Category: Game studies (Page 2 of 9)

Marshall Needleman Armintor

ABSTRACT:
The last decade has seen the rise of a mini-genre of digital games colloquially known as ‘looter shooters’. Looter shooters such as the games in the Borderlands series swamp the player with guns, cash, armour and powerups to the point that an important game mechanism becomes converting the loot into liquid capital at various in-game repositories. Aside from the garish critique of late-capital overproduction, the endless fountain of ordnance and flashy goods is a ‘grind’ of its own which requires the player to perform labour to sort out the best loot. This article also formulates a theory of grind based on the mechanics of opening loot boxes. Although gacha can tempt the player to gamble on exciting mystery loot containers, by contrast, the grind is all about the predictable and the mundane, where narrative fails to appear on the horizon. The looter shooter continually upends the possibility of story, seamlessly deploying a twin grind/gacha mechanic to obviate both narrative and game, flattening it all into unlosable, yet ‘unwinnable’ work.

KEY WORDS:
accumulation, Borderlands, disaster capitalism, FPS, gacha, grind, late capital, lootboxes, looter shooter, narratology, procedurality, roguelite.

DOI:
10.34135/actaludologica.2024-7-2.80-93

Átila Gonçalves Barcelos da Silva Duval, Domingos Savio Coelho

ABSTRACT:
Gamification has been investigated in various fields, including education. And tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) provide a playful and yet safe space for unique learning experiences to take place. However, the literature on the use of TTRPGs is limited, notedly in behavioural science, and particularly in the Brazilian context. This study begins to explore the use of this type of gaming for the development of behavioural repertoires, especially socioemotional, in young people. The auto-efficacy of university students and individuals from the external community regarding their own social and emotional abilities was assessed before, during, and after their participation in a TTRPG campaign. A TTRPG system developed in a psychology research course was used, with mechanics designed to evoke social and emotional behaviours as challenges were faced. Comparative results before and during the campaign showed an increase in comfort to handle social situations and in confidence to handle emotional issues within the gaming environment. Comparisons before and after the campaign suggest a transfer of learning from the game experiences to their individual repertoires. Despite the promising results, the study addresses its limitations. Finally, the potential of TTRPGs as a psychoeducational tool was highlighted, and further investigations in different areas were suggested.

KEY WORDS:
psychoeducation, skills, socioemotional, tabletop role-playing games.

DOI:
10.34135/actaludologica.2024-7-2.52-62 

Amin Heidari

ABSTRACT:
This theoretical study explores the strategies of emoji implementation in digital games, influenced by emojis’ cute aesthetics. The effects of the Cute have been discussed from two perspectives. While some consider it as a sweet coating around the bitter pills of everyday life under capitalism, others regard it as a true mental refuge, capable of teasing, harshness and seriousness. By categorising emojis’ functions in digital games into five groups (personification, aesthetic substitution, doubling the fun, instrumentalization, and self-enhancement), it will be posited that sometimes emojis’ function is primarily rooted in their solacing power, and that at other times their role is more directly tied to reinforcing the rationale behind the capitalist market. Their role in personification (Emoji Quest), aesthetic substitution (Disney Emoji Blitz) and doubling the fun (Emoji Kitchen – DIY Emoji Mix) aligns with the comforting power of the Cute. Meanwhile, their role in instrumentalization (Emoji Clickers) and self-enhancement (Mirror Fun Emoji Face Stickers) can bolster ideological components of the capitalist market, namely greed and self-obsession.

KEY WORDS:
aesthetics, capitalism, cuteness, digital games, emoji, mobile games.

DOI:

10.34135/actaludologica.2024-7-2.38-51

Michaela Fikejzová, Martin Charvát

ABSTRACT:
The aim of the paper is to interpret the themes of dissemination of cosmic horror via the transformation of human bodies in the Bloodborne digital game. The analysis’ central operative concept is the medicalisation process introduced by Michel Foucault, when he described the birth and emergence of biopolitics at the end of the 18th century and showed how medical science, built on new paradigms, led to a specific control of the population, especially its natality and mortality. Within Bloodborne, we can see the mechanisms of medicalisation through the constitution of a powerful institution, which subsequently introduced the ritual of transfusion when experimenting with blood. However, this led to the transformation of human/mortal bodies by means of the beastly scourge, and thus to the alteration of the properties of mortal bodies, into a form of becoming-of-the-monster. As a result, medicalisation allows for the dissemination of cosmic horror and the loss of humanity. This type of analysis seeks to expand our understanding of the intersection of digital games and sociocultural phenomena at the level of representation, and their involvement in the construction of game fictional worlds.

