From #Gamergate to the 2016 election, to the daily experiences of marginalized perspectives, gaming is entangled with mainstream cultures of systematic exploitation and oppression. Whether visible in ...the persistent color line that shapes the production, dissemination, and legitimization of dominant stereotypes within the industry itself, or in the dehumanizing representations often found within game spaces, many video games perpetuate injustice and mirror the inequities and violence that permeate society as a whole. Drawing from groundbreaking research on counter and oppositional gaming and from popular games such as World of Warcraft and Tomb Raider, Woke Gaming examines resistance to problematic spaces of violence, discrimination, and microaggressions in gaming culture. The contributors of these essays seek to identify strategies to detox gaming culture and orient players and gamers toward progressive ends. From Anna Anthropy�s Keep Me Occupied to Momo Pixel�s Hair, Nah, video games can reveal the power and potential for marginalized communities to resist, and otherwise challenge dehumanizing representations inside and outside of game spaces. In a moment of #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and efforts to transform current political realities, Woke Gaming illustrates the power and potential of video games to foster change and become a catalyst for social justice.
Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live provides a much-needed theoretical framework for examining deviant behavior and deviant bodies within one of the largest virtual gaming communities-Xbox Live. ...Previous research on video games has focused mostly on violence and examining violent behavior resulting from consuming this medium. This limited scope has skewed criminologists' understanding of video games and video game culture. Xbox Live has proven to be more than just a gaming platform for users. It has evolved into a multimedia entertainment outlet for more than 20 million users. This book examines the nature of social interactions within Xbox Live, which are often riddled with deviant behavior, including but not limited to racism and sexism. The text situates video games within a hegemonic framework deploying whiteness and masculinity as the norm. The experiences of the marginalized bodies are situated within the framework of deviance as they fail to conform to the hegemonic norm and become victims of racism, sexism, and other types of harassment.
Atmospheres are everywhere: at the workplace, in the soccer stadium, in front of the crackling fireplace. They shape our everyday language and have become quite natural expressions of how we find ...ourselves in certain environments and how we feel about them. Their influence is far-reaching: aesthetic atmospheres are closely linked to a contemporary experience-oriented historical culture whose products and practices claim to establish an immediate contact with the past. With ›Vergangenheitsatmosphären‹ Felix Zimmermann offers for the first time a term to adequately describe this striving for immediacy. By means of in-depth analyses of the digital games »Anno 1800« (2019), »Assassin's Creed Syndicate« (2015), and »Dishonored: The Mask of Wrath« (2012), the term is contoured and the productivity of atmospheric research trained on theories and methods of public history, game studies, and phenomenology is demonstrated.
Playing Along Miller, Kiri
2012, 2012-02-09, 2012-01-12
eBook
This book is about play, performance, and participatory culture in the digital age. It shows how music, video games, and social media are bridging virtual and visceral experience, creating dispersed ...communities who forge meaningful connections by “playing along” with popular culture. Miller reveals how digital media are brought to bear in the transmission of embodied knowledge: how a Grand Theft Auto player uses a virtual radio to hear with her avatar’s ears; how a Guitar Hero player channels the experience of a live rock performer; and how an amateur guitar student translates a two-dimensional, pre-recorded online music lesson into three-dimensional physical practice and an intimate relationship with a distant teacher. Through ethnographic case studies, Miller demonstrates that our everyday experiences with interactive digital media are gradually transforming our understanding of musicality, creativity, play, and
participation.
Uncertainty in Games Costikyan, Greg
2013, 2019-06-20, 2015-01-30, ♭2013, 2013
eBook
How uncertainty in games—from Super Mario Bros. to Rock/Paper/Scissors —engages players and shapes play experiences. In life, uncertainty surrounds us. Things that we thought were good for us turn ...out to be bad for us (and vice versa); people we thought we knew well behave in mysterious ways; the stock market takes a nosedive. Thanks to an inexplicable optimism, most of the time we are fairly cheerful about it all. But we do devote much effort to managing and ameliorating uncertainty. Is it any wonder, then, asks Greg Costikyan, that we have taken this aspect of our lives and transformed it culturally, making a series of elaborate constructs that subject us to uncertainty but in a fictive and nonthreatening way? That is: we create games. In this concise and entertaining book, Costikyan, an award-winning game designer, argues that games require uncertainty to hold our interest, and that the struggle to master uncertainty is central to their appeal. Game designers, he suggests, can harness the idea of uncertainty to guide their work. Costikyan explores the many sources of uncertainty in many sorts of games—from Super Mario Bros. to Rock/Paper/Scissors , from Monopoly to CityVille , from FPS Deathmatch play to Chess . He describes types of uncertainty, including performative uncertainty, analytic complexity, and narrative anticipation. And he suggest ways that game designers who want to craft novel game experiences can use an understanding of game uncertainty in its many forms to improve their designs.
Best Before James, Newman
2012, 20120821, 2012-08-21
eBook
Despite record sales and an ever-growing global industry, the simple fact is that videogames are disappearing.
Most obviously, the physical deterioration of discs, cartridges, consoles and ...controllers means that the data and devices will crumble to dust and eventually will be lost forever. However, there is more to the disappearance of videogames than plastic corrosion and bit rot. Best Before examines how the videogames industry's retail, publishing, technology design, advertising and marketing practices actively produce obsolescence, wearing out and retiring old games to make way for the always new, just out of reach, 'coming soon' title and 'next generation' platform.
