Journal ArticleDOI
Start, Select, Continue: The Ludic Anxiety in Video Game Scholarship
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The authors trace three modes of rhetorical video game scholarship inspired by the ludology vs. narratology anxiety: ludic scholarship, transitional scholarship, and communicative scholarship, or work that investigates how video games communicate as one would examine any other media.Abstract:
Game-studies scholars have adopted the phrase “ludology vs. narratology” to explain a tension in video game scholarship. Ludology is the perspective that video games should be studied with their uniqueness as a medium at the foreground while narratology is the study of games that take that uniqueness for granted in order to ask broader questions. In this essay, I perform a critical literature review in which I trace three modes of rhetorical video game scholarship inspired by the ludology vs. narratology anxiety: (1) ludic scholarship, or work focused on discovering what makes video games different than other media, (2) transitional scholarship, or work that sees video games as different but moves beyond merely targeting those differences and into other arguments, and (3) communicative scholarship, or work that investigates how video games communicate as one would examine any other media, namely by taking the differences between games and other media as granted. Ultimately, I forecast that the ludic anxie...read more
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The corporeal turn: at the intersection of rhetoric, bodies, and video games
TL;DR: The authors examines the trend in game studies toward studying bodies, both of players and of characters, in communication scholarship and concludes that instead of creating a single, unifying theory of gaming bodies, games scholars should identify themes of bodies in games.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Joy of the Easter Egg and the Pain of Numb Hands: The Augmentation and Limitation of Reality Through Video Games
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the physical limits of our bodies within the expansion of our senses in video games and discover hints, influences, remnants, appropriations and quotes, expanding the web of signs and significations far beyond the limits of the games themselves.
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Horror Video Games and the “Active-Passive” Debate
TL;DR: In this paper , Perron's edited compendium of essays regarding horror video games subtitled Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play (2009), much of the argumentation orbits debate regarding the definition and creation of the experience of horror compared between an ostensibly passive cinema reception (from whence the games take most of their conventions) and the ostensibly more active reception of ludological horror.
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La alegría de los huevos de Pascua y el dolor de las manos entumecidas: el aumento y la limitación de la realidad a través de los videojuegos
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the physical limits of our bodies within the expansion of our senses in video games and discover hints, influences, remnants, appropriations and quotes, expanding the web of signs and significations far beyond the limits of the games themselves.
References
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Book
Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames
TL;DR: Ian Bogost argues that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Meaning of Race and Violence in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas
Ben DeVane,Kurt Squire +1 more
TL;DR: The authors found that players use their own experiences and knowledge to interpret the game and do not passively receive the games' images and content, and that the meanings they produce about controversial subjects are situated in players' local practices, identities, and discourse models as they interact with the game's semiotic domain.
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Learning in Context Digital Games and Young Black Men
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present an exploratory study of Black middle school boys who play digital games and examine how differences in game play are potential factors in the discrepancy between White male gamers and Black male gamers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
BookDOI
Joystick Soldiers : The Politics of Play in Military Video Games
TL;DR: Huntemann and Huntemann as discussed by the authors discuss the history of video games in the U.S. Army and their role in the development of the Joystick Soldier and the early history of Video Wargaming.