Armageddon Army

As one of the more visible manifestations of the boom in new media, computer games have attracted a great deal of attention, both from the popular press, and from academics. In the case of the former, much of this coverage has focussed on the perceived danger games pose to the young mind, whether that danger be physical (in terms of bodily atrophy due to inactivity) or social (in terms of anti-social and even violent behaviour, caused by exposure to specific types of content). The massacre at Columbine High School in the United States seems to have further fuelled these fears, with several stories focusing on the fact that the killers were both players of violent video games (Dickinson 1999; Hansen 1999). These concerns have also found their way into political circles, promoting a seemingly endless cycle of inquiries and reports (for example, see Durkin 1995; Durkin and Aisbett 1999). Academic discourse on the subject has, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, tended to adopt a similar line, tracing out a return to the dark days of media effects theory. This is especially true of those studies that focus on the psychological aspects of computer game usage. For example, Scott (1995) conducted a study specifically aimed at investigating "to what extent, if any, aggressive computer game playing would have on individuals of different personality composition, and in which particular aspects of aggressiveness this might be experienced" (Scott 1995, 122). Similarly, Ballard (1999) examined the relationship between gender and violent computer games arguing that the level of violence depicted in a game directly affects the interaction between players of different genders. Almost without exception, these studies come from the experimental tradition of media research, often employing laboratory experiments in order to test their hypotheses. As the problems with this methodology have been covered extensively elsewhere (for example, see Hall 1982; Murdock and Golding 1977; Lowery and DeFleur 1983) I will not go into detail here, except to point out that most experimental research underestimates the importance of physical context in media use. Other studies have attempted to approach the subject from a more qualitative perspective, often utilising theories derived from post-structuralism to examine the construction of identity in games. For example, Alloway and Gilbert (1998) explore relationship between computer games and notions of masculinity, arguing that simplistic notions of effects dramatically underestimate the sophistication of the readers. Similarly, Beavis (1998) argues that it is necessary to more fully explore the relationship between games players and games before engaging in debates about the social benefits or dangers of the medium. According to Beavis: Other studies have attempted to approach the subject from a more qualitative perspective, often utilising theories derived from post-structuralism to examine the construction of identity in games. For example, Alloway and Gilbert (1998) explore relationship between computer games and notions of masculinity, arguing that simplistic notions of effects dramatically underestimate the sophistication of the readers. Similarly, Beavis (1998) argues that it is necessary to more fully explore the relationship between games players and games before engaging in debates about the social benefits or dangers of the medium. According to Beavis: However, while arguments like that of Beavis clearly take the debate in another direction, in many cases the writers find themselves mired in the same ideological paradigm as the effects theorists. While stressing the need for a more nuanced conceptualisation of the game-player relationship, Beavis also implies that games are potentially destructive, stating that "young people need to be helped to critique and resist the subject positions and ideologies of video games" (Beavis, 1998). In response, the games industry itself has launched several attacks on the academic community, many of which, ironically, are framed in the kind of aggressive terminology the researchers are themselves concerned about. For example, Green argues, But for a group of academics to draw sweeping conclusions about an industry they are so obviously clueless about, based on a ludicrous, half-assed experiment that sounds like something out of a Simpsons episode, adds absolutely nothing to the discussion. (136) While it could be argued that Green's "from the hip" response itself adds little to the dialogue, it does serve to highlight one of the more surprising aspects of the computer games debate. As Green asserts, it is apparent that many of the scholars conducting research into computer games seem to know very little about the subject they are studying, a situation analogous to television researchers watching only cinematic films. Indeed, given the descriptions some researchers give of particular games, it is doubtful that they have actually played the game themselves, raising questions about the extent to which they are authorities in the area. This paper is, at least in part, aimed at rectifying this situation, by providing some broad commentary on the specific characteristics of the game medium. For the sake of convenience, I will be focussing mainly on games available on home consoles such as the Sony Playstation, and will restrict my argument to single-player games. Computer games are clearly a distinct form of media; while many are played through established technology like televisions and computers, there would seem to be something intrinsically different about their mode of address. This is primarily a function of their interactivity; unlike most forms of media, computer games respond to direct input from their audience. However, at the same time, games also display characteristics that are, at least superficially, similar to existing media forms. While games are often categorised according to the type of action required of the player (eg shooting, driving, puzzle-solving etc), they can also readily be categorised into the same genres used for other entertainment media such as films and video cassettes. Games can be based on sports, action, drama, comedy and even music, although admittedly the broad category of "simulation" game has no direct counterpart in film and video, except, perhaps philosophically, for documentary. Film and television genres are traditionally defined in terms of a set of key textual characteristics, with iconography, setting and narrative being perhaps the most obvious. Applying these notions to computer games it soon becomes clear why the generic classifications used for other media have been so easily adapted to the new medium. For example, the iconography of an action film like Face Off (explosions, guns, corpses etc) can all be found in an action game such as Syphon Filter. Similarly, the settings of horror films like I Know What You Did Last Summer (old houses, dark alleys etc) are all faithfully reproduced in horror games like Resident Evil. These correlations are true of most filmic genres and computer games, to such an extent that there is a growing trend in crossover production of "game of the film" (eg. Tomorrow Never Dies, Die Hard, Independence Day) and "film of the game" (Pokémon, Mortal Kombat) texts. When we turn our attention to narrative, however, the situation becomes somewhat more complex. Like films and television programs, games usually have definite beginning and end points, but what happens between these points seems, at least superficially, to be dramatically different. Regardless of their genre, films and television programs are self-propelling entities; the actions of the characters drive the narrative forward toward some kind of resolution. In the case of a television series, this resolution might only be partial, but at the end of the program's duration there is still some kind of finality to the narrative process, albeit temporary. Games, on the other hand, are designed for extended and often repeated playing, and as such necessarily resist narrative closure, and therefore have to provide pleasure for the player in other ways. In some cases, games adopt a strategy that is similar in many ways to episodic television; the game is divided in into several "sub-games", with overall narrative resolution only being achieved through the successful completion of the sub-games. A good example of this is Dreamworks' Medal of Honor, a first-person action game set is World War Two. In order to complete the game, players must successfully carry out a series of missions, which are themselves divided into several tasks. In keeping with the action orientation of the genre, these tasks usually involve destroying some piece of military equipment, and players are rewarded based upon their proficiency in carrying them out. What is especially interesting about games like Medal of Honor is their ability to create an illusion of narrative freedom; players can effectively dictate the course the narrative takes depending on how they perform certain tasks. Resident Evil and its sequels take this concept one step further, creating a virtual gaming environment in which the player is seemingly free to go wherever they want. However, while the players are free to dictate the narrative flow at the level of what I have termed the sub-game, completion of the overall game (and therefore narrative closure) requires the player to follow a rigidly pre-established path through the game's levels. Players could in theory spend days wandering the desolate landscape of Resident Evil 2, but they just wouldn't get anywhere. Other genres of game present different problems in terms of narrative progression, and indeed some would argue that certain games progress without possessing a narrative at all. Racing games are the most obvious ex

