Video Game Production Research Articles

Le producteur de jeux vidéo comme interface. Un exemple d’application de la narratologie de Greimas à l’analyse de la production de jeux video

Malgré le développement des recherches sur les industries créatives en général et sur l’industrie du jeu vidéo en particulier, les modalités de production au sein des groupes de projet des studios de développement de jeux vidéo demeurent encore peu connues. De quelles manières des travailleurs parfois très spécialisés dans leur domaine peuvent communiquer de façon à atteindre à un certain consensus lors du processus de production ? À l’aide de la théorie de la narrativité élaborée par Greimas et utilisée dans des recherches en communication organisationnelle, nous montrons comment un producteur de jeu vidéo chargé de gérer un groupe de projet produit un métanarratif englobant les divers narratifs et les divers points de vue de ses collaborateurs. Ce dispositif méthodologique nous permet de rendre visibles des modes de management souple de la créativité et de relativiser la dichotomie art/argent. Malgré son ambiguïté, ce métanarratif privilégie certaines conceptions de production du jeu vidéo.

Public Policy and the Media

This paper will consider the impact of communications technologies on global peace and non violence by examining how these technologies are addressed in public policy on culture, education, health and safety. Discussion will focus on how they are employed in advertising industries to target children; ways in which special effects in the production of films, television programs, video and computer games fuel the use of violence as a form of entertainment and how this is resulting in increasing evidence of collective desensitization in communities and schools throughout North America.Manifestation of these trends is at odds with educational goals that discourage the use of violence as a form of conflict resolution, materialistic, consumer driven value systems, and unhealthy eating habits. It will be demonstrated that unimpeded proliferation of popular culture as entertainment for profit driven purposes, laced with themes of sex and violence because they sell well on a global market and translate easily into any language, will have to change, if we are to encourage transformation and sustainable development on either a local, national or global basis.Massive export of popular culture commodities by the U.S., long the world's leader in this context, has more than quadrupled in the past two decades with content increasingly coarse and violent. This is having an international as well as local and national impact. The ingrained belief that what is good for show business is good for America's image is not only gravely eroding the country's reputation around the world, but accelerating a culture of violence that is, from an educational, health and environmental perspective, at odds with efforts for a paradigm shift that will move us forward, as a species, towards social justice and a green Earth.

Balancing the Tensions Between Rationalization and Creativity in the Video Games Industry

This paper investigates the forces that influence creativity in the video games industry. We adopt a qualitative approach to guide the development of grounded theory across multiple levels of analysis, including the industry (consisting of multiple actors), organizational, and individual creator levels. Our study shows that business and production interests currently drive the rationalization of video game production. There is a maturing trend, with product designs becoming well established as genres, and consumers and publishers desiring incrementally innovative games. This leads publishers to focus on acquiring intellectual property, and publishers and studios alike to make incrementally innovative sequels. The increasing complexity of products leads to further rationalization in their development. However, the need to satisfy consumers' continually evolving tastes and game developers' inclinations to be creative also creates tensions with these rational forces. Different actors balance these tensions differently. Studios may seek to balance these by shifting between more and less innovative products, by creating original intellectual property to increase their bargaining power with publishers, and by iterating and repositioning products during development to adapt them to the market. Publishers may enhance their portfolio by hiring highly creative designers into their stable. New products are created through combinative creativity, that is, the recombination of existing ideas from different sources into new products. The connection of combinative mechanisms with the balancing behavior at the firm level provides a means for understanding the evolution of innovative products and, therefore, industries.

Making metadata work in digital asset management and video game production

This article focuses on Digital Asset Management (DAM) and the metadata used to support and strengthen the asset to which it is related. A DAM solution involves both technical and human components, most notably the subjective understanding of the rich media assets being used and the creation and application of metadata for those assets. Making metadata work in DAM means investing in the construction of a metadata model, a container of descriptive elements about the assets, that enables the users to search for and retrieve the assets needed for their work. The production of video games will serve as the backdrop to this discussion; specifically, the unique digital assets used in a game's creation with some examples from Electronic Arts. Furthermore, this will provide the setting for an analysis of how DAM may be useful for the description, identification and retrieval of those digital assets so that they may be made accessible. Metadata must not be seen as a static indicator of knowledge, but rather as a fluid model that is always subject for review and for change in its ongoing support of the rich media digital assets in the DAM system.

Layering and heterogeneity as design principles for animated embedded agents

Animation of three-dimensional digital characters is still a major hurdle in the production of films and video games. This paper analyzes the technology of autonomous embedded agents as a solution to this challenge. Multi-layering and heterogeneity are chosen as desirable principles for the design of digital characters. The FreeWill+ animation framework has been developed with these principles in mind. Its general structure as well as some of its special features are presented. Automatic action acquisition based on the Q-learning technique has been presented as an extended example of the system capabilities.

