games

Even before worldwide quarantines added impetus, material gaming had already become increasingly enacted in virtual spaces. Rather than virtual play replacing the material, as some speculated in the early days of videogames, material play has become increasingly entangled with virtuality. These increasingly complementary modes of play offer a rich space for exploring the multifaceted embodied and conceptual activity of play, the blending of material and virtual that in many ways defines games.The three panelists encompass a wide range of perspectives, including the perspective of a game maker translating material play into the digital realm, that of a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) scholar who researched how players interact differently with the Catan boardgame and its digital implementations, and that of a theorist reflecting on how virtual spaces remediate material affects. Together, these diverse perspectives aim to explore the paradoxical yet generative spaces where materiality and virtuality intersect in gaming.The theoretical approach looks at analog games as capable of producing the specific circumstances that foreground the affective relationships between the players and the other pieces of the assemblage. Because of the procedural nature that necessitates specific types of interactions between parts of the play assemblage, analog games amplify the social interactions between players and differently produce affective orientations as a consequence of their systems. Then examines the ways that these games are remediated and adapted to digital platforms highlighting the things that are lost or changed in the move to digital, uncovering the types of experiences that are important for each type of adaptation.

The HCI approach presents Association Mapping (AM) in HCI; called so because the formation of a network is due to objects making associations in context. By recording the associations that form a network, it is possible to understand what objects are most central within that network. . This research contributes to the next paradigm of HCI by providing a new tool to understand use that is fragmented, distributed, and invisible. AM incorporates association as its measurement. This results in passive measures of attention, hybridity, and influence in network formation of any kind. It does this by making the systemic nature of use visible and capable of evaluation at any level.And finally the design approach applies design strategies for incorporating three main types of play: Screenplay, Gameplay, and Roleplay, seeking to answer questions about how to bridge the narrative and performance aspects of digital and analog play. This is particularly applicable to classic games that are associated with transmedia narratives and characters, such as the Clue board game, where there are established cinematic traditions and character roles.During the COVID-19 pandemic, board games have become a useful medium for examining our changing relationship with physical and digital interaction. In addition to presenting our own findings, this panel also offers several methodologies for furthering research into the intersections of the analog, digital, physical, and virtual.

Stories in released games are still based largely on static and predetermined structures, despite decades of academic work to make them more dynamic. Making game narratives more playable is an important step in the evolution of games and playable media as culturally relevant art forms. In the same way interactive systems help students learn about complicated subjects like physics in a more intuitive and immediate way than static texts, more dynamic interactive stories open up new ways of understanding people and situations. Such dreams remain mostly unrealized in released and playable games.

In this dissertation I will describe a number of design and technical solutions to the problem of creating more expressive and dynamic storygames, informed by a practice-based approach to game production. I will first define a framework for the analysis of games, including especially the terms storygame (a playable system with units of narrative where the understanding of the interconnectedness between story and system is crucial) and the notion of narrative logics (the set of processes that define how player input affects the next unit of story presented by the system). I will exercise this framework on an existing and well-known storygame genre, the adventure game, and use it to make a number of claims about the mechanics and dynamics of narratives in this genre that are borne out by an analysis of how contemporary games adopting some of its aesthetics succeed and fail. I will then describe three emerging storygame modes that are still in the process of being defined, developing a critical framework for each informed by close readings and historical analysis, and considering what design and technical innovations are required to fully realize the new mode's potential. These three modes I discuss are sculptural fiction (which shifts the focus from navigating to building a structure of narrative nodes), social simulation (games that explore the possibility space created by a set of simulated characters and rules for social interaction), and collaborative storygames (in which the lexia are generated at least in part by the participants during play). Each theoretical chapter is paired with a case study of one or several fully completed and released games I have created or co-created in that mode, to see how these design ideas were realized and technical advancements implemented in practice. I will conclude each section with applied advice for game makers hoping to work in these new spaces, and new technological developments that will help storygames continue to evolve and prosper

Jonathan Tweet explains how, unlike highly narratively structured games such as The Call of Cthulhu, the free-form, character-focused Everway includes a matrix that allows for the creation of coherent characters and productively constrains the otherwise open-ended game-play.

The source is the essay-review on www.electronicbookreview.com written by Jonathan Tweet.

Keith Herber discusses how in his "Haunted House" scenario for Call of Cthulhu, characters are driven insane by their attempt to unravel the game's mysteries. Herber's explanation distinguishes his work from many other role-playing games in which the goal is to develop characters and acquire power and/or wealth. In contrast, characters in Herber's scenario are rewarded with mental instability.

The source is the essay-review on www.electronicbookreview.com written by Keith Herber.

