David S Heineman

Bio: David S Heineman is an academic researcher from Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. The author has contributed to research in topics: Game studies & Porting. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 5 publications receiving 47 citations.

Korea’s Online Gaming Empire

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Porting game studies research to virtual reality

Abstract: In 2016, years of speculation, crowd-funding campaigns, major investment, and general hype around virtual reality (VR) finally culminated in several consumer products making it to market, ushering in what many in the tech industry have broadly referred to as a new frontier in interactive entertainment. Initial sales and pre-order figures for headsets such as the HTC Vive, the Facebook-backed Oculus Rift, and the Sony PlayStation VR all indicate that there is indeed a voracious market out there for these new technologies, even if most initial purchasers fall into the category of risk-taking “early-adopters.” In any case, among enthusiasts for the hardware are a considerable number of writers who have expressed excitement around the idea that VR technologies have finally advanced enough to open up new possibilities for how we might think about play itself. They point toward early experiments in new kinds of community interactions, new types of experiences in worlds that users could otherwise not visit, and new kinds of disruptive, realitybending exercises that ask users to reconsider both the potentialities of play in virtual spaces as well as the relationship between those spaces and the actual, embodied, physical spaces in which they live. For many reasons, not least of which is that VR offers intriguing commentary on absence/presence binaries, the technology has long been theorized by critical theorists as philosophically diverse as Baudrillard (1998),1 Virilio (Kellner, 1999),2 Rheingold (1991),3 and so on. Although that foundational work will continue to inform how we conceptualize VR’s cultural significance, there is as yet a lack of scholarship that engages specific VR technologies through consideration of specific hardware/software and their related discursive formations. Indeed, while there has been some enthralling recent work done by the likes of Walden (2006),4 Castronova (2009),5 and Parisi (2015),6 very little 661711 NMS0010.1177/1461444816661711new media & societyReview Essay research-article2016

Game studies’ elephant in the room:

Abstract: Every year the Game Developers Conference (GDC) has given out the prestigious Pioneer Award, an award which “celebrates those individuals who developed a breakthrough technology, game concept, or gameplay design at a crucial juncture in video game history—paving the way for the myriads who followed them” (Game Developers Choice Awards, 2019). Past winners of the award have included the founders of the company Activision, the creator of the first home console, Ralph Baer, master game designer Yu Suzuki, and other revered names from the history of the video game industry. In 2018, the GDC selected Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari, creator of Pong, and lifelong innovator in the video game industry as the award’s 2017 recipient. However, shortly after announcing their choice for the award, a social media protest campaign coalesced around the “#NotNolan” hashtag, a campaign that grew in size as more people became familiar with the stories of Bushnell’s reign as boss at Atari in the earliest days of the company. In the many interviews he’d given in the years since, Bushnell regularly boasted about cultivating a fraternity-like culture at Atari, one which other employees have subsequently noted as troubling: Atari’s women were consistently subject to objectification, harassment, and many of the other forms of sexand gender-based discrimination that, at the time of GDC’s announcement, had recently and regularly been associated with the rapidly expanding #MeToo movement. As Gillian Smith (2018), a computer science professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute put it, “While other industries are distancing themselves from the abusive and sexist behaviors of powerful men, GDC is giving a pioneer award to one of them.” In response to the #NotNolan campaign, the 922164 NMS0010.1177/1461444820922164new media & societyBook review essay book-review2020

Does game studies have “Complete Confidence in Its Own Legitimacy?”:

Abstract: It is something of a comfortable obfuscation to frame game studies as an emerging discipline,1 one that is still trying to “carve out a niche” or “find its way” in and against the broader purview of the humanities at what many have publicly claimed is a moment of institutional crisis (Winterhalter, 2014). Framing game studies in this mode is a way of affording it a certain insurance against larger, sweeping changes in higher education that might seek to marginalize scholarship on something as “non-serious” as video games; to shutter curricular offerings that don’t directly line up to specific career paths; or to subsume games studies into larger, more established, and often less nimble disciplines such as computer science or mass communication.2 As such, a game study is regularly cast as a field with unique relevance to better-funded science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs and related technological fields (e.g. Malaby and Burke, 2009) or to pedagogy more broadly via concepts such as gamification (e.g. Peng and Alhabash, 2013). Even within the humanities, game studies has often been connected to higher education buzzwords like “the digital humanities” or “MOOCs” so as to frame the field as a future-looking discipline, one with the potential to serve as a model for what attractive humanities programs might offer across their curricula. In short, game studies are often caught up in a defensive rhetoric that markets the field as a kind of early 21st century cure to a perceived late 20th century decline in the relevance and reach of the humanities. Among the ideas shared by Kirkpatrick’s Computer Games and the Social Imaginary, Juul’s The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games, and Costikyan’s Uncertainty in Games is that, rather than being a fledgling discipline with tenuous connections to prior research, the study of digital games is instead very much indebted to the 545968 NMS0010.1177/1461444814545968new media & society research-article2014

Gaming in Virtual Reality: What Changes in Terms of Usability, Emotional Response and Sense of Presence Compared to Non-Immersive Video Games?:

Abstract: Background. Virtual reality can provide innovative gaming experiences for present and future game players. However, scientific knowledge is still limited about differences between player’s experien...

Now you’re playing with audience power: the work of watching games

Abstract: As electronic sports (e-sports)—the configuration of competitive videogaming as spectator sport—surges in popularity, industry organizations such as Major League Gaming (MLG) continue to experiment with techniques for capturing, and capitalizing on, the work of watching play. This article critically considers these techniques of “audiencing” by comparing observations of two MLG tournaments, in 2008 and 2012, situating them within broader cultural, technological, and economic transformations in the competitive gaming landscape. Even as games continue to be lauded as “participatory” media, this account shows a shift within some e-sports contexts towards rebuilding, rather than blurring, the boundaries between content producers and audiences.

The backer–developer connection: Exploring crowdfunding’s influence on video game production

Abstract: As video game development studios increasingly turn to digital crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter for financing, this article explores the ways in which these processes shape production. It examines in particular the interactions that typically occur between studios and players as part of crowdfunded development, analysing the ways in which these activities inform aspects of video game design. By charting the implications of this burgeoning economic model, the article contributes to scholarship concerning video game production and intervenes within more specific discussions concerning the role of the player within development. The article’s case study, which draws from evidence of production concerning multiple Kickstarter projects, is organised into two sections. The first ascertains the degrees to which Kickstarter users can influence the details of a proposed project during a crowdfunding campaign; the second looks at how developers involve crowdfunding communities within production once fundin...

Play to the camera Video ethnography, spectatorship, and e-sports

Abstract: Electronic sports (e-sports) represents an increasingly popular and profitable array of organizations, communities, and sets of practices, all of which place tremendous value on audiences; for example, playing games competitively, in front of a crowd, represents the legitimization of gaming as spectator sport. This article reports on an audiovisual ethnography of a community of competitive gamers for whom the video camera became not so much a research tool but a promotional resource. Examining the transformations the camera enacted, both to the practice of ethnographic fieldwork and to participants’ embodied performances of competitive gaming, this article explores the central role played by recording technologies in the production of e-sports. It concludes by considering some of the intersections of surveillance, gaming, and emergent leisure practices – including the use of digital recording technologies to collect social scientific data, at a time when watching and being watched is increasingly pervasiv...

From Generative to Conventional Play: MOBA and League of Legends

Abstract: Despite its vast enthusiast community and influence on contemporary game designers, the MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) remains under-explored by academics. This paper considers many meanings of “well played” reflected in the design, community, and aesthetics of the genre's most popular member, League of Legends. Originating as modifications of commercial RTS (real-time strategy) games, MOBAs present a rare study of the “rhetoric of the imaginary” in play theory applied to popular game design. The genre's reification in commercial forms such as League show how the attitudes of distributed design projects manifest themselves as values of play. A close reading of the phases in a match of League of Legends exposes one possible aesthetic framework for the consideration of eSports. Greg Costikyan's theory of uncertainty in play serves here as a backbone for the study of conventions, tension, strategy, and tactics in a team-based competitive videogame.