Controlling Gameplay

Settler Stories

In his chapter on the ‘Theatre of War’ in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975, ch. 6), Paul Fussell notes a consanguinity between the participant’s view of warfare and of theatre: ‘Seeing warfare as theatre provides a psychic escape for the participant: with a sufficient sense of theatre, he can perform his duties without implicating his “real” self and without impairing his innermost conviction that the world is still a rational place’ (p. 192). The participant’s position provides the fulcrum of Fussell’s discussion of theatre and the First World War from a range of perspectives: wartime audiences escaping the reality of war by immersing themselves in theatre, those with experience of war (the equivalent of soldier-poets) writing theatrically (but not necessarily only plays), representations of war participants in drama, the theatrical language of war participants (particularly class-conscious British soldiers). The catch-phrase ‘theatre of war’, in this view, is effective because it captures a double bind of location and participation in war. On the one hand, the war zone is like a stage and those in it become self-conscious performers who are displaced from the everyday life of ‘real’ selves and located in an ‘irrational place’. On the other hand, the theatre stage and actors materialize an experience which temporarily draws audiences away from their everyday existence and ‘real’ selves — and under those conditions the dislocations of war can be effectively represented and conveyed, even if war is distant or past. Of course, the same could be said of cinema or television drama. Theatre and war zone meet in the locations and dislocations of participation in Fussell’s view, and indeed that is the dominant sense in which a ‘theatre of war’ is understood both in literary terms and in the metaphorical plethora of the catch-phrase.

