Video Game Medium Research Articles

Militarizing and Colonizing Outer Space as a Video Game. Ender’s Game and Astroculture

The author of the article analyzes Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, focusing her attention on the relationship between the key motif of the novel – gaming – and the tendency to militarize and colonize outer space highlighted by astrocultural scholars. Card’s novel follows the astrocultural pattern of setting future wars in space, but introduces an important novelty: games of various kinds, including video games, become a mediating element between the characters and the real experience of space war. The theoretical framework for the analysis is provided by the insights of astrocultural scholars such as Alexander Geppert, Tilmann Siebeneichner and Alice Gorman. In analyzing Ender’s Game and, to some extent, its 2013 film adaptation, the author examines the protagonists’ relationship to space, which is shaped by the game’s setting. It is here that military and colonial themes are most prevalent. The first part of the paper presents the main contexts of the motif of the militarization of outer space and its close relationship with video games. These contexts provide an important background for the analysis of the motifs of games and outer space in Ender’s Game. Selected reflections from the field of ludology are helpful in interpreting Card’s use of video games not only as a theme, but also as a structural principle of his novel’s settings. In the last part of the paper, the author considers the transformation of the militant motif taking place in the novel’s finale into a narrative focused on the colonization of outer space, as well as the transformation of this narrative that occurred in Gavin Hood’s film adaptation. The goal of such an interpretation is to show the story created by Orson Scott Card as entangled in a dynamic relationship with the video game medium that was developing at the time of its creation and with the changing trends of astroculture.

Turnt, Trippy, and Tipsy: Video Games, Drugs, and Allo-Ludic Play

This article offers a flexible method for analyzing drug representations in video games as they map onto lived social realities outside the game with a particular focus on US cultures. While drugs have received ample attention in popular culture studies—especially in film and television studies—game studies has been slow to produce systematic analyses of these important cultural artefacts expressed through the video game medium. Drawing upon Donna Haraway’s cyborg politics and Steven Conway’s ludic framework (with the addition of allo-ludic play), this essay offers game studies scholars a flexible—perhaps even a “turnt”—taxonomy for analyzing the imbrication of virtual drugs inside the game and oppressive, discriminatory, and inequitable conditions of life in America outside the game. Through a brief analysis of stimulants, depressants, and psychedelics in Triple-A and indie games, the essay argues for the importance of studying drugs in video games to understand the complex, intersecting histories of the rise of the video game medium alongside the changeful histories of US drug policies, laws, and enforcement.

China in the Skin

How do video games tell “the good China story”? In reviewing Chinese official media's months-long criticism of the mobile MOBA game, Honor of Kings (Wangzhe rongyao 王者榮耀), and the game's rounds of responses in 2017 and 2018, this article investigates a unique digital object that affords storytelling in video games: skin (pifu 皮膚). Neither a playable character per se nor a player's avatar, skin constitutes a special digital milieu where China stories are told, debated, and their “goodness” performed. It traverses various composing strata of video games and distributes narrative into a game's mechanics, procedure, representation, playing experience, and more. Skin, the author argues, is a yet-theorized differentiator that anchors “Chineseness” in the world of video gaming. It is a new site in a digital age in which the theoretical problem of Chineseness manifests different kinds of difficulty. The article ends with a discussion of the significance of researching skin to our understanding of what a Chinese video game is. The author calls for a new conceptualization of a Chinese video game that accounts for video game's medium specificity. Speaking to scholars of both Chinese studies and digital game studies, this article anticipates more scholarly interest in the intersection of the two fields.

„Nasze ścieżki staną się drogami”: Ekogroznawcze refleksje wokół Death Stranding Hideo Kojimy


 
 
 The article discusses the issue of environmental game studies, which the author defines as an analysis of the involvement of video games in environmental discourses. In order to formulate a definition of an eco-game, the author uses Lawrence Buell’s environmental text theory and Alenda Y. Chang’s postulates from the manifesto of environmentally conscious game design, as well as references to works in the field of post-humanistic philosophy. He also invokes concepts derived from gaming studies to describe the ecological contexts of the medium of video games. In the second part of the work, environmental game theory is used to analyse an example of an eco-game. The author chose the AAA production Death Stranding created by the Japanese designer Hideo Kojima. Looking at its unconventional depiction of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the biopolitics regulating the life of the protagonist and the gameplay based on unhurried exploration of space, the author outlines potential further directions for the development of research in the field of environmental game studies.
 
