Browsing by Subject "Game Studies"

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    Playing Badly: The Heroic Cheat and the Ethics of Play
    (2018-05) Lindberg, Adam
    This dissertation explains the work of hegemonic play in understanding what games are and what they do. This explanation is used to formalize a new theoretical and practical model for games criticism that can also be applied in literary, media, and social criticism. The present moment has been dubbed a “ludic age” as our algorithmically-informed world increasingly resembles game systems, a similarity exacerbated by an ongoing and intentional surge in deploying game concepts across every corner of organizable experience. Despite these signals to the value of reading games within ordinary experience, there persists a deeply held belief that the essential nature of games lies in their radical difference to non-game or “real” life. In Playing Badly, I challenge the game/nongame dichotomy on its logical and philosophical grounds and with regards to its practical utility, arguing that classical game ontology offers neither a compelling description of games nor the means to use that description robustly in critical work. By rethinking game ontology, my argument reveals games’ crucial role in producing and maintaining the fiction of stability on which everyday forms of life depend. Reading texts, whether social, digital, or traditional, from this ludic perspective offers a framework for critiquing the ethical stakes at play within each system. Games, however generous one is with that category, exercise power by formalizing values in their rules. Ultimately, my project creates space for resistance by using the concept of cheating to reveal opportunities for play within the systems of value represented in our texts and by extension the systems in which we live our lives. To contextualize my intervention, I explain the strengths and weaknesses of current views on game ontology within game studies and offer an alternative argument in favor of a game-specific ontology generated through the interaction of a game’s socio-historical context, formal components (rule interactions and representational choices), and the term hegemonic play, which refers to a way of playing a game that reinforces its dominant hierarchy of values. I contend this approach better accounts for the dynamism inherent in games, which change depending on where, when, and by whom they are played. It is the concept of cheating that organizes these forces and offers an infinitely clearer picture of the borders of the protean texts we call games. I present an array of readings of traditional, social, and digital texts that demonstrate how cheating makes the values at play within game structures legible and how this view of games can be brought to bear on other texts where game structures predominate, which is to say any text at all.
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    Pressures on play: rhetoric, virtual environments, and the design of experience in virtual world computer games.
    (2012-05) Baron, Robert John
    My dissertation explores the ways in which player interactions are shaped, directed and constrained by the designed experience of modern virtual world computer games from a rhetorical perspective. To that end, I develop a theory of "virtual consubstantiality" based on shared experiences within virtual environments as integral to virtual community formation. I examine two case studies to explore this concept. First, I examine the massive multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. I identify three key pressures exerted on players within World of Warcraft's virtual environment: a focus on gameplay, a focus on the player utility, and the pressure to engage in "purposeful social interactions" with other players. I go on to document structures in World of Warcraft's virtual environment that reinforce these pressures: the implementation of a "dungeon finder" system for the creation of random in-game groups, the implementation of the "Real ID" social network that links players across the whole catalog of games produced by Blizzard Entertainment, and the restructuring of the game's virtual environment as a part of the release of World of Warcraft's most recent expansion, Cataclysm. Second, I examine Farmville, as representative of a new class of social computer games. I explore three key pressures exerted on players within Farmville's virtual environment: The pressure to collect in-game items, the pressure to connect with other users for in-game rewards, and the pressure to consume both in-game and real world resources. In a similar fashion, I go on to document three in-game mechanics reinforce these pressures: the portability of the game space across several computers and several computing platforms, the intentionally simplicity design of the overall game interface and the large degree of automation of both in-game and out-of-game communication between players. The research finds that virtual environments do shape their user interactions. I further argue that the virtual consubstantiality formed by the shared experiences created by the design of these virtual environments is integral to the formation and maintenance of each virtual environment's virtual community.