Category: Game studies (Page 1 of 6)

ABSTRACT: The study deals with content media convergence, i.e. the fragmentation of media into different forms and formats in order to reach new audiences. The main thesis is that this form of convergence, which has been observable in the media segment over the last decades, has in recent years started to be deliberately and purposefully implemented in the digital games segment as well, and game studios are trying to reach audiences that are not players of the original game from which the media content converged through the creation of media content. However, not in order to attract them to play the game, which could be considered a classic marketing strategy, but in order to create a narrative and intermedia universe from which each converged part can have a separate audience, for which it is not necessary to know the whole universe. The study proves this through a case study of the game League of Legends by the game studio Riot Games and on the contents that converged from the game, through a discursive content analysis in the categories of gaming segment, audio-visual contents, music, social networks and other contents. The study concludes that the analysis supports the thesis that League of Legends converges and is able to fully reach non-gamer audiences.

KEY WORDS: audience, convergence of digital games, cross-media, digital games, League of Legends, media convergence.

ABSTRACT: The horror genre can be found both in books and movies to shock and scare the audience. In digital games, players have to survive, they try to progress while they have to overcome frightening obstacles, otherwise they cannot be successful. The paper analyses three main topics: spatiality (where closed, open and looping spaces are in the centre), focalization (based on G. Genette’s term., We shows how the different angles could contribute to the narrative and what unique methods exist), and temporality (where traumatic experience and looping time is at the focal point, and E. Husserl’s protentions and retention terms will be important as well). We also argue that these games are unusual if we take a look at M. Csíkszentmihályi’s skills-challenges diagram and see if they fit in the flow zone. The paper aims to extend our understanding of horror games.

KEY WORDS: flow, focalization, horror, protention, retention, spatiality, temporality.

ABSTRACT: Nulltopia is disjunction in space, the non-space between one space and another. Such disjunction becomes important in the ontology of imaginary worlds, whose thresholds are not fully traversable. Some knowledge and some exigencies transfer across the boundaries of an image, but some do not, remaining asymmetrically bound, extant only on one side – potentiating scenarios like starving while eating Minecraft cookies. This theoretical study presents an exercise in the metaphysics of digital games, defining nulltopia in reference to dreams, the theatrical proscenium, vehicle windows, video screens, loudspeakers, and interactive consoles; and contextualizing nulltopia relative to immersion. Developing from a syncretic combination of movement and depiction, the video screen extends a technology of imagination that already existed in component forms. Partially separating slow reality from fast imaginary, nulltopia affords both discourse and addiction to the ‘etiolated actual’, in contrast to an imagined, perfectly immersive, ‘society without screens’,the bounds of whose world become imperceptible.

KEY WORDS: digital game, imagination, immersion, nulltopia, ontology, perception of motion, space, virtual reality.

ABSTRACT: This study focuses on aspects of media pedagogy and philosophical anthropology in digital games and seeks to answer the question as to why we play digital games. Digital play is viewed as an aesthetic and cultural phenomenon according to I. Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful and is interpreted, analysed, and compared with the anthropological dimension of play. According to I. Kant, the main element of beauty is disinterested liking. Digital games have been observed in such a judgment of taste. We will observe the phenomenon of play based on I. Kant’s understanding of the aesthetic concept of play and C. Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology. The paper presents the phenomenon of play from the aspect of aesthetic pedagogy, but also asks why we like games and what is aesthetic in them that causes pleasure. The aim of this study is to analyse the phenomenon of games from the context of digital games and to show how different anthropological, philosophical, and pedagogical aspects mutually complement and intertwine. The research question of why we play digital games opens the possibility for new reflections and understandings of the world of games, the concept of beauty and the meaning of games for humans. The complexity and multidimensionality of the game phenomenon is also observed according to E. Morin’s aesthetics in which the artistic and aesthetic dimension of digital play is discussed. The concept of play is philosophically relevant, and through the study we approach J. Huizinga’s aspect of the seriousness of culture and E. Fink’s play of the world. In the aspects of social life such as metaphors and imagination, play imposes itself as communication. The true character of the game is manifested in the self-pleasure of relieving the individual, but also in the imagination and beauty that the game provides. The game, as such, represents an aesthetic attitude towards life and it is at its core an imitation in the space of the imaginary.

KEY WORDS: digital game, game aesthetics, game structure, game world, media pedagogy.