SimHamlet
Half of the Danish court lies dead after a series of puzzling macabre events. It’s your job to untangle this mess and find out who did what to whom, why, when and how. To do this, you need to interrogate the gravedigger (you can do that in plain English). Apparently, he has all the information you need. The problem is that he’s a bit thick and might need some tight questioning.
Sub-Versions: Investigating Video Game Hacking Practices and Subcultures
“Hacking” is an evocative term — one that is mired in tropes that reduce a diverse range of practices into a few stereotypically malicious activities. This thesis aims to explore one hacking practice, videogame hacking, whose practitioners make unauthorized alterations to videogames after their release. Through interviews, game analysis, and reflective writing, this thesis investigates videogame hacking subcultures of production — communities of creative labour that exist in the margins of mediamaking and the fringes of the law.
Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Teaches Typing
Type! Type the boulder up the hill! Type the eagle away from your liver! Type, damn you! It’s Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing in the depths of Hades! Feel the burn of your repetitive strain injuries!
Hybrid Knowing: Preserving Physically and Digitally Entangled Traces in Hybrid Game Design
This dissertation represents the written portion of an interdisciplinary research-creation project that explores ways of studying creative practices with a focus on a kind of interactive experience called a hybrid game. It represents a contribution to the field of critical game design research. It builds on research from an extensive range of fields, including queer game design, intersectional feminist theory, critical design, critical game design, game design practice and methods, practice-based research and research-creation research, performance and theatre, live-action roleplay studies, alternative controller studies, autoethnography, and archival studies. From there, this research proposes and uses a methodology for studying the practice of creating interactive experiences that have non-standard, custom physical elements along with digital ones, especially those involving a facilitator. I make the case that autoethnography, though it has some limitations, is a well-suited method for research-creators engaged in design research.
All in a day’s work: Working-class heroes as videogame protagonists
Class depictions in videogames are prevalent, yet understudied. In this article, we analyse how the working class – particularly working-class men – have been depicted in videogames over the past 30 years. In doing so, we bring together a class- and gender-based analysis to study how narratives, representations, gameplay, and game systems construct the “working-class hero” as a central protagonist. This is done by examining eight paired examples of videogames that feature working-class characters in central roles, including janitor, fire-fighter, taxi driver, and bartender. Our analysis finds that some roles are glorified (such as firefighters), positioning their protagonists in direct conflict with white-collar settings and antagonists. However, many other roles task players with “doing their job” in the face of repetitive (and sometimes outlandish) working conditions. Through these examples, we document the portrayal of working-class videogame heroes, noting how videogames can both reinforce and subvert common media tropes.
Sidings of the Afternoon
“Each age demands its own form.” – Hannes Meyer
Inspired by Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, light works by Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, and Bauhaus urban design.
What can a filmmaker do when they are locked in during a pandemic? They make a film using a computer. With the participation of game scholars and academics from the Technoculture, Art and Games Research Centre, a town was built in Minecraft following the principles of Bauhaus. Just like the designers and artists of Bauhaus, we also need to rethink the way we use spaces, objects, cities. Beyond thinking about medical safety, as humans we need spaces that expand beyond our bodies’ physical circumference. Just like the light-shadow structures built by Moholy-Nagy, our inner worlds are bigger than the space our bodies take up. In Siding of the Afternoon, optimism for our future takes shape in a metaphor of see-through spaces and overlays, echoing the way our apartments expanded through videoconference windows connecting to and merging with other spaces all cross the world.
“Follow my train of thought, my shifting perception of the space around me, my fleeting relationships with nature and my urban cell. Seasons passing by while I stare at the same three objects in my house. What is outside, what will we find when we emerge? How will we move on when our toxic relationship with a virus that paralyzed our urban bodies end? Scathed or unscathed? Dreams, algae, shadows, flowers and knives.” – Gina Hara
The voiceover of the film was created by data-mining the most commonly used words and expressions by the players who built the buildings shown in the film.
The Garden of Earthly Delights
An online chatroom for the animals of Age of Empires II. Experience the inner lives of more than ten unique animals in a rich biodiverse environment.
Design – Milan Koerner-Safrata
Design – Neilson Koerner-Safrata
Composer – Iven Jansen
Jingle Jigsaw
Jingle Jigsaw is a single player dance/puzzle game that uses Kinect tracking and motion controls. The peculiarity about this game is that it uses no screen and relies solely on audio feedback for the gameplay. It’s a puzzle-game where the players must solve the level by assembling bits of a song in the right order using dance-like movements. This game tests the feasibility and fun of free movement play in dance games and as well as screenless digital-physical interactions.