 

Animating for Interactivity: The Walk Cycles of Prince of Persia (1989) and Ninja Gaiden (1988)

This article uses the walk cycle to simultaneously place movement in video games within the history of animation, and to show how the walk cycle has been adapted for the video game medium. Dating back to the pre-cinematic toys of the 19th century, the walk cycle is an animation technique that depicts a character’s walking animation as a self-contained, reusable loop. Video games import this technique into a new context with different affordances. A comparative analysis of the video games Prince of Persia (1989) and Ninja Gaiden (1988) explores different methods of implementing the walk cycle and reveals a trade-off between verisimilitude of movement and responsiveness to user input. Prince of Persia’s walk cycle, inspired by full cel animation, foregrounds fluid movement, while Ninja Gaiden utilizes limited animation techniques to prioritize responsiveness. Thus, this article argues that interactivity becomes a site of tension between movement and responsiveness, with video games drawing on older forms of animation to negotiate this tension.

Interactivity and Ecomedia in the Digital Age

Interactivity is a fundamental aspect of contemporary digital media and communication, playing a crucial role in the synergistic relationship between filmic representation and video games. This paper examines the interplay between Jeta Amata's eco-film Black November and the video game Niger Delta Commando, focusing on the narratives, themes, and imaginary worlds that define their relationship. In the context of Nigeria's Niger Delta challenges, these media forms provide alternative approaches for addressing environmental issues while maintaining relevance and competing for attention in the entertainment landscape. Nigeria's rapidly growing video game industry holds significant potential for entertainment and economic development. This study acknowledges the integral part played by film in influencing the development of video games, as both mediums share aspects such as camera techniques, narrative structures, visual representation technologies, special effects, and thematic concerns. In this case, Niger Delta Commando allows players to determine the narrative through interactivity, offering a unique and innovative way to address the Niger Delta's environmental challenges. Adopting a dual analytical and descriptive methodology, this paper explores the interrelatedness of the narratives linking Black November and Niger Delta Commando, reconciling leading arguments in ecomedia, and assessing the Nigerian narrative's notions of interactivity, immersion, and environment. The analysis also considers the environmental impacts of media product life cycles and addresses the differential experiences of affected populations. The eco-film Black November is recreated in the interactive video game medium Niger Delta Commando, emphasizing the military action storyline and visual style reminiscent of the Niger Delta region's activist struggles. However, the video game primarily adopts an action-thriller plot without addressing the underlying factors contributing to violence in the region or the environmental degradation detailed in Black November. Media products, including films and video games, have demonstrated their utility as tools for engaging with and analyzing human concerns. With video games becoming increasingly popular and accepted as an artistic medium, adaptations like Niger Delta Commando can provide more immersive representations of environmental issues. The paper proposes that future video games addressing the Niger Delta region should feature complex and nuanced intersections reflecting the region's ecological challenges, moving beyond violence and towards a more constructive engagement with the environment.

Images of Chopin in, and through, Japanese Video Games

This article examines the use of Chopin’s music in video games created by Japanese developers. While, as William Gibbons and others have documented, classical music has been used throughout the history of video games, a surprising number of Japanese games have used Chopin’s music. Sometimes this music is presented as a straightforward performance of a piece by Chopin, while others remix, vary or interpolate Chopin’s musical materials in new compositions. Chopin’s music here stages many of the tensions and possibilities found in the video game medium. In that sense, it ‘thematises’ video games. The article focuses on three aspects of Chopin in games. The first is sentimentalism (both in association with death, the supernatural and the morbid, and in association with sexual romance and romanticism more broadly). Secondly, Chopin’s music is associated with virtuosity, intertwining emotion and physicality. Finally, Chopin’s music is used as an agent for postmodern juxtaposition, in the process problematising a divide between art and mass culture. These three trends are interlinked and draw upon longstanding historical images and connotative values in relation to Chopin. The discussion builds on antecedent research concerning Chopin’s reception by Lawrence Kramer, Jim Samson, Charles Rosen and Stephen Downes, critical perspectives on games and/as musical interfaces by David Sudnow and Roger Moseley, and discussions of classical music in popular culture by Andreas Huyssen and Mina Yang. Key case studies include Space Adventure Cobra, Clock Tower 3, Eternal Sonata, Gran Turismo, Pop’n Music, Catherine and a selection of visual novels. Chopin’s music in Japanese games serves as a way to understand the meanings of that music in a modern pop-culture context. Besides that, however, such a study uncovers how the issues central to the discourse of Chopin are manifest and (re)configured in a medium and context of production very far removed from the music’s origins.

