailed features when applied to digital local news. This usage of game engagement transferred to digital news contexts also allows alternative ways to interpret the term gamification. Classically gamification has been defined as using game design elements in non-game contexts, where typical game features like points, leaderboards, and badges have been introduced into a significant variation of media and forms, often to increase effectiveness or output from processes. This research contests that view and suggests that gamification can be used to engage mechanisms from games on a higher or more abstract level than actual game mechanics.The method for transferring this form of game engagement to digital local news engagement is built on a process where the more detailed strategies for making computer games engaging are abstracted and re-applied to the field of digital local news. These strategies form the basis for the unique engagement model illustrated within the thesis. These engagement aspects drawn from the model are further elaborated and used to examine specific examples and two prototypes focused on digital local news. The conclusions demonstrate that a focus on engagement through many varied applications can offer a rich method to increase and to analyze user experiences and to design novel features specific to enhancing digital local news.
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| 4. |
- Berg Marklund, Björn, 1988-, et al.
(författare)
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Postcolonial Threads in GUX : a Conversation
- 2022. - 1
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Ingår i: What Happens When We Play. - Pittsburgh, PA : ETC Press. - 9781387441655 - 9781387434831 ; , s. 67-81
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Bokkapitel (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- Videogames have a long, and complex, relationship with “non-Western” countries. Game narratives and ludic symbols are fraught with implicit, or explicit, imperialist history and ideologies. In some games, such as Sid Meier’s Colonization, the connection is fairly obvious. But a game doesn’t have to be about colonization to present a colonialist narrative. Souvik Mukherjee is a game researcher at the front of a growing discussion on this topic. In his work, he analyses games from different perspective (media analysis, philosophy, and sociology) to present a holistic understanding of the way games represent, and constructs, different cultures, people, political systems, ethics, and societal issues. This chapter is an edited transcript of an interview with Souvik, where we talked about everything from his academic work, to how he modded Age of Empires in his childhood.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Holloway-Attaway, Lissa, et al.
(författare)
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When You Hear the Chime : Movable Books and the Dramaturgical Functions of Sound in Mixed Reality Interactive Narrative Design
- 2022
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Ingår i: Interactive Storytelling. - Cham : Springer Nature Switzerland AG. - 9783031222979 - 9783031222986 ; , s. 427-440
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this paper we outline the pre-digital histories of recorded and synthesized sound, exploring their entanglements with both the literal codex and larger literary imaginary. In particular, we focus on intersections of sound and movable books, offering the rich genealogy of the movable book as a fertile addition to the IDN (interactive digital narrative) family tree, as an example of pre-computational interactive narrative with a long history. Drawing on this intermedial history, along with our own experience designing an MR (mixed reality) movable book, we offer a taxonomy of dramaturgical functions of sound in MR IDN. We demonstrate the use of this taxonomy in analysis of our own work, and suggest opportunities for expanding the taxonomy in support of future speculative research and design imaginaries for IDNs.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
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Interactive Storytelling : 15th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2022, Santa Cruz, CA, USA, December 4–7, 2022, Proceedings
- 2022
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Proceedings (redaktörskap) (refereegranskat)abstract
- This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2022). ICIDS is the premier conference for researchers and practitioners concerned with studying digital interactive forms of narrative from avariety of perspectives, including theoretical, technological, and applied design lenses.The annual conference is an interdisciplinary gathering that combines technology focused approaches with humanities-inspired theoretical inquiry, empirical research, and artistic expression. This year’s conference was built around the central theme of ‘Speculative Horizons’. With this theme we were motivated to consider the future and its relationship to interactive digital storytelling.
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| 9. |
- Kirkpatrick, Graeme, et al.
(författare)
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Marxism and the computer game
- 2016
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Ingår i: Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds. - Bristol : Intellect Ltd.. - 1757-191X .- 1757-1928. ; 8:2, s. 117-130
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article asks the question, how should the computer game as a new cultural form be assessed from a Marxist perspective? Marxism is a developed theoretical discourse operative in several domains that are potentially relevant to computer games. The first part of our discussion focuses on Marx’s discussion of technology in relation to art and presents his historical dialectic of alienation and disalienation. This dialec-tic highlights the ambivalence of technology: it is both the condition of possibility of a society of a plenty in which humanity is freed from drudgery and yet, with each step forward, it is associated with the imposition of new demands and novel forms of oppression. Viewed in this way, computer games are an important manifestation of digital technology, deeply implicated in new forms of capitalism. In the second section we use Marx’s ideas on art to explore the aesthetics of the new medium. The aesthetic occupies a special place in Marxist thought because it defines a space of reflection in which we can find a momentary escape from the fray of conflictual social relations and from which the future may shine a light. Viewed as a form of art, computer games are also ambivalent. On one side, they have been associated with a revival of play and a new culture of levity and creativity, which has spread as far as contemporary workplaces and even transformed the design of industrial, or productive, technology. At the same time, we argue that there has been no corre-sponding social transformation – people are not more free as a result of ‘gamifica-tion’. Rather, it seems that computer games present a deepening entanglement of aesthetic values (play, freedom, imagination) with technologies of control (interface, system, rules). In conclusion, we suggest that digital games bring the dream of art to life but that the result is not freedom but rather a perversion of play as its facility for opening up imagined spaces is used to restrict access to the space of freedom.
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