Set against the context of material deterioration and the discursive production of obsolescence, Best Before examines the conceptual and practical challenges faced within the nascent field of game preservation. Understanding videogames as rich, complex and mutable texts and experiences that are supported and sustained by cultures of gameplay and fandom, Best Before considers how - and even whether - we might preserve and present games for future generations.
Want to design your own video games? Let expert Scott Rogers show you how! If you want to design and build cutting-edge video games but aren't sure where to start, then the SECOND EDITION of the ...acclaimed Level Up! is for you! Written by leading video game expert Scott Rogers, who has designed the hits Pac Man World, Maximo and SpongeBob Squarepants, this updated edition provides clear and well-thought out examples that forgo theoretical gobbledygook with charmingly illustrated concepts and solutions based on years of professional experience. Level Up! 2ndEdition has been NEWLY EXPANDED to teach you how to develop marketable ideas, learn what perils and pitfalls await during a game's pre-production, production and post-production stages, and provide even more creative ideas to serve as fuel for your own projects including: * Developing your game design from the spark of inspiration all the way to production * Learning how to design the most exciting levels, the most precise controls, and the fiercest foes that will keep your players challenged * Creating games for mobile and console systems – including detailed rules for touch and motion controls * Monetizing your game from the design up * Writing effective and professional design documents with the help of brand new examples Level Up! 2nd Edition is includes all-new content, an introduction by David " God of War " Jaffe and even a brand-new chili recipe –making it an even more indispensable guide for video game designers both "in the field" and the classroom. Grab your copy of Level Up!2nd Edition and let's make a game!
Video games have long been seen as the exclusive territory of young, heterosexual white males. In a media landscape dominated by such gamers, players who do not fit this mold, including women, people ...of color, and LGBT people, are often brutalized in forums and in public channels in online play. Discussion of representation of such groups in games has frequently been limited and cursory. In contrast,Gaming at the Edgebuilds on feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity and draws on qualitative audience research methods to make sense of how representation comes to matter.
InGaming at the Edge, Adrienne Shaw argues that video game players experience race, gender, and sexuality concurrently. She asks: How do players identify with characters? How do they separate identification and interactivity? What is the role of fantasy in representation? What is the importance of understanding market logic? In addressing these questions Shaw reveals how representation comes to matter to participants and offers a perceptive consideration of the high stakes in politics of representation debates.
Putting forth a framework for talking about representation, difference, and diversity in an era in which user-generated content, individualized media consumption, and the blurring of producer/consumer roles has lessened the utility of traditional models of media representation analysis, Shaw finds new insight on the edge of media consumption with the invisible, marginalized gamers who are surprising in both their numbers and their influence in mainstream gamer culture.
Throughout the 1990s, artists experimented with game engine technologies to disrupt our habitual relationships to video games. They hacked, glitched, and dismantled popular first-person shooters such ...as Doom (1993) and Quake (1996) to engage players in new kinds of embodied activity. In Unstable Aesthetics: Game Engines and the Strangeness of Art Modding, Eddie Lohmeyer investigates historical episodes of art modding practices—the alteration of a game system’s existing code or hardware to generate abstract spaces—situated around a recent archaeology of the game engine: software for rendering two and three-dimensional gameworlds. The contemporary artists highlighted throughout this book—Cory Arcangel, JODI, Julian Oliver, Krista Hoefle, and Brent Watanabe, among others –- were attracted to the architectures of engines because they allowed them to explore vital relationships among abstraction, technology, and the body. Artists employed a range of modding techniques—hacking the ROM chips on Nintendo cartridges to produce experimental video, deconstructing source code to generate psychedelic glitch patterns, and collaging together surreal gameworlds—to intentionally dissect the engine’s operations and unveil illusions of movement within algorithmic spaces. Through key moments in game engine history, Lohmeyer formulates a rich phenomenology of video games by focusing on the liminal spaces of interaction among system and body, or rather the strangeness of art modding.
Interviews with female gamers about structural sexism
across the gaming landscape
When the Nintendo Wii was released in 2006, it ushered forward a
new era of casual gaming in which video games ...appealed to not just
the stereotypical hardcore male gamer, but also to a much broader,
more diverse audience. However, the GamerGate controversy six years
later, and other similar public incidents since, laid bare the
internalized misogyny and gender stereotypes in the gaming
community. Today, even as women make up nearly half of all gamers,
sexist assumptions about the what and how of women's gaming are
more actively enforced.
In Gaming Sexism, Amanda C. Cote explores the video game
industry and its players to explain this contradiction, how it
affects female gamers, and what it means in terms of power and
gender equality. Across in-depth interviews with women-identified
gamers, Cote delves into the conflict between diversification and
resistance to understand their impact on gaming, both casual and
"core" alike. From video game magazines to male reactions to female
opponents, she explores the shifting expectations about who gamers
are, perceived changes in gaming spaces, and the experiences of
female gamers amidst this gendered turmoil. While Cote reveals
extensive, persistent problems in gaming spaces, she also
emphasizes the power of this motivated, marginalized audience, and
draws on their experiences to explore how structural inequalities
in gaming spaces can be overcome. Gaming Sexism is a
well-timed investigation of equality, power, and control over the
future of technology.
