World Of Video Games Research Articles

Children’s literature as a springboard to place‐based embodied learning

Globalization makes living in the world more complex. Many children live as social cyborgs attached to the digital spaces of the virtual play worlds of television, video and computer games rather than connected to their own local places. The impact of this change may well be that children lack acquaintance with their local places and may never develop the ecological literacy or the positive attitudes toward place that is so crucial to its sustainability. This paper presents an autoethnographic study of a third grade class engaged in reading picture story books that featured place‐based settings in partnership with embodied learning textually and visually through art, photography, poetry, story writing and environmental journals of class field experiences along their local river valley. Combining place‐based education with social constructivist pedagogy fostered places for learning for children to create a knowing that they, too, can take action for places where they live throughout their lives.

The Design of Virtual Space

Videogames are the starting point for the general understanding of virtual space. (Grove & Williams, 1998). Academics use videogames to describe virtual space (Murray, 1997; Nitsche, 2009). Others argue that there is no understanding of virtual space, only a loose collection of articles connected by the issue of realism in rendering or behavior (Manovich, 2001). These statements point to a lack of understanding of virtual space on its own terms and set the stage for this document. This is a design document, written by a designer of virtual spaces. Its purpose is to provocatively explore user experience and task completion as forces that influence the design of virtual space. This is not a conventional research paper. The complex relationships of narrative, realism, motivation, usability, and human computer interaction (HCI) are unpacked in the videogame World of Warcraft through a detailed examination of travel. It is proposed that the exploration of travel in a videogame can provide a toolkit of ideas for the application of narrative, realism, motivation, and usability in virtual space. Travel can inform designers on issues of user experience and task completion in virtual spaces

A Fable: or, how to recognize a narrative when you play one

This article marshals various critical models to demonstrate to both ludologists and narratologists that their respective methodologies are not antinomic. Through an analysis of the narrative properties of two video games in the action-adventure genre, Fable and Fable II, this article exposes commonalities between traditional narrative modes and electronic multimodal narratives. Nonetheless, this article's consideration of possible worlds semantics destabilizes established tenets of mimetic theory and points to a significant distinction between traditional narrative worlds and the virtual worlds of video games.

Politicization of the On-Line Worlds as a Problematic of a Private Space Publicized: Comparative Study of MMORPG and Second Life

Virtual worlds constitutes new spaces where millions of users meet to discuss or play, like the videogame World of Warcraft. (8 million subscribers). These universes are distinguished from chats, forum, blog; instantaneousness and interactivity are the main values, with miscellaneous expression forms: writing, speaking, graphical art creation, and video broadcast, even political space buildings.Editors present these leisure places as non-political worlds, according to the user agreement, but according to users appropriation we can observe politicization attempts through multiples ways: fleeting political speech act (two players discussing, public speech), community life activism, political parties' institutionalization. Nevertheless speeches and acts plurality traduce a real-life preoccupations contamination, focused on social and political problematic. Then, on-line political discussions appear clearly in electoral periods, some French political parties as Front National and Parti Socialiste have set up general quarter in the persistent world Second Life. According to the previous paradox of politicization of explicit non political worlds, we will expose investigation methods through on-line world (participating observation, interviews, content analysis) then we will try to reveal structural divergences between a game and a persistent world. Our first results will be focused on political discussion modes (hard talks, short-time period, solipsism and self representation) that will lead us to a typology of different politicization ways.So this analysis would focus on criticizing Jongen Habermas or Richard Sennett public space theories, especially dealing with dichotomy between private and public sphere. Because of individualization process, communication ideology and game norms industrialized, MMOG as a private space which is publicized differs from traditional form.

On My Mind: Mathematics through the Eye of the Camera

Many movies include a scene or two containing mathematics content to achieve various effects, such as to show the importance of education, to emphasize a point the filmmaker wants to clarify, and to add humor. many of us have been dazzled by the complexity of mathematics in A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting. I know the level of mathematics is beyond the middle school years, but the passion for the subject matter might inspire some students. In Rain Man, Dustin hoffman plays the autistic brother of Tom cruise and proves that he can calculate square roots and do complex decimal computations in his head. These scenes hint at the importance of mental-math skills, a concept that we need to emphasize in the middle grades. It also shows that calculations can be done accurately and rapidly, even when the person doing the calculation has no understanding of what the numbers mean. middle school students are used to a world of television and video games and learn a lot from these visual aids. So why not use films to help us teach concepts or make students smile about mathematics?

