video 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.

Join us for a fast paced, fascinating romp through some of Africa's electronic literature. Digitally born from so many different countries and languages, African elit spans interactive video games(pc, mobile and web), Twitterature, interactive poetry, hypertext fiction etc. Yohanna Waliya Jospeh, at the University of Calabar in Nigeria, is a digital poet, distant writer, novelist, playwright, winner of the Janusz Korczak Prize for Global South 2020, Electronic Literature Organization Research Fellow and UNESCO Janusz Korczak Fellow. He'll lead us on a whirlwind tour of his new African elit database, and we will discuss:How can we recognize hypertexts in African discourse and bring them to scholars' and readers' attention?What are the barriers for elit in African nations and how can we overcome these?

What would the next steps be in integrating the African elit database into other elit databases

(Salon invitation)

Video games are mirrors to our contemporary reality that reflect our society's philosophies, rhetoric, and more. Published in 2013, BioShock: Infinite offered a glimpse into the reality of a Utopian America ruled by conservative far-right identity politics. In 2016, Donald Trump's election as the 45th President of the United States brought to the forefront of America what is often ignored. In this essay, I argue what Utopia is to the far-right by analyzing the society of Columbia, the use of media in the state, and more. Overall, I argue that politics and ideas of Utopia can be simulated into video games to understand far-right narratives of Trumpian politics better.

This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.

This thesis examines key examples of materially experimental writing (B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1, and Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch), hypertext fiction (Geoff Ryman's 253, in both the online and print versions), and video games (Catherine, L.A. Noire, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Phantasmagoria), and asks what new critical understanding of these 'interactive' texts, and their broader significance, can be developed by considering the examples as part of a textual continuum. Chapter one focuses on materially experimental writing as part of the textual continuum that is discussed throughout this thesis. It examines the form, function, and reception of key texts, and unpicks emerging issues surrounding truth and realism, the idea of the ostensibly 'infinite' text in relation to multicursality and potentiality, and the significance of the presence of authorial instructions that explain to readers how to interact with the texts. The discussions of chapter two centre on hypertext fiction, and examine the significance of new technologies to the acts of reading and writing. This chapter addresses hypertext fiction as part of the continuum on which materially experimental writing and video games are placed, and explores reciprocal concerns of reader agency, multicursality, and the idea of the 'naturalness' of hypertext as a method of reading and writing. Chapter three examines video games as part of the continuum, exploring the relationship between print textuality and digital textuality. This chapter draws together the discussions of reciprocity that are ongoing throughout the thesis, examines the significance of open world gaming environments to player agency, and unpicks the idea of empowerment in players and readers. This chapter concludes with a discussion of possible cultural reasons behind what I argue is the reader's/player's desire for a high level of perceived agency.The significance of this thesis, then, lies in how it establishes the existence of several reciprocal concerns in these texts including multicursality/potentiality, realism and the accurate representation of truth and, in particular, player and reader agency, which allow the texts to be placed on a textual continuum. This enables cross-media discussions of the reciprocal concerns raised in the texts, which ultimately reveals the ways in which our experiences with these interactive texts are deeply connected to our anxieties about agency in a cultural context in which individualism is encouraged, but our actual individual agency is highly limited.

In the past decade a new genre of video games has emerged; with little action or traditional gameplay this new form has been described as audiovisual novels, ‘freeform unstructured narrative’ (Heron & Belford, 2015), ‘narrative avant-garde’ (Koenitz, 2017), ‘walkers’ (Muscat et al., 2016), ‘literary games’ (Ensslin, 2014), or ‘Walking Simulators’ which was added to the Urban Dictionary in April 2014 as a pejorative description of games where the main purpose appears to be walking around. This new genre has its antecedents in text adventure games, Point and Click adventure games, digital fiction, and art games, yet defining the Walking Simulator as ‘simply’ a game is an unproductive argument in itself (Fest, 2016). Aims and research questions: How do we categorise Walking Simulators? How should we analyse them? What can we find out from that analysis? Methodology and analytical framework Taking a broadly representative sample of Walking Simulators published in the past ten years (most have received critical acclaim and also won BAFTA and similar awards) some common features were identified. Sidestepping (but not ignoring) a definition of ludicity based in game coding and mechanics, and instead exploring how this genre offers narrative experiences that are closer to that of reading is a more productive and effective approach to understanding this new genre (Heron & Belford, 2015, Fest, 2016, Ensslin, 2014). Using an empirical cognitive poetic stylistic analysis developed by Bell, Ensslin, van der Bom, and Smith in 2018, this paper will examine Campo Santo’s 2016 BAFTA award winning game, Firewatch, as a case study to show how Walking Simulators offer transportation and immersion more commonly found in fiction texts rather than the flow of a video game. Player forums on the Steam platform have been used as an anecdotal qualitative sample of responses as a testingground for the possibilities of developing an empirical reader-response study in the future. Emerging Results and Conclusions This is an emerging and dynamic field of research which will continue to expand as more Walking Simulators are published. The results point to ongoing analysis and exploration of this new genre to firmly establish the Walking Simulator as a new digital storytelling artefact that is accessible to a wide range of player/readers. It is also hoped that by setting out a clear working definition for this new genre together with suggested analytical frameworks that there will be wider interdisciplinary scholarly interest.