A study on the playing of computer games, class success and attitudes of parents to primary school students

Studies investigating the effects of violent computer and video game playing have resulted in heterogeneous outcomes. It has been assumed that there is a decreased ability to differentiate between virtuality and reality in people that play these games intensively. FMRI data of a group of young males with (gamers) and without (controls) a history of long-term violent computer game playing experience were obtained during the presentation of computer game and realistic video sequences. In gamers the processing of real violence in contrast to nonviolence produced activation clusters in right inferior frontal, left lingual and superior temporal brain regions. Virtual violence activated a network comprising bilateral inferior frontal, occipital, postcentral, right middle temporal, and left fusiform regions. Control participants showed extended left frontal, insula and superior frontal activations during the processing of real, and posterior activations during the processing of virtual violent scenarios. The data suggest that the ability to differentiate automatically between real and virtual violence has not been diminished by a long-term history of violent video game play, nor have gamers' neural responses to real violence in particular been subject to desensitization processes. However, analyses of individual data indicated that group-related analyses reflect only a small part of actual individual different neural network involvement, suggesting that the consideration of individual learning history is sufficient for the present discussion.

Limbs Alive: Use of computer games to provide motivating, child centred therapy to improve bimanual skills for children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy.

Onward Through the Fog: Computer Game Collection and the Play of Obsolescence

"You Have Unleashed a Horde of Barbarians!": Fighting Indians, Playing Games, Forming Disciplines Christopher Douglas Abstract We are about four or five years into the formation of a new discipline, that of digital game studies. At this early stage, digital game studies is necessarily and self-consciously concerned with its own formation, and recent commentators have differed over whether digital games should become part of an already existing discipline like cinema, literary, new media, or cultural studies or whether it needs to resist such "colonizing" attempts and develop into a discipline of its own, with a coherent object of study and institutional support. This essay agrees with the warnings against the kind of methodological blindnesses likely to result from such colonizations--that games will be understood as just a more interactive kind of film or narrative--but argues nonetheless that each of these disciplines (and others) is likely to have valuable conceptual tools that we need to carefully adapt for game studies. Moreover, it's sometimes precisely the historical baggage of the old disciplines that provides insight into the structure of game use. This essay argues that the ideological content of one series of influential games, Sid Meier's Civilization series, comes to light when the historical, disciplinary blindness to forms of American imperialism in American literary studies are considered. The Civilization games transform and display the symbolic Native presence in the land whose accidental, terrestrial effects in the games must be destroyed in order for the player to win the game; however, and moving beyond the kind of ideological representations found in film or narrative, in these games the users must perform their logic, a logic which is coded into the very rules of the game. Games like Civilization thus rehearse a series of lessons about national destiny, race and colonization, and the moral fitness of civilizations and individuals. --cd We are about four or five years into the formation of a new discipline, digital game studies. Though by one account computer games have been around for more than four decades (Aarseth), and by another computer and video game sales in the United States are rivaling movie box office sales (Frauenfelder), academic attention to the medium has come relatively recently. At this early stage, digital game studies is necessarily and self-consciously concerned with its own formation, and is heavily engaged with an argument about whether this new phenomenon is to be swallowed by already existing disciplines, or whether it needs to and could develop into a discipline of its own, with a coherent object of study and institutional support. 2001 was an interesting year in this regard. Espen Aarseth, whose Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature aims to unseat "hypertext" as the paradigm for studying electronic literature, editorializes in the inaugural issue of the new online journal Game Studies that "2001 can be seen as the Year One of Computer Game Studies as an emerging, viable, international, academic field." As editor of Game Studies, Aarseth notes "the very early stage we are still in, where the struggle of controlling and shaping the theoretical paradigms has just started." His editorial both invites and warns, however, as he cautions against the "colonizing attempts" of other disciplines: "Making room for a new field usually means reducing the resources of the existing ones, and the existing fields will also often respond by trying to contain the new area as a subfield. Games are not a kind of cinema, or literature, but colonizing attempts from both these fields have already happened, and no doubt will happen again." The problem, Aarseth argues, is the kind of methodological blindnesses that would be imported into digital game studies along with other baggage. While "we all enter this field from somewhere else, from anthropology, sociology, narratology, semiotics, film studies, etc., and the political and ideological baggage we bring from our old field inevitably determines and motivates our approaches," Aarseth envisions "an independent academic structure" (of which Game Studies would surely stand as one institution) as the only viable way for digital game studies to avoid obscuring its object through inappropriate lenses borrowed from other fields. Also in 2001, the October issue of PMLA contained an article on the...

