Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture最新文献

{"title":"Playing with Plants, Loving Computers: Queer Playfulness beyond the Human in Digital: A Love Story by Christine Love and Rustle Your Leaves to Me Softly by Jess Marcotte and Dietrich Squinkifer","authors":"D. Gati","doi":"10.7557/23.6364","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6364","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that queer playfulness sets up a utopian relationality based on desire and vulnerability between human players and their nonhuman Others. Specifically, using the indie games Rustle Your Leaves to Me Softly by Jess Marcotte and Dietrich Squinkifer and Digital: A Love Story by Christine Love as case studies, the article reconfigures the notion of queer playfulness from its more familiar conceptualizations in queer game studies as residing less in willful resistance and agentive subversion than in the willing subjection of the playing self to the play and pleasure of the nonhuman Other—in the case of these games, plants and computers. Thus, queerness manifests as a precarious form of desire that does not seek to and cannot master its object. Ultimately, the article posits queer playfulness as a radical decentering of the human subject and the playing ego in favor of a humble, vulnerable, and contingent form of relationality between humans and their unassimilable Others.","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"21 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120914621","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":"Can Playfulness Be Designed? Understanding Playful Design through Agency in Astroneer (2019)","authors":"Bettina Bódi","doi":"10.7557/23.6362","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6362","url":null,"abstract":"The cultural phenomenon that Minecraft (Mojang 2009) has become over the past decade demonstrates, amongst many other things, a powerful appetite for games where the player is thrown in a virtual playground to do as they please. Aerospace-themed survival-crafting game Astroneer (2019) by System Era Softworks is one of many such video games released since that capitalizes on this trend. The appeal of such games lies in that they can be enjoyed by players with various interests, abilities and backgrounds: the average player can mine, build, and fight whatever and whomever they please, or even create entire games within the game. The design of such games is, in many ways, less constricted than that of other avatar-based genres, such as action-adventures or first-person shooters. Freedom, playfulness, and creative play are often associated with such design, which evoke questions about agency. This article connects these notions and asks: can agency help us better understand how playfulness can be designed? By interrogating the paratexts surrounding the game’s development to see how developers discussed design decisions that facilitate playfulness, this article illustrates how thinking of agency as something afforded by game design can be a productive analytical tool to identify design decisions that facilitate player freedom and creative thinking. This, in turn, sheds light on whether, and if so how, playfulness can be designed.","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"50 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":"121577667","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":"Playful Strategies in Print Advertising","authors":"Alysa Karels, Teresa de la Hera","doi":"10.7557/23.6430","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6430","url":null,"abstract":"The fact that people are increasingly eager to seek out playful experiences in their everyday lives is part of a trend known as the ludification of culture. Scholars find that, in a time characterized by information overload, consumers are open and drawn to media products that offer entertainment through playful interaction. Meanwhile, the advertising industry is faced with the quandary of how to stand out and attract consumers’ fleeting attention in a landscape that has become highly competitive. Print advertising in particular faces a budget decline and has to compete with digital advertising forms that know richer affordances to appeal to consumers’ attention. For this reason, this article explores how print advertising uses playful strategies in order to stand out from the crowd and appease the demand to provide entertaining interaction for consumers. In doing so, the article focuses on the following research question: How do advertisers make use of playful communication strategies in print advertisements to stand out in the contemporary attention economy? To gain a comprehensive answer to this research question, a qualitative approach was taken. A thematic analysis of print advertisements was conducted, going through multiple rounds of coding that eventually resulted in the emergence of three central themes of playful strategies: (1) the use of playful visual design that is meant to instill a playful mindset; (2) the use of strategies based on a pleasurable interactive experiential logic; (3) the liberation of unspoken topics of a dark, solemn, and negative nature in a playful way. This study identifies playful aesthetics and their capacity for interactivity, resembling that of games, in static media forms such as print advertising; moreover, it identifies how playfulness can be used as a mode of production (playification) for the advertising industry as part of the creative industries. The conclusions and implications drawn from this article are thus theoretically and practically impactful. Regarding the former, contributions to an understanding of aesthetic interactivity and