Videogames and Agency

Videogames and Agency
Author: Bettina Bódi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2022-12-30
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 1000829871

Videogames and Agency explores the trend in videogames and their marketing to offer a player higher volumes, or even more distinct kinds, of player freedom. The book offers a new conceptual framework that helps us understand how this freedom to act is discussed by designers, and how that in turn reflects in their design principles. What can we learn from existing theories around agency? How do paratextual materials reflect design intention with regards to what the player can and cannot do in a videogame? How does game design shape the possibility space for player action? Through these questions and selected case studies that include AAA and independent games alike, the book presents a unique approach to studying agency that combines game design, game studies, and game developer discourse. By doing so, the book examines what discourses around player action, as well as a game’s design can reveal about the nature of agency and videogame aesthetics. This book will appeal to readers specifically interested in videogames, such as game studies scholars or game designers, but also to media studies students and media and screen studies scholars less familiar with digital games. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Games

Games
Author: C. Thi Nguyen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2020
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 0190052082

Games are a unique art form. They do not just tell stories, nor are they simply conceptual art. They are the art form that works in the medium of agency. Game designers tell us who to be in games and what to care about; they designate the player's in-game abilities and motivations. In other words, designers create alternate agencies, and players submerge themselves in those agencies. Games let us explore alternate forms of agency. The fact that we play games demonstrates something remarkable about the nature of our own agency: we are capable of incredible fluidity with our own motivations and rationality. This volume presents a new theory of games which insists on games' unique value in human life. C. Thi Nguyen argues that games are an integral part of how we become mature, free people. Bridging aesthetics and practical reasoning, he gives an account of the special motivational structure involved in playing games. We can pursue goals, not for their own value, but for the sake of the struggle. Playing games involves a motivational inversion from normal life, and the fact that we can engage in this motivational inversion lets us use games to experience forms of agency we might never have developed on our own. Games, then, are a special medium for communication. They are the technology that allows us to write down and transmit forms of agency. Thus, the body of games forms a "library of agency" which we can use to help develop our freedom and autonomy. Nguyen also presents a new theory of the aesthetics of games. Games sculpt our practical activities, allowing us to experience the beauty of our own actions and reasoning. They are unlike traditional artworks in that they are designed to sculpt activities - and to promote their players' aesthetic appreciation of their own activity.

Video Games as Culture

Video Games as Culture
Author: Daniel Muriel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2018-03-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317223926

Video games are becoming culturally dominant. But what does their popularity say about our contemporary society? This book explores video game culture, but in doing so, utilizes video games as a lens through which to understand contemporary social life. Video games are becoming an increasingly central part of our cultural lives, impacting on various aspects of everyday life such as our consumption, communities, and identity formation. Drawing on new and original empirical data – including interviews with gamers, as well as key representatives from the video game industry, media, education, and cultural sector – Video Games as Culture not only considers contemporary video game culture, but also explores how video games provide important insights into the modern nature of digital and participatory culture, patterns of consumption and identity formation, late modernity, and contemporary political rationalities. This book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers, interested in fields such Video Games, Sociology, and Media and Cultural Studies. It will also be useful for those interested in the wider role of culture, technology, and consumption in the transformation of society, identities, and communities.

Storyplaying

Storyplaying
Author: Sebastian Domsch
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2013-08-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110272458

Incontestably, Future Narratives are most conspicuous in video games: they combine narrative with the major element of all games: agency. The persons who perceive these narratives are not simply readers or spectators but active agents with a range of choices at their disposal that will influence the very narrative they are experiencing: they are players. The narratives thus created are realizations of the multiple possibilities contained in the present of any given gameplay situation. Surveying the latest trends in the field, the volume discusses the complex relationship of narrative and gameplay.

How to Do Things with Videogames

How to Do Things with Videogames
Author: Ian Bogost
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2011-08-05
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 145293312X

In recent years, computer games have moved from the margins of popular culture to its center. Reviews of new games and profiles of game designers now regularly appear in the New York Times and the New Yorker, and sales figures for games are reported alongside those of books, music, and movies. They are increasingly used for purposes other than entertainment, yet debates about videogames still fork along one of two paths: accusations of debasement through violence and isolation or defensive paeans to their potential as serious cultural works. In How to Do Things with Videogames, Ian Bogost contends that such generalizations obscure the limitless possibilities offered by the medium’s ability to create complex simulated realities. Bogost, a leading scholar of videogames and an award-winning game designer, explores the many ways computer games are used today: documenting important historical and cultural events; educating both children and adults; promoting commercial products; and serving as platforms for art, pornography, exercise, relaxation, pranks, and politics. Examining these applications in a series of short, inviting, and provocative essays, he argues that together they make the medium broader, richer, and more relevant to a wider audience. Bogost concludes that as videogames become ever more enmeshed with contemporary life, the idea of gamers as social identities will become obsolete, giving rise to gaming by the masses. But until games are understood to have valid applications across the cultural spectrum, their true potential will remain unrealized. How to Do Things with Videogames offers a fresh starting point to more fully consider games’ progress today and promise for the future.