KEY WORDS:
affect, Bloodborne, cosmic horror, inhuman, medicalisation, monster.

DOI:
10.34135/actaludologica.2024-7-2.26-37

Georgios Liapis, Ioannis Vlahavas

ABSTRACT:
Gaming technology’s potential extends beyond entertainment, providing a powerful platform for learning and evaluation, and for that, NPCs with static movement and conversation behaviours are often used. To make them more human-like and emulate actions, technologies such as artificial intelligence are utilized. This work proposes smart NPCs to imitate personality traits in a serious escape room setting. For their development, labelled personality profiles are normally required from human players to define their standard behaviours. As this is rather difficult, deep reinforcement learning is a feasible and effective alternative for generating the necessary dataset. Each NPC is an AI agent that simulates a specific personality according to the OCEAN 5 model. Our escape room environment also includes Raven-inspired intelligence tests and a custom communication system that allows the development of smart NPC teams. Analysis of gameplay data and metrics uncovered behavioural patterns affecting performance, stability, and task completion times. Such progress has potential across multiple digital game types for smart NPCs with specific personality, as well as for the creation of standard gameplay style profiles that can be used for players’ assessment.

KEY WORDS:
agents, deep reinforcement learning, machine learning, NPC, serious games.

DOI:
10.34135/actaludologica.2024-7-2.4-25

Daniela De Angeli

ABSTRACT:
Escape rooms are increasingly popular all around the world. Due to their popularity, we are also seeing more variations in concept, form, and aim. For example, nowadays we can engage with physical, digital or mixed escape rooms. Escape rooms are also developed for a range of purposes beyond entertainment, including to broadcast a message, train, and/or exchange data. However, past research on escape rooms has focused mostly on analysing physical versions or on investigating if and how escape rooms can educate players. This paper aims to overcome these gaps by exploring how escape rooms (digital, physical or mixed) can be designed for a variety of purposes beyond entertainment. Hence, this paper offers two main contributions: a definition of escape rooms with a purpose and a framework that can be used to both design and analyse escape rooms with a purpose. The framework is initially implemented based on a literature review in the fields of serious games, escape rooms and puzzle design. Its efficacy is then tested through the analysis of three escape rooms with a purpose. Following this analysis, the framework is finalised to include the following key design elements: concept/idea; stakeholders (target players and others); purpose; goal/winning condition; equipment; theme; narrative (puzzle organisation and storytelling methods); puzzle design; and evaluation.

KEY WORDS: 
design, education, escape room, game, location, methodology, narrative, serious games.

DOI:
10.34135/actaludologica.2024-7-1.108-134

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Maximos S. Theodoropoulos

ABSTRACT:
Literature on the digital games industry and gaming history has for the most part focused on the global production centres of North America, Western Europe, Japan, and, lately, China. However, in recent years, a call to research the diverse and less dominant national contexts within which digital games are produced has been addressed. In this article, we shed light on early digital game development in Greece, covering the years between 1982 and 2002. This particular region has been highly neglected by both domestic and international researchers. We approach Greek digital game development from both historical and cultural perspectives, through an investigation of how local game developers interact with a wide range of contextual facets in a complex interrelation between global and national conditions. This article argues that, in order to highlight the characteristics of early national game production cultures and digital games design, one must examine them as well under the broader cultural production ecosystem, along with the economic and institutional contexts and transformations within which digital game production takes shape.

KEY WORDS: 
cultural industries, digital games, digital games history, game design, Greece.

DOI:
10.34135/actaludologica.2024-7-1.86-106

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Miroslav Macák

ABSTRACT:
Over recent decades, digital games have been trying to find new ways to monetize their player base. The games have evolved from purely premium titles sold as a product, to repeatedly monetized free-to-play games as a service that allow players to spend limitless amount on various microtransactions. However, there are still some oddities present on the gaming market. The case study analyses the digital game Pokémon TCG Live, which does not have any form of direct monetization. The study points out how it corresponds to both the overarching Pokémon franchise, as well as the digital games industry. Its main goal is to identify its core mechanics that are traditionally connected with monetization practices, and find its position on the market in relation to other digital trading card games. Another point of interest for our study is the high level of interconnection between the printed and digital versions of the Pokémon Trading Card Game and how it impacts the online client.

KEY WORDS: 
free-to-play, media mix, monetization, Pokémon, Pokémon TCG Live, trading card games.

DOI:
10.34135/actaludologica.2024-7-1.74-85

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