At the nexus of ludology and narratology: Advances in reality-based story-driven games.

Story-driven games are growing in popularity across a wide range of genres. However, the narrative potential of video games is still being debated, particularly in light of the so-called tension between gameplay and storytelling. This study proposes that rules and game mechanics perform narrative semiotic functions, offering a ludic grammar of interactive storytelling. Case studies of four representative games show through exploratory player action shaped by rules, the medium of video games can generate meanings that traditional media cannot, thereby better achieving their narrative goals.

From High Heroism to Abject Abyss: Ethical Aspects of Highly Aestheticised and Critical Videogames

Videogames have become the leading medium in our globalised cultural industries following the postmodern ludic turn and shift towards simulation as the central mode of meaning-making. Subject to public controversies and media panics, like all new media before them, questions of morality and ethics inevitably become pertinent in any attempt to define videogames, their effects on and place in our societies. This paper provides a survey of the dimensions of production-, player-, designer-, and game ethics applied to the medium of videogames, offering a multitude of jumping-off points for further debates. The roles of both players and designers in the realisation of various system dynamics and play experiences are critically considered, and a practical framework for the analysis of morality systems in (video-)games established. Finally, fours pertinent games, Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011), Dishonored (2012), Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014), and Firewatch (2016), are introduced as examples for a deconstructive approach to individual heroism, a systemic ethical perspective, a discussion of personal and collective responsibility, as well as the acknowledgment of the limits of human agency respectively. Resulting from these deliberations, an argument is finally made for a necessary increase in affective game design strategies and practices to realise the unparalleled potential of (video-)games as virtual learning spaces for ethical reflection and moral action.

The Effectiveness of Using Kinect-Based Dyslexia Therapy in Improving Reading Ability in Dyslexic Children: A Linguistic Study

Dyslexia is a learning disorder characterized by difficult in reading, writing, or spelling. People especially children with dyslexia have difficult to identify spoken words and converting them into letters or sentences. The aims of this study are 1) to find out the early symptoms of dyslexia in children, 2) to reveal the effectiveness of using video game media (kinect-based dyslexia therapy media) in improving reading skills in dyslexic children. This research used quantitative method. This research is an experimental longitudinal because there is an intensive observation of the subject within a certain period of time. The result of this study is to reduce the dyslexia children as much as possible to read by using the intervention “Kinect-Based Dyslexia Therapy” (LexiPal). Strong evidence of the success of the LexiPal intervention can be seen through the experimental method (calculated the difference in the position of the treatment group and the control group at the end of the experiment). Calculations are carried out through simple statistical calculations.

Reading gamefully: videogamification as multimodal pedagogy for high school setworks

This paper draws from multiple publications in the Literacy Studies, Game Studies and Multimodal fields to foreground the affordances of using modern video game aesthetics - particularly their user interfaces or screens - as learning scaffolds in the under-resourced English classroom context. Though this may be seen as a well-worn terrain for research today (nearly 30 years after the advent of Game Studies), it is argued that video games remain somewhat underrepresented in literacy education, with the Covid-19 pandemic and recurrent lockdowns even further cementing games technologies from learners' home domains as the new frontier in teaching and learning. The benefits of importing such technologies into the classroom is nothing new to the field. Yet, this study innovates by optimising the most accessible of graphological media (pencils, pens, paints and paper) during participants' transmodalisations of prescribed English literature - particularly Shakespeare's plays - into a range of video game screenshots, including character menus, maps, and heads-up-displays. The research site is a public high school in Johannesburg, South Africa, with five Grade 10-12 learners drawing the screenshots in response to an extracurricular, multimodal enrichment programme. The author contends that this programme (or similar pedagogies) may encourage future groups to delve further into the complexities of their school setworks, which may then be connected meaningfully to their own, increasingly digital life-worlds. Recognising game-making as an extraordinarily complex undertaking, the researcher then offers a fine-grained analysis of each participant's text-to-game re-genrefication. In this way, the powerful representational properties of the video game medium can come to light, reaffirming its importance as a semiotic resource and pedagogic tool.

