Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture最新文献

{"title":"I Am... Bothered About D&D","authors":"Kristian A. Bjørkelo","doi":"10.7557/23.6981","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6981","url":null,"abstract":"Is Dungeons & Dragons receiving too much attention in game studies compared to other tabletop role playing games? And what, if any, are the issues with this?\u0000In this commentary the author creates an overview of the overwhelming focus on Dungeons & Dragons in game studies journals and puts it in relation to the cultural and economic position of the popular role playing games. The author calls for a more diverse and critical approach to tabletop role playing games in game studies, and the need to take into account the different playstyles fostered by different mechanics and the communities that form around the games.","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"8674 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116888827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Categorizations of World War II in Videogames","authors":"E. Sørensen, J. Schank","doi":"10.7557/23.6893","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6893","url":null,"abstract":"WWII remains a popular adaptation for videogames seventy years after its end, yet, what kind of war is depicted through these games? With inspiration drawn from Ethnomethodology, this article asks which cues WWII first person shooters, strategy games and flight simulation provide players with to categorize WWII. Eight different categorizations are identified. Even though preferred categorizations are found in each of the three genres analyzed, each game invites players to categorize WWII in several different ways. Moreover, it is shown that the sequentiality of these different categorizations is crucial for the way in which players are led to engage in virtual military engagements. They are offered varied moral orders and varied moral engagements.","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"110 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128473156","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Materiality, Nonlinearity, and Interpretive Openness in Contemporary Archaeogames","authors":"Marco Malvezzi Caracciolo","doi":"10.7557/23.6618","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6618","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing inspiration from discussions on the relationship between archaeology and video games (“archaeogaming”), this article argues that contemporary games address three central concepts of archaeological theory: the uncertain materiality of archaeological finds, the way in which caring for artifacts complicates a linear or chronological understanding of history, and the open-ended quality of archaeological interpretation. The “archaeogames” I examine—which include Heaven’s Vault (Inkle, 2019), Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital, 2019), The Forgotten City (Modern Storyteller, 2021), and Elden Ring (FromSoftware, 2022)—capture these concepts by implementing a variety of gameplay and narrative mechanics. In addition to embedding archaeological objects at the level of representation, these games turn archaeological theory into a gameplay practice—a process potentially leading to the emergence of collaborative and creative storytelling within what I call archaeological fandom.","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133011564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Taking Playful Scholarship Seriously: Discursive Game Design as a Means of Tackling Intractable Controversies","authors":"S. Werning, Jasper van Vught","doi":"10.7557/23.6365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6365","url":null,"abstract":"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 stakehol","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126467382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Play and Playfulness in Lynda Barry’s What It Is","authors":"K. Brown","doi":"10.7557/23.6366","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6366","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses play and playfulness in Lynda Barry’s autobiographical comics/instructional work What It Is (2008). The term ‘playfulness’ is commonly used in two primary but distinct ways, namely in a phenomenological sense concerning a free attitude accompanying a given play activity, and referring to a frame-breaking form of disruption. I refer to the former as play/playing, and reserve the term ‘playfulness’ for the latter, while also suggesting that playfulness implies a form of disruptive attitude or intent. Playing is a central concept in Barry’s work, one on which the author draws in terms of formulating the creative process. Barry’s insistence on the phenomenological or experiential aspects of playing both reinforces and is reinforced by the stylistic aspects of What It Is. Thus, assertions of playfulness based on elements of Barry’s work that subvert convention, often via a form of ambiguity, are consistently countered by Barry’s emphasis on process. It is therefore argued that, if What It Is displays a form of playfulness, it is primarily in terms of the way that it occupies the border between immediacy and authenticity, on the one hand, and constructedness, on the other. The article first establishes the approach to playing adopted by Barry throughout What It Is, based on the work of D. W. Winnicott, and links it to other conceptualizations of play/playing, before drawing a distinction between playing and playfulness. Following this, it examines how Barry’s delineation of the creative process as play, as well as the author’s approach to style, achieves a perceived form of immediacy and authenticity. After this, following consideration of the playfulness of Barry’s collage pages, the article considers how What It Is occupies the border between immediacy and constructedness.","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"227 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123186844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Meaning of Playfulness: A Review of the Contemporary Definitions of the Concept across Disciplines","authors":"Leland Masek, Jaakko Stenros","doi":"10.7557/23.6361","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6361","url":null,"abstract":"‘Playfulness’ is a concept used in various disciplines. In this article, we conduct a qualitative, systematic, and interdisciplinary literature review on the term ‘playfulness’ as