negative pleasurable experiences are made, and a need for further inquiry in playification is identified and encouraged. Regarding the latter, the benefit for advertisers to use playful print advertising strategies in their marketing mix is illuminated and ethical concerns regarding the persuasion of the strategies are expressed. The article closes by pointing out directions for future research.","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"34 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":"128852513","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":"“This Is a Story about Regeneration”: Understanding The Missing: J. J. Macfield and the Island of Memories","authors":"A. McDivitt","doi":"10.7557/23.6356","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6356","url":null,"abstract":"The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories (2018) is an intricate case of playing through an often grotesque and horrific game to develop empathy and understanding for the main character J.J. Macfield. The SWERY developed game involves physically dismembering the titular character to solve puzzles and move forward in her quest to locate her love interest, Emily. At first, it seems absurd and disturbing, but as the player moves through the game or reads the texts on J.J.’s phone, more of her story takes shape. There are odd moments such as a deer-headed character with a distorted voice indicating that there is a medical emergency, and they add to the sense of absurdity in a game that purposefully intends for you to harm your player character. The brutal mechanics are an integral part of J.J.’s journey and story. The game involves multiple suicides, bullying, self-harm, and ultimately, the revelation that the entire game is a narrative about a trans woman who has been in a dream while being revived by paramedics after a real-world suicide attempt. It’s a story of self-acceptance, of seeking the support of those closest to you, and by finishing game, J.J. is able to fight and conquer her self-loathing, represented by a monstrous being carrying a razorblade. J.J.’s physical pain and the body horror throughout the game represent the struggles that she has with body dysmorphia and her pain dealing with intolerance from her mother. This gameplay mechanic frames J.J.’s experiences in a way that is understandable even without her lived experience. I will argue that The Missing’s audio design and gameplay mechanics are integral to creating an empathetic playing experience. The game begins with the message, “this game was made with the belief that nobody is wrong for being what they are,” and that message is key to understanding The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories.","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"68 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121012062","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 Philosophy of Computer Games – Introduction","authors":"J. Bakels","doi":"10.7557/23.6351","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6351","url":null,"abstract":"The Philosophy of Computer Games—this special issue's topic—might seem in vogue and out of date at the same time. Out of date on the one hand, because the first wave of philosophical approaches to computer games peaked about ten years ago. On the other hand, a renewed turn to computer game aesthetics and especially the turn towards a phenomenology of computer games that has gained some new momentum recently seem to have brought new attention to what philosophy has to offer to game studies (and vice versa), raising new questions and putting new emphases on old ones.","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"479 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122744928","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":"A Game on Time: The Witness and the Temporality of the Digital Image","authors":"P. Brown","doi":"10.7557/23.6353","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6353","url":null,"abstract":"This essay addresses the temporality of digital images through a reading of the 2016 puzzle game The Witness. Fusing Paul Ricoeur’s definition of narratives as “games with time” and Alexander Galloway’s description of the computer as “remediating the very conditions of being itself,” I describe The Witness as a game on time. The methodical pace it ties its player to, along with the environmental awareness it elicits, creates, rather than simply representing, relations of time that bespeak the accelerated, non-human temporality—the “protentions” (Yuk Hui)—of digital objects and environments. Taking the game’s embedding of a ten-minute sequence from director Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia (1983) within its gameplay as a cue, I develop these ideas in relationship to both the phenomenology of time and the cinema of the “time image,” in particular the work of Abbas Kiarostami. For game designer Jonathan Blow, as for Kiarostami, the digital image is a fundamentally new form of temporal experience that requires new kinds of environmental awareness and care (Sorge).","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"184 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133401329","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":"Training for the Military? Some Historical Considerations Towards a Media Philosophical Computer Game Philosophy","authors":"Doug Stark","doi":"10.7557/23.6359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6359","url":null,"abstract":"It behoves a media philosophical appraisal of the computer game—invested as media philosophy is in how media engender modalities of thought — to grapple with the computer game’s