Eye movements indicate visual attention and strategies during game play, regardless of whether in board, sports, or computer games. Additional factors such as individual vs. group play and active playing vs. observing game play further differentiate application scenarios for eye movement analysis. Visual analysis has proven to be an effective means to investigate and interpret such highly dynamic spatio-temporal data. In this paper, we contribute a classification strategy for different scenarios for the visual analysis of gaze data during game play. Based on an initial sample of related work, we derive multiple aspects comprising data sources, game mode, player number, player state, analysis mode, and analysis goal. We apply this classification strategy to describe typical analysis scenarios and research questions as they can be found in related work. We further discuss open challenges and research directions for new application scenarios of eye movements in game play.

Film Writing Adapted for Game Narrative: Myth or Error?

The video- and computer-game industry generated a profit of US$6.35 billion in 2001, earnings greater than those of either Holly- wood films or pornography and, in the entertainment field, second only to those of the music industry. It is estimated that 60 per cent of all Americans regularly play computer or video games;142 per cent of them are women; the median age of gamers is twenty-eight.2 The pro- duction budgets for computer games now regularly run into the tens of millions of dollars, and the creation of a single game may involve a team of designers, actors, programmers, and musicians that rivals in size some film production crews. Despite the scale of this phenome- non, surprisingly little scholarship has been devoted to it. What scholarship there is can be divided into four basic categories: 1. History of Computer Gaming. Electronic games actually date back to 1958. In that year Willy Higginbottom, a technician who had designed circuits for the Manhattan Project, connected an ana- log computer to an oscilloscope and some buttons to create an electronic game of tennis. He did not patent the game. The first successful computer game was created three years later by a group of MIT technicians. Called Spacewar, it crudely simulated a spaceship shooting at enemies. It would eventually find its way into coin-operated arcade consoles. Computer games, then, are over forty years old, but it is only in the past twenty or so years that they have had any cultural profile. There has been lit- tle scholarly attempt to document their history, so most of the work in this category is being done by amateur enthusiasts.3 2. Taxonomy. Computer game enthusiasts and developers have been recognizing, defining, and naming computer game genres for the past ten years or so. "Gamers" (a term I will take to include not only enthusiasts but creators of computer games) ~~ Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d'~~tudes am~~ricaines 34, no. 1, 2004now recognize such genres as real-time strategy games, role- playing games, simulation games, and first-person shooter games. Many of these genres have recognized sub-genres. For example, some real-time strategy games are called "god games" because they place the player in a position of detached omnipo- tence. Video games tend to be categorized not by narrative con- tent but by style of game play. A real-time strategy game, then, may be set in outer space, in contemporary Europe, or in medi- eval China; because, in each of these settings, the player controls squadrons of fighters and their military hardware from a detached, third-person perspective, they are all real-time strat- egy games. 3. Socio-psychological Studies. This is the largest category of com- puter-game studies. Sociologists, psychologists, women's stud- ies scholars, media scholars, and innumerable journalists have tried to discern the impact that video-game playing is having upon society. Most often, these studies are analyses of the effects of video-game violence or video-game gender representation on children.4 As early as 1982, the United States surgeon general, Dr. C. Everett Koop, publicly declared that "videogames were evil entities that produced 'aberrations in childhood behaviour'" (Poole 218), though he offered no evidence to support his posi- tion. These studies were given a special urgency after the Col- umbine massacre when it was revealed that the two young men who committed that crime were fans of the first-person shooter game DOOM. There was a Senate inquiry on the subject in the wake of that massacre. 4. Formalist Studies. These look at computer games as a new type of media experience and/or a new form of narrative. Much of this scholarship draws upon theories generated in film and televi- sion studies.5 The most prominent theorists working in it are, perhaps, Steven Poole, author of Trigger Happy, and Mark J.P. Wolf, editor of The Medium of the Video Game.