Playing Nature

Playing Nature
Author: Alenda Y. Chang
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2019-12-31
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 145296226X

A potent new book examines the overlap between our ecological crisis and video games Video games may be fun and immersive diversions from daily life, but can they go beyond the realm of entertainment to do something serious—like help us save the planet? As one of the signature issues of the twenty-first century, ecological deterioration is seemingly everywhere, but it is rarely considered via the realm of interactive digital play. In Playing Nature, Alenda Y. Chang offers groundbreaking methods for exploring this vital overlap. Arguing that games need to be understood as part of a cultural response to the growing ecological crisis, Playing Nature seeds conversations around key environmental science concepts and terms. Chang suggests several ways to rethink existing game taxonomies and theories of agency while revealing surprising fundamental similarities between game play and scientific work. Gracefully reconciling new media theory with environmental criticism, Playing Nature examines an exciting range of games and related art forms, including historical and contemporary analog and digital games, alternate- and augmented-reality games, museum exhibitions, film, and science fiction. Chang puts her surprising ideas into conversation with leading media studies and environmental humanities scholars like Alexander Galloway, Donna Haraway, and Ursula Heise, ultimately exploring manifold ecological futures—not all of them dystopian.

Agency and Media Reception

Agency and Media Reception
Author: Susanne Eichner
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2014-01-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3658046732

What happens to our sense of agency, our general ability to perform actions in our life worlds, in the course of media reception and appropriation? Whilst considering media communication as a special form of social action, this work reconsiders the key concepts of social action theory, pragmatism, communication theory as well as film, game and television theory. It thus integrates agency as the key to understanding ‘doing media’ and at the same time conceptualizes agency as a specific mode of involvement across media boundaries. This approach amalgamates miscellaneous ideas and conceptions such as interactivity, participation, cognitive control, play or empowerment and applies the theoretical considerations on the basis of textual analyses of the films Inception and The Proposal, the TV shows Lost and I’m a Celebrity and the video games Grand Theft Auto IV and The Walking Dead.

Video Games and Storytelling

Video Games and Storytelling
Author: Souvik Mukherjee
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2015-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137525053

The potential of video games as storytelling media and the deep involvement that players feel when they are part of the story needs to be analysed vis-à-vis other narrative media. This book underscores the importance of video games as narratives and offers a framework for analysing the many-ended stories that often redefine real and virtual lives.

Player and Avatar

Player and Avatar
Author: David Owen
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2017-06-19
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 1476629420

Do you make small leaps in your chair while attempting challenging jumps in Tomb Raider? Do you say "Ouch!" when a giant hits you with a club in Skyrim? Have you had dreams of being inside the underwater city of Rapture? Videogames cast the player as protagonist in an unfolding narrative. Like actors in front of a camera, gamers' proprioception, or body awareness, can extend to onscreen characters, thus placing them "physically" within the virtual world. Players may even identify with characters' ideological motivations. The author explores concepts central to the design and enjoyment of videogames--affect, immersion, liveness, presence, agency, narrative, ideology and the player's virtual surrogate: the avatar. Gamer and avatar are analyzed as a cybernetic coupling that suggests fulfillment of Atonin Artaud's vision of the "body without organs."

The Art of Videogames

The Art of Videogames
Author: Grant Tavinor
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2009-11-19
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9781444310184

The Art of Videogames explores how philosophy of the artstheories developed to address traditional art works can also beapplied to videogames. Presents a unique philosophical approach to the art ofvideogaming, situating videogames in the framework of analyticphilosophy of the arts Explores how philosophical theories developed to addresstraditional art works can also be applied to videogames Written for a broad audience of both philosophers and videogameenthusiasts by a philosopher who is also an avid gamer Discusses the relationship between games and earlier artisticand entertainment media, how videogames allow for interactivefiction, the role of game narrative, and the moral status ofviolent events depicted in videogame worlds Argues that videogames do indeed qualify as a new and excitingform of representational art