heritage. Specifically, the essay addresses an issue raised by attention to the computer game’s historical intertwinement with the military and industry: the extent to which these cybernetic machines, overdetermined by their techno-epistemic conditions, continue to perpetuate the ways of thinking from which they derived. The first section of the essay reconstructs parts of this history, drawing primarily on Claus Pias’s computer game genealogy: Computer Game Worlds (2017). It pays particular attention to how the prehistory of time-critical action games reveals their close relationship with and tacit optimization of player pre-reflective perceptual and sensorimotor capacities. The second section considers the lasting implications of the computer game’s historical a priori vis-à-vis their propensity to train their users. It engages with Patrick Crogan’s argument in Gameplay Mode (2011) that computer games are the “reproduction rather than simply the ‘product’ of […] Cold War mentality” and foregrounds his claims as important considerations for any attempt to think media philosophically with and through the medium (2011, p.105). That said, the essay concludes recouping the computer game by way of the very training function it appears condemnable for. Drawing on Mark Hansen (2000), my contention is that Pias and Crogan place in relief what I figure as a creative consequence of computer game play with implications for media philosophy: brokering our corporeal, pre-reflective adaptation to and, thus, agency within our contemporary lifeworld. It is by virtue of, not in spite of, computer games cybernetically working on us that they potentiate ways of thinking about and living in digital culture. ","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129378955","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 Lifelike Death: Dark Souls and the Dialectics in Black","authors":"Daniel Illger","doi":"10.7557/23.6357","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6357","url":null,"abstract":"The article builds on Badious observation, that black is simultaneously characterized by lack and excess. In the Dark Souls trilogy the “dialectics in black” are realized as a law of movement, which structures how the game world is acquired. The games highlight a series of conflicting temporalities, which are realized in the play experience as a being-in-the-present. From the perspective of assemblage, this dynamic of conflicting temporalities can also be conceptualized as a longing for the melding of the human and inhuman. Here one can also find a hint as to how the Dark Souls games create “communities out of shared hardship” (Keza MacDonald and Killingsworth). In their many temporalities as well as in their specific game mechanics, the Dark Souls trilogy plots a hauntingly concrete point of contact between anonymous players, who feel connected in their shared loneliness.","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"108 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132864538","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":"Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments","authors":"Shane Denson","doi":"10.7557/23.6352","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6352","url":null,"abstract":"Twentieth-century serial figures enacted a “parergonal” logic by crossing boundaries between various media, slipping in and out of their frames, and showing them—in accordance with a Derridean logic of the parergon—to be reversible. With the rise of interactive, networked, and convergent digital media environments, these medial logics are transformed. A figure like Batman exemplifies the transition from a “parergonal” to a new “parergodic” logic; the latter term builds upon Espen Aarseth’s notion of the “ergodic” situation of gameplay—where ergodics combines the Greek ergon (work) and hodos (path), thus positing nontrivial labor as the aesthetic mode of players’ engagement with games. Ergodic media give rise to new forms of seriality that accompany, probe, and trace the developmental trajectories of the new media environment and the blurring of relations between work and play, between paid labor and the incidental work culled from our leisure and entertainment practices.","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132732664","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":"Gaming Under Biopolitical Sovereign Power","authors":"Mike Piero","doi":"10.7557/23.6431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6431","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that a spatiotemporal approach to abjection in video games helps scholars understand how confronting the abject in gameplay maps onto biopolitical conditions of living and gaming under sovereign state power. By means of a slow reading of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, this essay offers the chronotope of the abject as a flexible, interpretive tool to account for game narrative, mechanics, and iconography that map onto out-of-game lived realities. Drawing upon Kristeva’s psychoanalysis and Agamben’s philosophy of politics, I adapt Bakhtin’s chronotope of the threshold to the mutable video game medium in order to take up the threshold concepts of the abject, life/death, responsibility/ethics, and reading/writing presented in the game. Through the chronotope, I also reconsider this game’s critical response and relation to a Christian cosmology. Ultimately, the chronotope opens up a threshold space through which more just and equitable chronotopic relations might emerge.","PeriodicalId":247562,"journal":{"name":"Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114649707","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}