Material Game Studies: A Philosophy of Analogue Play

Worlds in Play: International Perspectives on Digital …, 2007

2019

This study explores traditional games in the current context of education for young children in Indonesia. Applying new concepts from new materialist perspective, traditional games are explained through a performative understanding. Discussions of this study bring to the fore performative agencies of space, bodies, movements and things in the games. A pocung model is introduced to bring together the key findings and to illustrate traditional games as a complex learning process. It uniquely connects a Javanese philosophy of laku and the notion of intra-active pedagogy as a reinvention of traditional games that informs educational practices for young children.

Philosophy & Technology, 2014

This paper discusses the nature and limits of player embodiment within digital games. We identify a convergence between everyday bodily actions and activity within digital environments, and a trend towards incorporating natural forms of movement into gaming worlds through mimetic control devices. We examine recent literature in the area of immersion and presence in digital gaming; Calleja’s (2011) recent Player Involvement Model (PIM) of gaming is discussed and found to rely on a problematic notion of embodiment as ‘incorporation’. We go on to further reflect on the nature of player involvement in digital gaming environments by applying insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. It is argued that digital embodiment differs so significantly from primordial embodiment that any idea of total immersion is simply fantasy. We subsequently argue that digital game media nonetheless provide us with unique opportunities for exploring the nature of distinctively human forms of embodiment, and so we need more complete and more reliable phenomenological descriptions of the experiences associated with computer games.

2018

The posthuman approach is gaining more and more attention in the field of game studies. As it is a wide category, the research itself also contains a wide spread of topics, from non-human play (Wirman 2014, Gualeni & Westerlaken 2016) and research methods based on Latourian actornetwork theory (Giddings 2008, Jessen & Jessen 2014), to the ontology of the game object (Bogost 2010, Fizek 2017). However, there is still a need for works that would focus on the creation of meaning inside the player-game relation and the play process itself, which, at the same time, would emphasize the ethical foundation of a posthuman approach focused on the human relation with technology. With that in mind, I will follow the premises of critical posthumanism, especially in the work of Karen Barad (2007). As a means of theorizing the player-game relation in dialogue with these premises, I shall introduce the idea of bio-object (Kantor 2004), which simultaneously emphasises both the equality and the uniqu...

Aether: the Journal of Media Geography, 2014

This paper takes up as its focus the ongoing fascination with narratives of nature and discourses of control in the worlds of digital games and gaming culture. In a range of gaming genres and franchises we see nature as plot device, as backdrop, as a menacing or chaotic environment in need of management and regulation, and as a rich set of malleable materials ripe for human manipulation. Our attention is on two titles and franchises in particular: BioShock and Spore. Both are representative of narrative tropes concerning nature that have become common to digital games across many genres, platforms and styles. We examine two different aspects of these games: the relationship between their discursive representations of nature and the affective dimensions of their gameplay. A close analysis of these two elements allow us to explore how the immersive qualities of these games offers a biopolitical simulation in which the gamer manages relationships between the human and nonhuman and scripts the conditions of possibility for encountering the natural world. We assert that these digital games offer therefore a unique insight into contemporary understandings of nature, where anxieties and desires about environmental crises are acted out, managed, and temporarily reconciled. "How will you create the universe?" This is the question that the developers of Spore, a PC game released in 2008, pose to the gamer. It is a potent question indeed. The gamer is invited to re-imagine the world, acting as architect, engineer, and god, managing their creature creation from single-celled organism to space-faring conqueror. The opportunity offered in the phrase "playing god" is one that resonates in the two game titles and franchises we examine in this article: BioShock and Spore. Of course, wielding power over life and lives is not new to the virtual world; we have become inundated with the chance to build empires (e.g. the Civilization and Age of Empires franchises), re-enact and re-engineer conquest (e.g. the Total War), and rehearse and manage the stuff of cities, theme parks, and even everyday life (e.g. The Sims and the Zoo Tycoon franchises). Nor is a fascination with the natural world in various forms and incarnations a new enterprise for gamers or the gaming industry. One can indeed argue that throughout its relatively recent history-from its infancy through the early boom years of the late 1970s and early 1980s, past its decline and into its current rebirth and expansion-there has been an ongoing fascination with creating facsimiles of the 'real world' through virtual means and of controlling the chaos of nature with human hands.