Déjouer le jeu. Réappropriation et détournement de l'univers de jeux vidéo dans la création contemporaine

In the era of cyber culture and collective intelligence, video game establishes itself more and more nearby the artistic disciplines historically settled. Its aesthetics and its way of revisiting the real reveal a new “formal representation” and an increasing number of contemporary artists use it as an expression mean. The spatial development of video games is comparable to contemporary installations; it presents itself as a distinctive space recreated into a public or a domestic dimension. Video games, like installations, intensify the feeling of displacement or ubiquity that any kind of show may provide. The installations using video games mechanism make us pass from the idea of “ esthetique relationnelle” introduced by Nicolas Bourriaud to a participative aesthetics where the spectator takes the place of the protagonist. The analyze of different works: “Vigilance 1.0” of Martin Le Chevalier, Kolkoz in “Hong Kong 2002”, “Nekropolis” of Tobias Bernstrup, and “Sam” of Palle Torsson shows some examples of reappropriation and diversion of the video games universe in contemporary art. Those examples allow us to see in a new way the world of video games. The contemporary artists appropriate this form of expression to make new plastic and participative explorations far of from the first play and entertainment finality. In these pieces the role of the spectator in the device is fundamental and it produces a total experience mobilizing at the same time: the vision, the hearing and the touch. The video game represents a post-modern form where contemporary artists may express the idea of “Gesamtkunstwerk” evoked by Richard Wagner in the second half of the XIX century with his theory of the “complete art work piece”. We are witnessing a turning point in the way of experimenting life which consists in interrogating the body into space and time in synaesthesia. Contemporary artist seem indisputably to make their own the Duchamp's words: “the viewers are the ones who make the painting”, the art of work remains unfinished until the spectator hasn't received it, the viewer turns up into an actor in a spectacular dynamics and his relation to the work of art goes beyond a simple passive contemplation.

Not a Hater, Just Keepin' It Real

Notwithstanding the presence of extreme racialized tropes within the world of video games, public discourses continue to focus on questions of violence, denying the importance of games in maintaining the hegemonic racial order. Efforts to exclude race (and intersections with gender, nation, and sexuality) from public discussions through its erasure and the acceptance of larger discourses of colorblindness contribute to a problematic understanding of video games and their significant role in contemporary social, political, economic, and cultural organization. How can one truly understand fantasy, violence, gender roles, plot, narrative, game playability, virtual realities, and the like without examining race, racism, and/or racial stratification—one cannot. This article challenges game studies scholars to move beyond simply studying games to begin to offer insight and analysis into the importance of race and racialized tropes within virtual reality and the larger implications of racist pedagogies of video games in the advancement of White supremacy.

Extending cyberspace

In the current market many game developers and publishers treat the cellular phone as just another platform to which they can port a console game; they ignore the exciting new possibilities cellular phones provide via their inherent ability to maintain connectivity while on the move. One possibility is to extend the virtual world of traditional video games through location-based information, which allows users to play games that incorporate knowledge of their physical location and landscape, and then provides them with the ability to interact with both real and virtual objects within that space. However, if such games are to become pervasive and if developers want their efforts to escape the bounds of the research laboratory, they must address the nature of the cellular environment, the precision of the location-based technologies in their region, and the present and likely future capabilities of cellular handsets. To aid innovative game development we draw together many fragmented sources of information for an assessment of technologies, and implementations of cellular location-based games. Further, we discuss practical mechanisms for producing a finer degree of location granularity, both through future technology and our novel implementations of systems that augment location-sensing. The first mechanism uses Bluetooth, which is already a pervasive component of mobile phones feature sets, and can be implemented without the need for client side software. The second implements the use of a future pervasive technology, RFID tags, now that commercial cellular handsets that incorporate RFID readers have emerged.

Terminator or Super Mario: Human/Computer Hybrids, Actual and Virtual

: Is a human/computer hybrid feasible: If so, in what ways would such hybridization affect our concept of what it means to be human? There are two forms of such hybridization, the actual and the virtual. Actual hybridization involves the implantation of mechanical devices in the human body. In actual hybridization the computer comes to us and to our body to enhance our functioning in our world. In virtual hybridization we go to the computer, projecting our minds into the world of cyberspace and being formed there. Perhaps the most common form of virtual hybridization is the immersion our children experience in the world of video games. Both forms of hybridization encourage us to think of ourselves only in terms of function, just when most of our theologians find that humans reflect the image of God through our relationships. This emphasis on function best serves the military, but leaves us in the theological community with a dissatisfying concept of what it means to be human.

Computer Games and Narrative Progression

Computer Games and Narrative Progression

Introduction: Special issue on ‘shared knowledge’

This paper explores threats as they appear in children's everyday dispute interactions. The main purpose is to extend understandings of children's interactions and disputes in order to show how young boys construct threats in pretend frames within a classroom peer dispute by drawing upon the resources of the video game world and a verbally constructed fight. The conceptual and methodological frameworks underpinning the analysis are conversation analysis and Goffman's concept of frame. The analysis focuses on one episode that illustrates how the boys, in the absence of the teacher, invoke, share and switch frames within the dispute. Using pretence, they posit threats and build attack strategies in a video game and in mass fight frames, even though they are in a classroom and unable to complete the threats at that moment. The analysis points out that the pretend threats are different to other sorts of threats and escalate the dispute sequence. Threats in the pretend frame, as in the video game frame, are also opportunities to bring activities outside school into the classroom. Hence, this study also looks at how video game playing is used as a resource when not playing. The implications for broader educational practices exemplify how language and social interaction function in children's peer interactions by uncovering the multifaceted aspects of peer culture, friendship and children's agentive roles in maintaining and creating social and moral order in different realities.