A multiplayer version of this game is currently in development that will employ haptic devices and a physical installation using LED lights to give additional visual feedback to the player.
Created by: JoDee Allen and Adrian Holzer
See You Next Mission: An Analysis of the Super Metroid VARIA Randomizer
In order to play games in new ways and facilitate competitive races on Twitch, speedrunners and hackers have cultivated a new genre of speedrunning based on remixing classic video games.
In this paper, I investigate the histories, affordances, and legalities of the browser-based applications that lie at the heart of this practice—video game randomizers—using the Very Adaptive Randomizer of Items and Areas (VARIA) for Super Metroid (1994) as a primary case study. I begin my analysis with an overview of Super Metroid’s underlying game structures while elaborating upon its connections to broader speedrunning histories. This is followed by a summary of how randomizers function and a chronicling of VARIA’s development, in which I draw comparisons to a number of commercially released game technologies. I then perform a more deliberate analysis of VARIA using the walkthrough method, scrutinizing the application’s environment of expected use (that is, how users are encouraged to interact with it) and providing a technical walkthrough of its features (that is, a step-by-step account of its functionality).
Scaling Liveness in Participatory Experiences
SSHRC Insight grant ; Lynn Hughes (Intermedia, Studio Arts, Concordia -PI), Bart Simon (Sociology, Concordia- Co-applicant), Noah Drew (Theatre, Concordia -collaborator), Jorge Ramos (Co-Director ZU -UK theatre company, London, UK -Post Doc), Jade Maravala (ZU-UK theatre company, London, UK- collaborator), Jaakko Stenros ( University of Tampere, Finland -collaborator).
This research-creation program looks at ”liveness” across three different but neighboring practices: participatory theatre, larps (Live action role playing games) and digital-physical games (games that are digital but focus on the body and sociality rather than the screen). In each case ‘liveness’ is at the centre of the experience and is what makes it compelling, but the type of liveness is different in each case. The theatrical experience involves professional actors (mixed with participants from the general public). Digital-physical games focus on physical interaction between untrained participants, where the interaction is structured by digital technology in one way or another. The focus in larps is on larger groups of people, who are not trained as actors, acting out a complex story together -and larps rarely depend on technology to structure the experience.
Jacques the Fatalist
Jacques the Fatalist, a tale of fate, love and sex. An interactive adaptation of the XVIIIth century novel by Denis Diderot.
More info here: https://www.lablablab.net/?p=670
GameSound, Quantitative Games Analysis, and the Digital Humanities
This article relates to the 2018 CSDH/SCHN conference proceedings. This paper outlines Michael Iantorno’s and Melissa Mony’s experiences with quantitative game analysis by summarizing the first year of development of the prototype ludomusicological database GameSound. To further the discussion, this article also summarizes and analyzes the work of fellow digital humanities scholar Jason Bradshaw, who applied intriguing types of tool-based analysis to BioShock Infinite. To conclude, the paper hypothesizes where this type of research could lead in the future: both for GameSound and for other projects using similar methods and methodologies.
Destabilizing Animation: Structures of Agency and Uncanny Animacy in Animated Media
This thesis examines the destabilization of a hierarchical ordering of human vs. nonhuman agency found in digital media which present a surge of “animacy” – perceptible qualities of “agency, awareness, mobility and liveness” (Chen 2012). It examines one webtoon (The Bongcheon-Dong Ghost 2011) and two video games (Undertale 2015 and Doki Doki Literature Club 2017), which push at the boundaries of their respective media forms by channeling technical/computational forces (e.g. Javascript or memory storage) into character animation; “animation” in a doubled sense: both as the fusion of discontinuous instants afforded by the mechanical succession of images as well as the production of a social Other possessing qualities of life and agency (Silvio 2019). The result is a perception of agency (and thus animacy) that resists the categorization of both the character and the media object. Challenging dominant structures and theories of comic readership, video game play, or “database consumption” (Azuma 2009) respectively, these works argue against the control that the human operator is presumed both to have and to require as part of a framework which constitutes the works themselves as media objects. This thesis further argues that the structures critiqued and challenged by these works index a broader conceptualization of human action in the world, predicated on “animacy hierarchies” which are buttressed by binaries of human/nonhuman, animate/inanimate, moving/still, subject/object, and will/determination. By adopting an animist logic, in which images/media/characters might potentially act in unforeseen ways, these works challenge and destabilize such binaries.