Narrativity is one of the most difficult qualities of electronic literature to theorize. On the one hand, readers clearly have narrative experiences with electronic texts—​ from text-​ centric Storyspace hypertext fictions through commercial video games. On the other hand, many of the qualities that we value in electronic textuality, such as the variable way in which features of these texts are encountered by readers, work against traditional narrative coherence. Marie-​ Laure Ryan (2006: 196) speaks for many when she writes that “the root of the conflict between narrative design and interactivity (or gameplay) lies in the difficulty of integrating the bottom-​ up input of the player within the top-​ down structure of a narrative script.” The concept of narrativity itself has undergone significant rethinking in recent years, and as a result narratology offers more sophisticated ways of talking about how stories can appear in electronic texts than classical narrative models allowed. Before turning to particular features of electronic literature, let me begin with a basic history of the concept and identify key issues.(source: the first paragraph of the chapter) 

This paper examines a selection of examples of AI storytelling from film, games, and interactive fiction to imagine the future of AI authorship and to question the impetus behind this trend of replacing human authors with algorithmically generated narrative. Increasingly, we’re becoming familiarized with AI agents as they are integrated into our daily lives in the form of personified virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa. Recently, director Oscar Sharp and artist Ross Goodwin generated significant media buzz about two short films that they produced which were written by their AI screenwriter, who named himself Benjamin. Both Sunspring (2016) and It’s No Game (2017) were created by Goodwin’s long short-term memory (LSTM) AI that was trained on media content that included science fiction scripts and dialogue delivered by actor David Hasselhoff. It’s No Game offers an especially apt metacommentary on AI storytelling as it addresses the possibility of a writers strike and imagines that entertainment corporations opt out of union negotiations and instead replace their writers with AI authors.After watching Benjamin’s films, it’s clear that these agents are not yet ready to take over the entertainment industry, but this trend is growing more common in video games. Many games now feature procedurally generated content that creates unique obstacles, worlds, and creatures. The most well-known example might be No Man’s Sky (2016), but it is not the first; Spelunky (2008), for example, made use of procedural generation many years prior. Although attempts at algorithmically generated narrative are rare, Ludeon Studio’s RimWorld (2016) boasts that its sci-fi game world is “driven by an intelligent AI storyteller.” Its AI, however, became the subject of controversy after Claudio Lo analyzed the game’s code that supports its storyteller and revealed that the program replicated problematic aspects of society, including the harassment of women and erasure of bisexual men.These examples offer insight into issues that have and will continue to arise as AI storytelling advances. This paper addresses questions concerning not only the implications for human authors in the face of this very literal take on Barthes’ “Death of the Author,” but also those related to what AI will learn from reading our texts and what it will mean to look into the uncanny mirror that AI will inevitably hold up to us when producing its own fiction. Though it may be a while before Siri will tell us bedtime stories, it is no doubt a feature that has occurred to Apple, as requesting Siri to do so results in a story about her struggles working at Apple and the reassurance she receives from conversing with ELIZA. ELIZA is one of the earliest natural language processing programs that was created by Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960s and was designed to mimic a Rogerian psychotherapist by parroting back user input in the form of questions. Siri’s reference to this program is both an acknowledgement of the history of these agents and evokes a future where our virtual assistants grow to become more than canned responses.

During the 1990’s, reports of people dreaming about arranging geometric shapes became so widespread that newscasts worldwide dubbed the phenomena the “Tetriseffect.” In The Aesthetics of Play, Brian Upton posits that we play games by acting on internalized analogues of the game’s formal constraints. We need not understand the complexity of its code, so long as “we have constructed a set of internal constraints that correctly predict future evolutions of the game’s state, ... we can make meaningful decisions” (Upton 119). Between play sessions, these mental models of gameworlds allow players to continue playing the game by planning new strategies or considering difficult puzzles, thus never really ceasing to play the game. My proposed paper will build on Upton’s epistemological model of play to explore how we play our favorite games even after the computer has been shut down by looking at activities such as metagaming, coaching, and training in the competitive on-line shooter Overwatch.

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)