Game or Watch: The Effect of Interactivity on Arousal and Engagement in Video Game Media

This study examined arousal and engagement during video game play for interactive players and passive spectators who watched a recording of gameplay. We examined interactive (online) and noninteractive (offline) events in the game design. We collected psychophysiological data (eye movements, pupil dilation, heart rate) and self-reported measures (general anxiety, game experience, levels of fear). Overall, playing the game was associated with general increases in heart rate and a significant increase in the mean fixations distance. During offline events, players and spectators showed similar levels of arousal as indicated by pupil dilation. During online events, however, players showed increased pupil dilation—more so than someone who is watching the exact event without interactive control. These findings suggest that both players and spectators show increases in arousal and engagement, but there is a unique level of arousal and engagement for interactive play, as indicated by changes in heart rate and eye-tracking metrics. We discuss the application of the psychophysiological findings to recent trends in consumer media such as Twitch and YouTube, as well as the importance of game design, as it relates to human behavior.

Collaborative Video Game Design as an Act of Social Justice

This research is about bringing social justice art education into classrooms through the medium of video games and exploring the ways in which video game design can be a learning tool that can make contributions to and engage in social justice work. Drawing from a case-study research project with a small group of middle school students, through the lens of critical pedagogy informed by recent work by Dipti Desai, this project examines how learning happens through dialogue and knowledge weaving. Findings have led me to consider the potential of this type of video game design as a site of resistance and transformation in art education.

The moon, the play and the end of history: A study of lunar temporality in Cyberpunk 2077

This article aims to analyse the representation of the moon in the open-world action RPG Cyberpunk 2077, released by CD Projekt Red in 2020, and its influence on a experience of time during the play. A close reading of CD Projekt’s title suggests a non-mimetic, cinematic and subjective approach to time in the game. Additionally, in Night City, the moon does not change its appearance and remains in its full phase almost until the end of the game. It serves as a bridge between the pre-designed narrative and the ludic interactions with the open world, creating an experience unique to the medium of video games. It signalizes that the player and their avatar V have entered the diachronic, atemporal space. At the same time, the lunar temporality can be read as an emanation of cyberpunk’s frozenness-in-time and its embrace of the neo-liberal version of the end of history.

Have Video Games Evolved Enough to Teach Human Origins?

OverviewVideo games are unparalleled as an interactive medium and can serve as potential educational tools through intelligent game design and the players’ immersion in the game world (e.g., Mayo 2009; Rassalle 2021; Rubio-Campillo 2020; Winter 2021). At the same time, video games, like any media, might also misinform (e.g., Aron 2020; Dennis 2019; Emery and Reinhard 2016). In this review, I present my impressions of the game Ancestors: A Humankind Odyssey (Panache Digital Games 2019), specifically regarding its portrayal of paleoanthropological themes. In preparing this review, I played the game in its entirety and subsequently interviewed the developers in order to clarify their intentions when designing the game (Patrice Désilets and Marc-André De Blois, personal communication 2021). Using the medium of video games, is it possible to make a “perfectly” accurate simulation of human evolution? Perhaps, but that may not matter anyway. In my view, video games, as exemplified by Ancestors, have great potential for exploring the basic components of human evolution and to reach and inspire a wider public that might otherwise learn very little about the subject matter.

