Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (38) (remove)
Language
- English (38) (remove)
Keywords
- climate change (2)
- global warming (2)
- Affective Computing (1)
- Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft (1)
- Blumenberg (1)
- Carl Schmitt (1)
- Cressida (1)
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1)
- Henry James (1)
- Hippolyte Taine (1)
Institute
- Institut für Künste und Medien (38) (remove)
Logic as a medium
(2010)
Computer games are rigid in a peculiar way: the logic of computation was the first to shape the early games. The logic of interactivity marked the action genre of games in the second place, while in massive multiplayer online gaming all the emergences of the net occur to confront us with just another type of logic. These logics are the media in which the specific forms of computer games evolve. Therefore, a look at gaming supposing that there are three eras of computation is taken: the early synthetical era, ruled by the Turing machine and by mainframe computers, by the IPO principle of computing; the second, mimetical era, when interactivity and graphical user interfaces dominate, the domain of the feedback loop; and the third, emergent era, in which the complexity of networked personal computers and their users is dominant.
Seki
(2010)
Game space can be conceived of as being structured by varying levels of ruledness, i.e. it oscillates between openness and closure, between playability and gameness. The movement through game space can then be described as a vector defined by possibility spaces, which are generated organically out of the interplay between ruled and unruled space. But we can only define rules ex negativo, therefore the possibility of breaking the rules is always already inscribed in this vector of movement. This can be conceptualized as a boundary operation that takes the difference between ‘ordinary life’ and ‘play’ as its argument, and which thus generates the difference between ‘play’ and ‘game’.
This paper comprises four parts. Firstly, an overview of the mathematics of decision logic in relation to games and of the construction of narration and characters is given. This includes specific limits of the use of decision logic pertaining to games in general and to storytelling in particular. Secondly, the rule system as the medial unconsciousness is focused on. Thirdly, remarks are made on the debate between ludology and narratology, which had to fail as it missed the crucial point: the computer game as a medium. Finally, gaming in general, as well as its relationship to chance, coincidence, emergence, and event is discussed.
In this contribution, we gather major academic and design approaches for explaining how space in games is constructed and how it constructs games, thereby defining the conceptual dimensions of gamespace. Each concept’s major inquiry is briefly discussed, iterated if applicable, as well as named. Thus, we conclude with an overview of the locative, the representational, the programmatic, the dramaturgical, the typological, the perspectivistic, the form-functional, and the form-emotive dimensions.
Governments all over the world have responded to the offer of violent and sexual-themed video games by inaugurating regulatory bodies. Still, video games with content that is deemed unsuitable for children are played even by young children. With a focus on the situation in Germany the aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, the current state of literature on the importance of age ratings for the regulation of video games is scrutinized. Therefore, the focus is on the German rating system by the Entertainment Software Self Control. This scheme is compared in particular to the American Entertainment Software Rating Board scheme and parallels with the Pan-European Game Information-system are drawn. On the other hand, results from an exploratory survey study on the preferences for video games among German 8 to 12 year olds are presented (N=1703), arguing that the preference for video games that are not suitable for them is a widespread phenomenon in particular among boys.
Normality is one of the defining categories of our society. Statistics of all kinds play a crucial part in establishing the normal. Computers, on the other hand, have a very close connection to statistics as the digital world is a statistical one in itself. In a multitude of games statistics are used as an element of gameplay. In this perspective, games can be regarded as a training in self-normalization. However, it is still questionable whether this leads to a genuine production of normality.
Fun and frustration
(2009)
This paper draws on Bernard Stiegler’s critique of “hyperindustrialism” to suggest that digital gaming is a privileged site for critiques of affective labor; games themselves routinely nod towards such critiques. Stiegler’s work adds, however, the important dimension of historical differentiation to recent critiques of affective labor, emphasizing “style” and “idiom” as key concerns in critical analyses of globalizing technocultures. These insights are applied to situate digital play in terms of affective labor, and conclude with a summary analysis of the gestural-technical stylistics of the Wii. The result is that interaction stylistics become comparable across an array of home networking devices, providing a gloss, in terms of affect, of the “simple enjoyment” Nintendo designers claim characterizes use of the Wii-console and its complex controllers.
The claim is made, that in order to analyze them sufficiently, computer games first of all have to be described according to their mediality, understood as the very form in which possible contents are presented to be interacted with. This calls for a categorical approach that defines the condition of possible actions that are determined by the program, but that can only be perceived as aesthetic features.