Kenneth Hite argues that the long-running, H.P. Lovecraft-inspired Call of Cthulhu franchise differs from traditional tabletop role-playing in its focus on suspense rather than character growth. Hite's analysis suggests that in its origins and emphasis on narrative structure Cthulhu is a highly literary game.

The source is the essay-review on www.electronicbookreview.com written by Kenneth Hite.

After Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the National Security Agency's spying program, people worldwide suddenly realised the degree to which their computing devices were gathering personal information that could be accessed by anyone with both the means and the inclination. The games Blackbox and République play with our relationships with our mobile devices, the former by cheekily revealing the functions of the titular blackboxes we hold in our hands, and the latter by crafting a dystopian society in which the player's phone becomes a tool primarily due to its centrality to surveillance culture. In this paper I consider the ways in which both Blackbox and République make use of the affordances of modern mobile devices to entertain and delight players while at the same time drawing attention to the ease with which malicious actors can exploit these same affordances to discover a worrying amount of information about the user. The tactics each game uses are notably different: Blackbox makes the user discover that it is secretly streaming an empty audio track without explicitly drawing a comparison to Facebook’s use of a similar tactic to spy on the user; République, by contrast, has the player make use of in-game cellphones, webcams, and Xbox consoles to spy on the game’s protagonist, drawing a direct comparison to the CIA’s use of the same devices. Despite these differences, however, each game makes use of the affordances of the platform to insert a crowbar into the gap between the user’s expectations and the technological reality of our devices. As I will demonstrate, the use of a player’s device to exploit hidden functionality within a ludic framework is a powerful illustration of the vulnerability of users to bad-faith actors, a vulnerability that works of electronic literature are uniquely positioned to communicate.

Twine’s accessibility and ease of use have allowed more people to write and develop videogames. Merritt Kopas writes in Videogames for Humans: “Twine’s financial and technical accessibility are major reasons for its broad adoption, especially among economically marginalized, nontraditional game designers...” (10). These ‘nontraditional game designers’ have produced an influx of narrative and gaming content, and, as Stuart Moulthrop notes, despite the fact that Twine games can be seen “as an evolution from literary hypertext in the late 1980s,” many in the Twine community insist they develop games, not electronic literature (2016). This defiance should not go unnoticed, as Moulthrop asserts: “This resistance is important... Their return to the story/game problem implies a working- through of earlier issues, if not clear dialectical progress. Their willing embrace of the ludic also signifies an ability to stand among and against hegemonic interests like the videogame industry” (2016).

Developing Moulthrop’s observation further, I argue that Twine game creators’ insistence to ‘play through’ the game vs. story debate is theoretically significant in terms of otherness. For instance, some Twine games have been defined as ‘empathy games,’ a term coined by established game designer Vander Caballero: “They [empathy games] help us put ourselves in other people’s shoes” (Huffington Post 2014). Unfortunately, when Twine games, such as Dys4ia,are labeled as empathy games, they can be used to illustrate otherness as a single story (Christian Science Monitor 2017).

Of course, the issue of representation and otherness is a recurrent topic within literary scholarship. James Meffan and Kim Worthington, for example, highlight the ethical implications of ascribing otherness through representation, which reduces “the Other to the order of the same” (“Ethics Before Politics: J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” 133). I argue the impulse to label certain Twine games as empathy games, to define and situate them against other works of literature or videogames, ultimately reduces the games ‘to the order of the same.’ I suggest examining Anna Anthropy’s The Hunt for the Gay Planet as an example of the political resistance and ethical issues of representation of the Other in games. Moreover, The Hunt for the Gay Planet emphasizes the importance of play when resisting hegemonic definition, and it is this commitment to the ludic that offers hope.

Developing the topic of play within Anthropy’s game, I turn to clinical psychologist Shachaf Bitan, who explores the writings of Donald Winnicott and Jacques Derrida and how they “proposed a playful turn” in their theoretical work. Bitan stresses the importance of Winnicott’s ‘transitional space’ as a space for play, where play can avoid hegemonic definition (“Winnicott and Derrida: Development of logic-of-play,” 34). In the same light, when Twine game creators resist the definitions of play, stories, and games, their work remains in a transitional, undefined, and ludic space. Therefore, the political and categorical ambivalence of certain Twine games, along with their devotion to the ludic, demonstrates how these games can ‘play in the gap’ and potentially serve as an undefined space for the Other to play.

(Source: ELO 2018 Conference; Pinpointing Twine's Others Panel; There’s An Other Gap in Play Speech)

This project aims to explore some of the differences and similarities between the narrative video games and electronic literature games documented in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base. The paper focuses on comparing the two game types and discussing literary aspects, game mechanics, platforms, and more. It also includes graphs made in Gephi that shows how tags and platforms from the Knowledge Base can be connected to the different games and works. 

(Source: Author's description)