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- Blomberg, Johan
(författare)
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The semiotics of the game controller
- 2018
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Ingår i: Game Studies. - 1604-7982. ; 18:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- An important question for video game research is how to characterize the video game experience. One common view emphasizes that players are cognitively able to operate with the game world as the experiential point of reference leading to states of "immersion, "spatial presence", or "engagement". A different view is that the player is also embodied and situated in the actual world, entailing that the video game experience also involves physical preconditions like hardware for playing. One aspect that has not been clearly thematized and analyzed is the contribution of the video game controller. I propose that the controller is not just an input device that lets the player act in the video game, but to play a video game is to act both on the controller and in the video game through the controller. It has the the dual character of requiring the player to act in the actual world while simultaneously providing the player with the link to the video game. This duality is similar to signs, which makes it possible and fertile to analyze game-controller pairings according to general semiotic principles.
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- Chapman, Adam
(författare)
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Its Hard to Play in the Trenches: World War I, Collective Memory and Videogames
- 2016
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Ingår i: Game Studies. - 1604-7982. ; 16:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article explores the relation of WWI popular collective memory to historical videogames. The article provides an overview of WWI games, organising them by genre and determining their engagement with the imagery that typically sustains and constitutes WWI popular memory. This reveals that -- unusually for popular history -- the majority of these games (40/58) do not significantly engage this memory. The article attempts to explain this lack of engagement by examining the issues that face videogames in trying to engage WWI popular memory (tonal incompatibility; fear of trivialisation through ludification; uncertainty about playable positions) given its relatively sensitive and contested nature. Accordingly, the analysis suggests that the nature of the depictions of WWI that players are exposed to in this new popular form is partly shaped by the particular limitations that the videogame form and its perceived cultural role entail. In doing so, the article also examines the nature of the videogame as a form for historical representation.
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- Höglund, Johan, 1967-
(författare)
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Magic Nodes and Proleptic Warfare in the Multiplayer Component of Battlefield 3
- 2014
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Ingår i: Game Studies. - 1604-7982. ; 14:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article examines the multiplayer environment that has become a central part of most competitive First Person Military Shooter (FMPS) franchises, including Battlefield and Call of Duty. While framed by a narrative, multiplayer games involve most directly a repeated negotiation of a particular space informed by certain rules. When narrative fades into the background the way that space is imagined and produced in the game becomes crucial. The ideological import of the game now relies on the nature of the ludic space where the gamer is placed and which he or she interacts with. With this in mind, the article explores the Battlefield 3 multiplayer map Grand Bazaar. Like some other Battlefield 3 maps, Grand Bazaar exists also as an actual place and is thus not only an imaginary ludic territory. To discuss the connection between this map, the real place and the way that the Middle East is often imagined in Western discourse, the investigation will make use of Sybille Lammes’ notion of “magic nodes” (Lammes, 2008) - a concept that stresses the ways in which ludic spaces are connected to the social and actual world - and Josh Smicker’s contention that First Person Military Shooter games increasingly produce “proleptic” or anticipatory warfare scenarios. The conclusion of the article is that the map Grand Bazaar is imagined as a permanent battleground and that the creation of such a ludic space is part of the “combat against futurity” that this genre of games often engages in.
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- Jakobsson, Mikael
(författare)
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The Achievement Machine : Understanding Xbox 360 Achievements in Gaming Practices
- 2011
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Ingår i: Game Studies. - : Greenland Perspective, University of Copenhagen. - 1604-7982. ; 11:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Xbox Live achievements and gamerscores have become an integral part of Xbox 360 gaming. Based on the framework provided by Microsoft, the community has developed intriguing gaming practices where the individual games become pieces of a larger whole. This paper, based on a two year community study, explores how players have reacted and adapted to the system. To get at this shift in console gaming, the achievement system is seen as a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) where separate achievements are the functional equivalent of quests. By conceptualizing the achievement system as an MMO, the paper questions the dichotomy between PC/MMO and console gaming. The paper also goes into detailed descriptions of gaming habits and strategies that have emerged as gamers appropriate the achievement system, in particular looking at three player types: achievement casuals, hunters and completists. My conclusions are that the Xbox Live achievement system only partially functions as a reward system. More importantly, in terms of impact on player practices, it is an invisible MMO that all Xbox Live members participate in, whether they like it or not. On one hand, the different strategies and ways of conceptualizing the system shows how players have appropriated the technology and rules provided by Microsoft, and socially constructed systems that fit their play styles. On the other hand, many players are deeply conflicted over these gaming habits and feel trapped in a deterministic system that dictates ways of playing the games that they do not enjoy. Both sides can ultimately be connected to distinguishable characteristics of gamers. As a group, they are known to take pleasure in fighting, circumventing and subverting rigid rule systems, but also to be ready to take on completely arbitrary challenges without questioning their validity.
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- Malazita, James, et al.
(författare)
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Disciplining Games
- 2024
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Ingår i: Game Studies. - : Game Studies. - 1604-7982. ; 24:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- How is game research constructed and enacted as a discipline, or anti-discipline, in contemporary culture and academia? In a field often heralded for and defined by interdisciplinarity, how is identity developed? Who gets to say what counts as games scholarship, and who can participate? In this article we offer a counter-reading of game research's oft-deployed concept of interdisciplinarity, highlighting how interdisciplinary commitments can serve to support neoliberal formations of the university and undermine political scholarship as much as they can serve as a liberatory framework. As the field of game research continues to institutionalize, with undergraduate programs and new graduate programs growing in size and number, and as new junior scholars enter the academic workforce, conversation is needed about the character of the field’s interdisciplinarity. How game research can structure itself to act as a supportive and protective force for junior, marginalized and precarious scholars is not just a question of university administration, but of the epistemic underpinnings of the field itself.
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- Rodéhn, Cecilia, 1977-
(författare)
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Introducing Mad Studies and Mad Reading to Game Studies
- 2022
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Ingår i: Game Studies. - 1604-7982. ; 22:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The aim of this paper is to introduce and develop mad studies as a theory and mad reading as a method for examining representations of madness in games. Mad studies is a theoretical field that examines madness and critically addresses systematic and symbolic sanism. In this text, mad studies is positioned as a shift of perspective from previous psy sciences-influenced research to a more inclusive way of studying madness in games. Mad reading is explained as (1) a situated reading, (2) challenging sanist representations, (3) reading the explicitly mad, (4) revealing where madness is not clearly visible, and (5) maddening games. The paper offers suggestions on how to put mad studies and mad reading into practice when studying games. The paper is primarily theory-driven but gives examples from several games, particularly the game Outlast.
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