European Conference on Games Based Learning, 2023

In the search for a comprehensive framework to structure and instrumentalize a Pedagogy of Play, the present article explores the ludic phenomena from an interdisciplinary perspective, integrating relevant knowledge from multiple sources and complementary epistemologies. As a result, a socio-technical framework of play and games is built, described and exemplified across different cases, over a continuous territory that performs in terms of multiple scales and complexities. The overall intention is not to normalize games, but to integrate more and diverse playful interactions within our everyday lives; not only within basic education but across academic and professional life: an exertion driven by a genuine search to learn from each other and supported by a versatile set of tools. By approaching games as the tangible materialization of play, therefore delegating the material embodiment of whatever comes out of our creativity, to an active learning practice inspired by our curiosity, and that of whom we collaborate with. To conclude, the article discusses and reflects upon the political and aesthetic implications of the presented framework, highlighting the importance of attitudes and narratives that complement conventional study programs by suggesting new ways to approach pre-identified, yet open spaces.

The Philosophy of Computer Games (Philosophy of Engineering and Technology)

Games in the Ancient World: Places, Spaces, Accessories, 2024

Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 2014

It is run on a non-proi t, voluntary basis by postgraduate research students at the University of Cambridge. Although primarily rooted in archaeological theory and practice, ARC increasingly invites a range of perspectives with the aim of establishing a strong, interdisciplinary journal which will be of interest in a range of i elds.

Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2013

Ac tA Ac A de m i A e A rt i u m V i l n e nsis / 67 2 012 A RT A N D PL AY Art and play are two fundamental characteristics of humans. Being comparably important, the two notions are strongly interconnected -something that is not only longstanding but has also been carefully observed. Hayden Ramsay notes: "As thinkers from Aristotle onwards have noted, part of the benefit of artistic performances is the opportunity to express and explore powerful emotions and beliefs in safer and more con-This paper examines creative uses of video games. The starting point of the article is an observation of the inherent interconnection between play and art. The demise of the play element, as observed by

2014

Digital games provide a fruitful comparison to ideologies because they resemble ideologies as an organizing structure entered into and because they serve as a systematic test case for alternatively organized (ideological) worlds. They do so perhaps more so than linear narrative media, as game-play presents both fictional worlds, systems and a spect-actor present as participatory agent. By addressing the structural parallels between ideology and digital games as organizations of quasi-natural conventions, I argue in this thesis that games have the capacity to model, propose and reflect on ideologies. Comparing roughly twenty years of scholarship on ideological play, ludology, narratology, game design, proceduralism and play-centred studies, I argue that games dynamically present stylized simulations of a possible world, occurring to the subject of play in a here-and-now that at once grants autonomy while doing so in a paradoxically rigid structure of affordances, constraints and desires. That subject of play, meanwhile, is split between played subject (the presented avatar and the game’s content), the playing subject as demanded by the ludic power structure of rules and the interpreting subject that is tasked to understand and inform the process of game-play. Through close analyses of Cart Life, the Stanley Parable and Spec Ops: the Line I argue for game-play as a dialectical process, past academic scholarship that posits either games as procedural systems of interpellation or play as mythical unrestrained creativity. An understanding of game-play as dialectical process akin to the relation between subjects and ideological power structures furthermore demands a recognition of the critical potential of game-play. Through theatrical techniques of enstrangement, game-play may reveal uncritical familiarity with the quasi-natural conventions of ideology – be they generic, social or political. via https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/28571

Games have intruded into popular, academic, and policy-maker awareness to an unprecedented level, and this creates new opportunities for advancing our understanding of the relationship of games to society. The author offers a new approach to games that stresses them as characterized by process. Games, the author argues, are domains of contrived contingency,capable of generating emergent practices and interpretations, and are intimately connected with everyday life to a degree heretofore poorly understood. This approach is both consistent with a range of existing social theory and avoids many of the limitations that have characterized much games scholarship to date,in particular its tendency toward unsustainable formalism and exceptionalism. Rather than seeing gaming as a subset of play, and therefore as an activity that is inherently separable,safe,and pleasurable,the author offers a pragmatic rethinking of games as social artifacts in their own right that are always in the process of becoming. This view both better accords with the experience of games by participants cross-culturally and bears the weight of the new questions being asked about games and about society.