Écriture Féminine in Digital Games: Feminine Writing and Female Voice in Gris

Creativity has been investigated in areas such as education, the workplace and psychology. However, there remains little in the way of a unanimous definition of what it means to be creative – with various conceptualisations illuminating different aspects of this multifaceted phenomenon. However, it is for the most part agreed that creativity contributes to a wealth of positive outcomes such as openness to experience, cognitive flexibility and emotional wellbeing. Furthermore, creativity is instrumental in facilitating a meaningful learning experience as learners can actively formulate and experiment with ideas in an authentic context. In this way, the creative process leads to ultimately the creative expression itself and subsequent positive effects such as learning. With such a wealth of positive effects, it is surprising that creativity has not been more extensively investigated within the area of digital entertainment games. Digital games provide an authentic and active context which fosters intrinsic motivation and offer numerous opportunities for players to be creative. As such, this thesis attempts to address this gap by presenting an account of current literature on creativity in digital games, and the results from three empirical studies. The first study comprised of 24 semi-structured interviews and 14 narrative surveys and identified three unique forms of creative expression, along with three different player constructed conceptualisations of what it means to be creative in games. Further circumorbital constructs related to creativity were also identified, including creative transfer, affordances for creativity and learning outcomes from being creative. The second study consisted of an online survey completed by 251 respondents and resulted in the development of the Creativity in Gaming Scale (CGS), in addition to providing a quantitative examination of what players learn from engaging in the different forms of creative expression, and what aspects of creativity are most likely to transfer. The third study focused on affordances for creativity in digital games and utilised the reflexive photographic method alongside photo-elicitation interviews with 9 participants to identify eight types of affordances to support the different types of creative expression. This research provides an extensive account of creativity in digital entertainment games; presenting the construct from the standpoint of the player. As such, the findings not only contribute towards presenting a holistic definition of creativity, but also highlight that creativity is an important aspect of player experience. The role of creativity in the learning process is extrapolated, with findings drawing a link between different forms of creative expression and what players may learn from being creative. Similarly, the transferable nature of creativity is investigated, with findings pointing to the different aspects of creativity which may transfer, and what areas of life they may transfer to. Finally, by identifying the specific affordances for creativity in games, the final contribution of this research is towards informing the design of games which may actively promote creativity in players.

The aim of this article is to examine the application of artificial intelligence in producing visual references during the development of a digital game. These references are a standard inclusion in Game Design Documents or Art Design Documents and are typically displayed as mood boards. In this article, we will discuss sound design and how artificial intelligence, mainly Bing utilizing Dall-E and Midjourney, can produce images that cater to the requirements of a particular game. One of the primary issues we will explore is the efficiency of using artificial intelligence in this creative process in terms of speed, accuracy, efficacy, creativity and how the resulting content compares with human-generated content. One objective is to examine how artificial intelligence can produce visual references that exemplify more detailed sound groups, such as ambiences or interactive sounds linked with specific in-game activities. These visual references will undergo testing within a digital game presently under development, thus achieving validation through real-world application. The game’s genre is an audio game with no standard graphics or interface, tailored to the needs of players with visual impairments. For that reason, generating visual references remains the sole approach to comprehending the actual game environment.

This essay specifies how a sub-genre of the digital adventure game – the so-called walking simulator – reproduces and reflects ideas, motifs, and (narrative) structures of European Romanticism. The goal here is to draw attention to the genre’s potential for the academic discussion, analysis, and teaching of Romantic theories and patterns. To achieve this, I provide an introductory overview on the history of the walking simulator with emphasis on the early experimental games Explorer, The Forest, and LSD: Dream Emulator. An analysis of Dear Ether’s landscape design and narrative structure serves as access point into the discussion of how the Romantic ideas of 1. the sublime, 2. the silent poetry of nature, and 3. The Freudian Uncanny as well as the storytelling techniques of 1. synesthesia, 2. (reflective and meditative) walking, 3. fragmented narratives, and 4. (romantic) self-referentiality have been used in different walking simulators (such as Proteus, What Remains of Edith Finch, Gone Home, and The Beginners Guide) to tell (spatial) stories about emotions, identity, individuality. Walking simulators subvert traditional expectations towards digital games and, through their use of Romantic storytelling techniques, have changed the discourse about digital games as not only entertainment but a form of art.

Creativity assessments should be valid, reliable, and scalable to support various stakeholders (e.g., policy-makers, educators, corporations, and the general public) in their decision-making processes. Established initiatives toward scalable creativity assessments have relied on well-studied standardized tests. Although robust in many ways, most of these tests adopt unnatural and unmotivating environments for expression of creativity, mainly observe coarse-grained snippets of the creative process, and rely on subjective, resource-intensive, human-expert evaluations. This article presents a literature review of game-based creativity assessment and discusses how digital games can potentially address the limitations of traditional testing. Based on an original sample of 127 papers, this article contributes an in-depth review of 16 papers on 11 digital creativity assessment games. Despite the relatively small sample, a wide variety of design decisions are covered. Major findings and recommendations include identifying (1) a disconnect between the potential of scaling up assessment of creativity with the use of digital games, and the actual reach achieved in the examined studies (2) the need for complementary methods such as stealth assessment, algorithmic support and crowdsourcing when designing creativity assessment games, and (3) a need for interdisciplinary dialogs to produce, validate and implement creativity assessment games at scale.