HOW WE ARE (NOT)COPING UNDER THE NEW GAMING PUBLIC: AN EXISTENTIAL-MATERIALIST ETHNOGRAPHY OF LIFEWORLDS WITHIN (AND AGAINST) GAMER HEGEMONY

This paper argues that existential-materialism is a useful generative tool for feminist games, media, internet, and cultural researchers to investigate how people cope (or do not cope) with the hegemony of the new gaming public as it crucially apprehends the medium of videogames as part of people’s lifeworlds embedded in materiality rather than separate from everyday life. Contributing to the emerging field of Feminist Game Studies, this research seeks to intervene into the hegemonic culture fostered and maintained by the ‘new gaming public’ which has become tied to the persistent imaginary of ‘Gamers’ as predominantly young males. Using qualitative mixed-methods to gather empirical data through fieldwork, surveys, and semi-structured interviews, this research presents a sociological examination of everyday struggles within (and against) hegemonic systems of oppression, reporting on how people are coping (or not coping) with exacerbated forms of sexism, racism, and homophobia pervasive across their digitally entangled and materially embedded lifeworlds. In the discipline of Game Studies, the methods of investigation are frequently configured around the study of play, players, or the creation of play; however, we must take greater stock of people’s lifeworlds, including non-players, non-play relationship dynamics, and non-play centric spaces in our intersubjective relations to videogames and beyond the hegemonic new gaming public.

Gaming Under Biopolitical Sovereign Power

This article argues that a spatiotemporal approach to abjection in video games helps scholars understand how confronting the abject in gameplay maps onto biopolitical conditions of living and gaming under sovereign state power. By means of a slow reading of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, this essay offers the chronotope of the abject as a flexible, interpretive tool to account for game narrative, mechanics, and iconography that map onto out-of-game lived realities. Drawing upon Kristeva’s psychoanalysis and Agamben’s philosophy of politics, I adapt Bakhtin’s chronotope of the threshold to the mutable video game medium in order to take up the threshold concepts of the abject, life/death, responsibility/ethics, and reading/writing presented in the game. Through the chronotope, I also reconsider this game’s critical response and relation to a Christian cosmology. Ultimately, the chronotope opens up a threshold space through which more just and equitable chronotopic relations might emerge.

Retro arcade games as expressive and performative interfaces

ABSTRACT This chapter explores arcade videogames as interfaces for performance in the context of digital art. When a new medium is invented it inevitably undergoes experimentation, and the hardware and software of coin-operated videogames are no exception to this rule. Performance is framed as it applies to the arcade videogame medium as a machine-driven act, and as human-machine interaction across user contexts. Retro game platforms provide a challenging set of audiovisual and interface constraints for focusing artistic output. Arcade games are accessible, immersive, and by nature of their public and competitive setting also performative. While this performance is not always deliberate on behalf of the user, it represents suspension of disbelief to act within the given play narrative. The black box nature of legacy arcade platforms as creative materials is explored through the practices of hacking, preservation, and reappropriation and reinterpretation of arcade hardware and software for creative means by independent artists and industry alike. This examination of arcade videogames as performative interfaces includes detailing the motivations, process, and results of the author’s own creative practice in arcade videogame interface art, in addition to a genealogy of arcade videogame themed artworks from media art practitioners going back to the 1980s.

Psychotherapy mediated by videogames

ABSTRACT Our purpose in this article is to propose an overview of the specificities of therapeutic mediation through video games. We analyse the clinical implications of using a video game interface and its different functionalities. The use of the video game set-up involves requirements, like adjustment between the subject, the machine and the virtual environment. With the computer game interface, we are interested in the creation and use of an avatar. From a clinical case, we show how the avatar can be invested as an interface of communication with the other and with oneself. Another specificity of digital mediation by video games concerns what is called gameplay, that is to say, the set of internal rules of the software. The description of its different functions gives points of reference to how the processes of “symbolization”, according to Roussillon, can be mobilized in the video game worlds. Then we describe the specific forms of transfer in the use of the video game medium, based on the technical aspects of the medium and its immersive properties. The description of the different components of the video game set-up highlights the therapeutic potential of this type of medium.

Bonnie Ruberg, The Queer Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games

Bonnie Ruberg, The Queer Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games Duke University Press, 2020. Pp. 288. Illustrations: 48. ISBN: 978-1-4780-0658-9 Constantine Chatzipapatheodoridis, Ph.D, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki In The Queer Games Avant-Garde: Reimagining the Medium of Video Games, Bonnie Ruberg has pieced together a series of interviews with game makers which focus on the queering of video games as well as on the creators’ personal narratives...