Design Bleed: A Standpoint Methodology for Game Design
In this paper we develop the concept of design bleed, a standpoint approach to game design. We adopt the terminology of bleed from the Nordic community around live- action role-playing games and use it as a lens on game development. Based on our own experiences in developing two game jam games, Lovebirds and Get Your Rocks On, we identify four ‘ingredients’ for bleed-inspired game design. We develop design bleed as a community affirming design practice which can be used as a tool for carving out shared standpoints. We suggest that this is particularly productive for game designers at the margins, as it has potential to be creatively and emotionally healing but can also invite expressions for political resistance to normative game culture.
Bug Hunter. Mapping Glitches Trajectories in Game Design Space: From the Poetical to the Political
Bug Hunter is a game design research-creation project devoted to the study of glitches as labor. By documenting the production and reception of an experimental glitch-based first-person platformer, this project maps the creative forces animated by glitches conceptualized as an unavoidable design phenomenon and emergent gameplay features. The focal point of this inquiry is the conversation and productive exchange between the art of making games and the resisting yet generative materiality of the glitch. In terms of player experience, the game itself asks a political question. It wants to determine in which capacity glitches do (or do not) have the power to raise critical consciousness about 1) game design as rhetorical strategy instrumentalizing and commodifying the glitch and 2) glitching as a rhetorical tactic that can be both destructively exploitative and creatively emancipatory. Inspecting the dialectical relationship between work and play through the glitch prism forges a unique vantage point to examine how glitches can operate within the confines of game design and gameplay to drive these two domains toward radical aesthetics, experimentations, and critics. From that perspective, glitches can be analyzed as vectors of politicization holding the potential to sculpt diverse political sensibilities existing in between the neoliberal opportunist and the anarchist tinkerer. Demystifying how game design, games, and glitches partake in this ideological shaping process is on top of Bug Hunter’s agenda.
ChessMod
ChessMod is a Minecraft mod for both 1.14 and 1.15 branches of Forge-modded Minecraft, inspired by Pippin Barr’s Chesses, which adds playable chessboards to both single and multi-player versions of the game. There is a rules-based board that enforces chess rules and the visual of the board changes as the stated of the board changes.
TAG Minecraft Bloc
An often-overlooked area of player creation is the curation, configuration, customization, and synchronization of mods into collections called modpacks. In the case of Minecraft this represents a significant aspect of the modding community allowing for less technically skilled participation and yet encompassing a high degree of know-how and creativity.
There almost 90, 000 mods listed in the curseforge repository and over 1600 pages of modpacks organized into a variety of mod and gameplay genres that emphasize different styles or play, different kinds of worlds. The top ten modpacks share more than 15million downloads between them. With extensive tweaking these packs can come to embody the narrative and gameplay visions of the modpack makers becoming discrete game experiences in their own right.
We refer to this kind of player-centric design practice as mod choreography a term which evokes the knowledge and skills of the choreography in bringing together disparate elements in the creation of a new experience. There is art and craft to mod choreography just as with modding and remains one of the most accessible pathways for players to shape play experiences for themselves and others.
Cloud Bodies
CLOUD BODIES is a 6dof VR experience using volumetric capture of two dancers merging with the point clouds of photo-scanned landscapes I photographed around where I grew up on Vancouver Island. The virtual bodies of the dancers morph with topographical scans from the natural world. Geometric metadata gathered from real environments are processed into point clouds, which are then reconstructed into virtual environments. A similar process of volumetric capture records the movement of bodies in x-y-z space. The use of photo-scanning to generate 3D virtual spaces signals to a hyper-archive of the future. What is the body’s relationship to these virtual and physical spaces?
Growing the otome game market: Fan labor and otome game communities online
Enjeux économiques et industriels de l’animation pornographique française
L’animation pornographique et érotique commerciale semble avoir toujours existé sur les écrans français. Son histoire commence par les court-métrages d’animation destinés aux maisons closes du début du XXe siècle, en passant par les grands succès commerciaux de longs-métrages dans les années 1970 tels que La Honte de la jungle ou Fritz le chat, jusqu’à la diffusion estivale en 2018 de la série d’animation française Peepoodo and the Super Fuck Friends. Pour autant, cette production subit une marginalisation économique, juridique et morale, limitant sa distribution. À partir d’une rétrospective historique puis d’une étude de cas, cet article se propose d’apporter une première réponse à la question de savoir si une industrie de l’animation pornographique – et non pas seulement un ensemble de contenus cinématographiques et audiovisuels – a la possibilité d’exister dans la France des années 2010.