Digital games that involve entertainment, relaxation and technology are very attractive to modern students, while the traditional learning/teaching methods are inefficient and unattractive to them due to the change in learning habits. Surveys testify the successful incorporation of digital games into the curricula of Nature, Mathematics, Foreign Languages and other subjects and allow assuming that they might also be incorporated into the curriculum of the subject of Arts; therefore, this article investigates and reveals the possibilities of the application of digital games in the implementation of the curriculum of Arts subject.
 Many different interpretations of the concept of a digital game show that it is a manifold and multifaceted phenomenon. In addition to the concept of a “digital game” which can be understood in its broadest sense as the integration of technology and entertainment, the concepts of serious games, game-based learning / digital game-based learning, edutainment, and lecture games can also be encountered in the education contexts.
 Digital games can be incorporated into the subject of Arts first of all as a phenomenon of modern art. In certain aspects, digital games can be attributed to pop art and they have certain connections with installation art and, no doubt, with video and optic art and other art branches. The idea of digital games as a form of art is still questioned but some researchers suggest that their artistic value should be grounded on the analogy with art cinema. Cinema is undoubtedly considered a form of art although it is understood that not all films are works of art but, instead, an expression of the popular culture.
 Digital games can be incorporated into art classes as a means of artistic expression in several different ways. The first method is the creation of a digital game as an art object during art classes. The second method involves playing already created digital games as the tool/means of development of certain artistic expression abilities. Surveys show that children under 10 years of age are already capable of designing games: their script, graphics and other elements. Teenagers and older students are often capable of controlling programs intended for professionals. The process of creation of a digital game is analogous to the process of creation of any other art work but, according to the researchers, the nature of such creative work offers more education possibilities in certain aspects in comparison to traditional creative activities. The playing of digital games during art classes could be applied instead of traditional methods aiming to train the composing, designing and modelling abilities of the students or to deepen their knowledge on art history. Learning through digital gaming is an attractive and engaging experience to modern students who cannot learn and read consistently but are rather inclined to act and learn through experimenting; therefore, digital games can also be incorporated into art classes as a motivating element.

Creative thinking in digital game design and development: A case study

Digital games represent ubiquitous forms of everyday social and cultural activity. Young people are engaging with these texts across a range of physical and digital spaces, and the speed with which digital game literacies have evolved has raised questions about how teachers can support their students to be critical participants in a digital game literacy world. In this chapter, I explore a case study that involved the development and delivery of an Indigenous storytelling unit combining the play and study of a digital game with a short animation film. The first part of this chapter details the nature of the intervention, including brief descriptions of activities from the case study, highlighting the challenge of progressing beyond literary approaches to texts that focus on decoding and engaging with authors’ intended meanings. The second part engages more closely with Critical Digital Literacies praxis (), re-examining the intervention with the assistance of Luci Pangrazio’s (, ) Critical Digital Design approach. The aim is to demonstrate how both students and teachers can encourage border-crossing in terms of what texts we bring to the literacy classroom and the critical dispositions we seek to nurture.

In November 2012, the New York Museum of Modern Art announced that it will exhibit a collection of digital games. In an article, art critic Jonathan Jones responded to this announcement by declaring that games lacked ‘authorial vision’ and were inadequate as an expressive medium. In 2010, the late film critic Roger Ebert wrote a similar article arguing that games could never be considered art. Such articles sparked discussions of whether or not digital games may be considered ‘art’. This article examines the relationship between arts and digital games through a comparative analysis of the literature on the nature of art and digital games. The article focuses on the participatory nature of art works, beginning with the interactive tradition in art from the 1960s onward, today focusing on the application of digital technologies. Since the 1990s, some artists have seen digital games as both an inspiration and a medium for artistic expression. Thus, they have created a variety of art works utilizing games as the medium. The importance of this artistic application of games comes from the use of procedurality as a form of expression. The article comes from this perspective to discuss not only the relationship between art and games, but also to explore the artistic applications to digital games through both looking at examples of such games as well as concepts from digital game studies.

This article provides a framework for using digital game spaces in college writing classrooms to help students develop environmental awareness. Drawing on a range of relevant theories, the author argues that digital game play offers simulated experiential learning opportunities that allow students to locate virtual representations of the environment that potentially mirror, critique, or even promote new ideas regarding material-world environmental concerns. By mapping critical, rhetorical, and ethical literacies onto digital gaming practices, this article advances a creative pedagogical approach to engagement with environmental rhetorics, narratives, and ideologies. Through an extended example of the popular mobile app The Sims Freeplay, the author brings together the disciplines of rhetoric and composition, environmental studies, and game studies in a productive conversation about the ways gaming can increase students’ rhetorical and ethical engagement with both writing and the environment.