The video- and computer-game industry generated a profit of US$6.35 billion in 2001, earnings greater than those of either Holly- wood films or pornography and, in the entertainment field, second only to those of the music industry. It is estimated that 60 per cent of all Americans regularly play computer or video games;142 per cent of them are women; the median age of gamers is twenty-eight.2 The pro- duction budgets for computer games now regularly run into the tens of millions of dollars, and the creation of a single game may involve a team of designers, actors, programmers, and musicians that rivals in size some film production crews. Despite the scale of this phenome- non, surprisingly little scholarship has been devoted to it. What scholarship there is can be divided into four basic categories: 1. History of Computer Gaming. Electronic games actually date back to 1958. In that year Willy Higginbottom, a technician who had designed circuits for the Manhattan Project, connected an ana- log computer to an oscilloscope and some buttons to create an electronic game of tennis. He did not patent the game. The first successful computer game was created three years later by a group of MIT technicians. Called Spacewar, it crudely simulated a spaceship shooting at enemies. It would eventually find its way into coin-operated arcade consoles. Computer games, then, are over forty years old, but it is only in the past twenty or so years that they have had any cultural profile. There has been lit- tle scholarly attempt to document their history, so most of the work in this category is being done by amateur enthusiasts.3 2. Taxonomy. Computer game enthusiasts and developers have been recognizing, defining, and naming computer game genres for the past ten years or so. "Gamers" (a term I will take to include not only enthusiasts but creators of computer games) ~~ Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d'~~tudes am~~ricaines 34, no. 1, 2004now recognize such genres as real-time strategy games, role- playing games, simulation games, and first-person shooter games. Many of these genres have recognized sub-genres. For example, some real-time strategy games are called "god games" because they place the player in a position of detached omnipo- tence. Video games tend to be categorized not by narrative con- tent but by style of game play. A real-time strategy game, then, may be set in outer space, in contemporary Europe, or in medi- eval China; because, in each of these settings, the player controls squadrons of fighters and their military hardware from a detached, third-person perspective, they are all real-time strat- egy games. 3. Socio-psychological Studies. This is the largest category of com- puter-game studies. Sociologists, psychologists, women's stud- ies scholars, media scholars, and innumerable journalists have tried to discern the impact that video-game playing is having upon society. Most often, these studies are analyses of the effects of video-game violence or video-game gender representation on children.4 As early as 1982, the United States surgeon general, Dr. C. Everett Koop, publicly declared that "videogames were evil entities that produced 'aberrations in childhood behaviour'" (Poole 218), though he offered no evidence to support his posi- tion. These studies were given a special urgency after the Col- umbine massacre when it was revealed that the two young men who committed that crime were fans of the first-person shooter game DOOM. There was a Senate inquiry on the subject in the wake of that massacre. 4. Formalist Studies. These look at computer games as a new type of media experience and/or a new form of narrative. Much of this scholarship draws upon theories generated in film and televi- sion studies.5 The most prominent theorists working in it are, perhaps, Steven Poole, author of Trigger Happy, and Mark J.P. Wolf, editor of The Medium of the Video Game.

Computer game had reached maturity in Taiwan,the market share of computer game would exceed NT dollars10,000 million and can be further increasing. Instead of entertainment platform, computer game is being regarded as mass media and a kind of emerging electronic platform. A lot of comprehensive applications are appearing within computer game due to the viscosity and clustered effect of game players is expected. This research proposed a knowledge placement framework enable game player reached various kinds of knowledge by experience related cognitive process which be represented in computer game via different manner. Based on Bloom classification mechanism, the learner would experience various cognitive processes, including: remember, understand,apply, analyze, evaluate and create, to receive related knowledge, such as factual, conceptual and procedural knowledge. According to problem solving theory, the proposed framework implements such bloom knowledge mechanism by tool, feedback and goal in computer game. Finally, a illustration certification training, CCNA networking management content design, is presented and further validation would be implement.

Digital Games Distribution: The Presence of the Past and the Future of Obsolescence