Playability in Action Videogames: A Qualitative Design Model

In the 1990s, the videogame industry has managed to become the fastest growing segment of the entertainment industry in America. However, only a very low number of videogame products manage to cover the costs of production and generate earnings. According to traditional marketing wisdom, players' preferences are a core issue in creating successful products, and the game design process is crucial for guaranteeing players' satisfaction. Then, an important question arises: What do players want in videogames? The purpose of this work is to propose a game design reference that directly mirrors players' preference, shaped as a qualitative model based on empirical data gathered during playing sessions. The model describes the main elements that, according to players' opinions, determine the playability of action videogames; the model proposes design guidelines that are the conceptualization of players' preferences. Therefore, the model helps game designers to understand the elements that must be dealt with to make better games. Besides the operational relevance of the model, the research methodology described in this work is an example of how a qualitative approach such as the grounded theory paradigm can be applied to solve a software specification problem directly focusing on end-users.

The Relationship between Video Game Characteristics and Player Ability

Video game production has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry. While consumer demand for video games remains strong, an explanation for the demand is not so clear. It is likely, however, that a user's degree of “engagement” with the game is relevant. An Engagement Questionnaire (EQ) was recently introduced to capture those dimensions that determine a user's engagement while playing a video game. The goal was to develop a metric that could be applied to a broad range of games and players. The focus of the present study was to determine to what extent there were systematic differences between gamers of high-and low-ability with respect to the way they rated their most and least favorite video games. Specifically, we were interested in identifying whether ratings along the five factors of the EQ were related to self-reported video-game ability. The results of the analyses indicated that difference scores between favorite and least favorite games on four of the five factors predicted self-reported ability. The findings allow us to define more clearly what high- and low-ability gamers think is important in video games.

Hollywood, in the Information Age: Beyond the Silver Screen by Janet Wasko

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 655 tion provides valuable insight into the relation between the ideologi­ cal context in which computing technology is introduced and the actual experiences of computer users. Janet Abbate Dr. Abbate is a postdoctoral fellow at the IEEE/Rutgers Center for the History of Electrical Engineering. She is writing a book on the history of the Internet, to be published by MIT Press. Hollywood, in the Information Age: Beyond the Silver Screen. By Janet Wasko. Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1995. Pp. x+308; illustra­ tions, tables, notes, index. $40.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). Hollywood in the Information Age examines contemporary Holly­ wood in the broadest sense of that term, including motion picture and television production, broadcast television, cable television, home video, and future means of video distribution and presenta­ tion.Janet Wasko, an associate professor in the School ofJournalism and Communications at the University of Oregon, seeks to describe how Hollywood corporations have moved from monopolizing film production and distribution to competing for control of (and domi­ nating) new video media, the world of “500 channels.” She also examines Hollywood’s role in the production and sale of video games, toys, trading cards, and a myriad of other cultural products. After two chapters on the state of Hollywood and its means of production, Wasko devotes single chapters to cable TV and other wired technologies for delivery of video products, the innovation and diffusion of home video, changes in theatrical motion picture exhibition, the commercialization of the film industry by Madison Avenue, and the recent successes ofHollywood in the realm of inter­ national distribution. A conclusion, extensive notes, and an index follow. To her credit, Wasko has stuffed her book with nearly two dozen tables and nearly a score of figures. These rich sources of informa­ tion apdy summarize shares of revenues, sales of new products, and patterns of corporate takeover. There are but four photographs in Hollywood in the Information Age, none from a motion picture or televi­ sion production. Instead we see a shuttered drive-in and movie pal­ ace, Ted Turner in repose, satellite dishes at a cable system facility, and a Blockbuster Video store. For a traditional photo-laden movie book, turn elsewhere. For other, more serious reasons, potential readers might also turn to other scholarship. Hollywood in the Information Agepromises a look to the future, but the book is actually a work of contemporary his­ tory. Readers of Technology and Culture will find Wasko’s discussions of the origins, dynamics, and consequences of technical change somewhat naive. For example, her introductory chapter, in which 656 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE the structure of the book is laid out, contains not a single endnote. We find the Frankfurt school mentioned on page 4, but no discus­ sion (or citation) of how to use that theory follows. The theoretical basis of Hollywood in the Information Age is defined by what Wasko does not accept; in only four single sentences does she lay out her approach. This is a work of Marxist political economy. We read lament after lament about the skill that Hollywood owners and managers have used to get and maintain corporate power. Some may admire how Hollywood has taken over each new mass entertainment technology. Wasko does not. But she seems frustrated at explaining why. For example, it is only after twenty-eight pages on the major and minor Hollywood corporate operations that we learn, in a mere 200 words, why Wasko thinks “the Big Boys are Big”: they are diversified. Moreover, in an analysis of contemporary Hollywood the reader expects, rightly, a book that is up-to-date. But that is difficult in a world where events are changing so rapidly, and university presses take their time. The cutoff here is early 1993, before Viacom had taken over Paramount and Matsushita sold, at a deep discount, MCA/Universal. Wasko’s conclusion that “MCA was certainly a plum for Matsushita” (p. 63) seems quaint in light of the subsequent near giveaway of MCA by the giantJapanese electrical manufacturer. Matsushita lost billions of dollars in its five-year foray into Holly­ wood. In a world where vast new alliances between Hollywood and...