The present discourse analysis is based on eight focus-group interviews with 32 teenagers where use of and preferences for digital games were discussed. The focus is on how teenagers take stances on digital games and present themselves as players. The main findings are that teenagers position themselves as ‘ordinary’ teenage players who have extensive experience and knowledge of playing various types of games, who play for fun, and who are in control of their playing. The construction of the ordinary teenage player is made in contrast to the hardcore player. The analysis also shows that teenagers display cultural knowledge of what is considered acceptable, as well as problematic stances on digital games and playing.

Save the Videogame! The National Videogame Archive: Preservation, Supersession and Obsolescence

The article analyses the artistic work of D. G. Rossetti in the context of his aesthetic concepts of art and femininity and in the inseparable unity of its verbal and visual beginnings. The material for the research was the sonnets of the English poet included in the collection “House of Life”, as well as some famous paintings by the artist, which formed a new canon of female beauty in Victorian culture and significantly influenced the English aestheticism of the late 19th century. Rossetti’s poetic and pictorial practice demonstrates a constant and intense search for ways to embody the artistic ideal of femininity and the concept of art formed by the artist at the very beginning of his career, as metaphorically expressed in his novella “Hand and Soul”. The meaning of Rossetti’s concept of art was in the clear understanding that an artist should express his soul, his unique vision of the world, beauty, and life in his artistic works. The article proposes a hypothesis about the evolutionary nature of Rossetti’s work. The paper examines the stages of development of his aesthetic concepts of femininity and art, which are associated with the presence of different female models who became his muses and lovers in certain periods of the artist’s life. The research argues that the essence of the evolution of Rossetti’s creative pursuits and practices was the desire to overcome the gap between life and art and remove the contradictions of the traditional dichotomy of the spiritual and the bodily-sensual, the soul and the body. This process was embodied in Rossetti’s gradual transition from the depiction of disembodied spirituality that dominated the sublime images of women created under the influence of Elizabeth Siddal, who was associated with Dante’s Beatrice, to the accentuated sensual beauty of the seductive Lilith and the almost simultaneously painted by the artist new, transformed images of Beatrice, inspired by his second important woman in his life, Jane Morris, and finally to the stylized and androgynous images of Pandora, Proserpine, and Astarte, also inspired by Jane. Namely, in her image, the artist’s ideas about femininity and beauty, love, life, and death, and his understanding of art as a reflection of the creative, androgynous author’s self were fully embodied. Rossetti’s iconic images were correlated with the verbal ones which complemented the visual ones, which testifies to the integrity of the English artist’s verbal and visual worlds.

Toni Morrisons Sula vividly depicts the struggles of black women against patriarchy in a black community in Ohio from 1919 to 1965. The three female characters Sula, Hannah and Eva are studied through the lens of feminism in this paper. In fact, writing about their sexual experiences proves to show the essence of feminine writing. It can be explained by Hlne Cixous theory in which she argues that women must write about women on the basis of their bodily experiences and speak for themselves. As a result, the explicit expressions of female desires, vivid narrations of female sexuality as well as the careful descriptions of female body based on the three characters experiences ultimately contribute to reveal female voice from womans perspective, liberate womens body and therefore break the phallocentric discourse. The paper then serves to combine the theory and practice and at the same time helps enrich the understanding of feminine writing.

Introduction Adolescent well-being is a multidimensional concept impacting lifelong health outcomes. As video games have become central to youth culture, they offer methodological opportunities to explore young people's perspectives. This study uses Minecraft as an innovative research tool to understand how youth conceptualize well-being. Methods Twelve participants (aged 15-22) were recruited through a French streaming community to create their ideal well-being spaces in Minecraft during a 7-hour construction challenge. A mixed-methods approach combined visual analysis of constructions and thematic analysis of presentations, using the five domains of the UN H6+ framework on adolescent well-being. Results Analysis revealed an uneven representation of well-being domains. Social connectedness and healthy lifestyle dimensions predominated (in 7/12 constructions), manifesting through communal spaces and health-promoting environments. Learning and safety domains were moderately represented (in 4 and 3 constructions), while agency elements were minimal. Natural elements were valued, with most constructions incorporating both outdoor and indoor spaces. Work/study spaces typically integrated with gaming setups rather than being isolated. Discussion This study contributes methodologically by demonstrating gaming environments’ potential as innovative research tools, and empirically by revealing how young gamers conceptualize well-being through social and physical dimensions, challenging gaming stereotypes. The underrepresentation of safety and agency domains may reflect the French context, where personal security exceeds OECD averages. The digital approach offered unique strengths, allowing extended reflection suitable for adolescents. Conclusions Minecraft-based research opens new avenues at the intersection of digital games and youth well-being, with applications for youth-centered health promotion interventions. Key messages • Digital games offer methodological innovations for youth research. Our Minecraft challenge demonstrates how creative expression reveals adolescent perspectives on different well-being domains. • Young gamers challenge stereotypes by prioritizing social spaces and natural environments in their well-being constructions. Gaming platforms offer innovative windows into youth health perspectives.

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss articles in the issue on topics including lifelong learning, informal education and social media in education.