used in recent scholarship. The article aims to overcome the ambiguity relating to ‘playfulness’ in order to create opportunities for growth in all related fields of study. Based on 429 written works and the 184 extracted definitions of ‘playfulness’ across disciplines, we find six clusters of meaning all of which emphasise engagement. Three themes describe different methods for how engagement is structured to become a higher priority than its context. The other three themes discuss structural characteristics of contexts that are playfully engaged in. A new synthetic conceptualization is offered: Playfulness prioritizes engagement over external consequence, realness, or convention. Furthermore, the study argues that playfulness is not a ‘what’ or a ‘why,’ but a ‘how,’ a priority organizing principle.","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121603791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: Playfulness across Media","authors":"Jan-Noël Thon","doi":"10.7557/23.6397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6397","url":null,"abstract":"This is the introduction to the guest-edited Playfulness across Media issue of Eludamos. The articles collected here seek to demonstrate the productivity of the concept of playfulness across disciplines and the importance of moving beyond the study of primarily game-based playfulness in order to explore how a playful mood, attitude, or state of mind can manifest itself in and be encouraged by a range of different practices of play and a range of different (post)digital media forms that include, but are certainly not limited to, digital and nondigital games. While there obviously are some very productive intersections between game studies and playfulness studies, the articles also clearly show that the latter cannot and should not be conflated with the former.","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126664752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Playing Make-Believe with #homemadeDisney Pandemic Ride Videos","authors":"Bobby Schweizer","doi":"10.7557/23.6368","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6368","url":null,"abstract":"In response to the closing of the Walt Disney theme parks at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, fans of Disneyland and Walt Disney World produced videos re-creating their favorite rides and attractions for a viral social media trend dubbed #homemadeDisney. The typically short (usually 30–90 seconds) videos from #homemadeDisney turned ‘guests’ into ‘cast members’ (staff) and smartphone owners into living room ‘imagineering’ ride designers. Participants engaged in a form of shared make-believe (Walton 1990) by assembling household objects as props, improvising ride elements, and performing as theme parkgoers for one another. The extensive collection of social media videos analyzed for this article reveals how fans interpreted attractions through a shared mimetic grammar (Milner 2016), the ride aesthetic (Telotte 2008), and the playful nature of the theme park experience.","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123598460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Playful Affordances of Picture Book Apps for Children","authors":"Hanna Järvenpää","doi":"10.7557/23.6367","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6367","url":null,"abstract":"The tradition of children’s literature has evolved side by side with the market of children’s entertainment, games, and toys. The selection of contemporary print products includes a wide variety of materially or technologically enhanced picture books. This background is rarely considered in the examination of children’s book applications that have attracted scholarly interest after the arrival of smartphones and tablets during the early 2010s.The relationship between picture book apps, mobile games, and digital playthings requires further examination that considers the specific affordances of the mobile platform. Leaning on five case studies, this article examines how picture book apps afford opportunities for a reading experience that contains features characteristic for children’s digital play. For this purpose, I adapt a specific model of close reading that focuses on the visual, auditory, tactile, and performative elements of children’s video games.On the basis of the case studies, it seems that navigating a picture book app requires balancing between different modes of action: reading, playing, and exploring. Engagement with picture book apps has different forms that resemble the features of both traditional print reading and digital play. However, further examination of children’s playful reading practices and intergenerational play is necessary from a premise that recognizes playing with a book as a valuable research topic.","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124465949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"There Is No Immersion: Critical Intervention through Hypermediacy in Metagames","authors":"Sarah Thorne","doi":"10.7557/23.6363","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6363","url":null,"abstract":"In 2020, Draw Me a Pixel released There Is No Game, a game that playfully engages with the concept of the metagame and its varied meanings to examine the relationship between developers, games, and their audiences. The game has much in common with other metagames released during the boom and bust cycle of the indie game market in terms of its themes and playful attitude toward its players. Like many of these games, it features an antagonistic narrator, who, upon launching the game, announces that there is no game. The concept of a game resistant to play has become a recurring theme in many metagames that critique industry pressures, trends, and players’ playful resistance to designed experiences. This article examines There Is No Game’s use of hypermediacy (as a feature of both its narrative and design) to deliver its critique of the industry, while offering insight into its own development. More than simply breaking the fourth-wall, hypermediacy becomes the instigator for critical reflection and is used to highlight the challenges faced by indie developers and the material conditions in which games are made. Yet, unlike its predecessors that share this critique, There Is No Game offers an optimistic perspective on the future of the industry.","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"92 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124708913","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}