(2008) The Video Game as an Object of Controversy (The Video Game Explosion)

Proceedings of Interactive Entertainment: Matters of Life and Death 2013

This article analyses the discourse surrounding the classification and regulation of videogames in Australia, with particular focus on the exclusion, and subsequent introduction of an R18+ rating over the twenty-year period between 1993-2013. This article argues that this period was characterised by a remarkable entropy and stasis within classification discourse, and that the introduction of the R18+ rating was eventually achieved by pro-R18+ advocates reaffirming the perceived validity and power of the core discourse. Thus, the history of videogame classification in Australia—with or without an R18+ rating—is the history of protection of children from inappropriate content, and mistrust of an interactive media form; these arguments underpin both the exclusion of an R18+ in the early 1990s and the inclusion of an R18+ in 2012. Finally, though a close analytical exploration of the history of videogame classification in Australia, this article argues that public discourse on classification has been subject to cynical media manipulation from almost all parties involved, which has resulted in a discursive entropy that has been largely disconnected with any understanding of how videogame culture and play is enacted in an everyday sense.

2014

Video games are increasingly becoming an important media today, despite the light connota-tion of its initial categorization. Today they are an industry that produces billions of dollars and employs engineers and artists alike in an art form spanning interactive games, to virtual socie-ties where millions of people dwell. However, like all human products, our same fears, flaws and xenophobia show in the games, with the reflection of hatred, racism and stereotypes that are our everyday experience. Also, because of the influence of other media, like television, with misrepresentations of blacks, Latinos and other races, or the objectification of women are pre-sent in video games. The significant thing found researching for this assignment is that most of those who use these games are themselves part of minorities or races that are not exactly white Americans. Abuse of the frustrations and desires of the user, handling codes and the system an-swers of gamers to maintain the player engagement, has more resemblance to the use of illegal drugs than with art, but however, the complexity of the design, stories and global assessment, have led to other considerations by experts. Competing in the games could be considered as having more of escapism that the reality of engaging, but all human beings are expected in their tribes to compete and demonstrate their value as a member while complying with social norms or expectations. Same as satisfying or surrender to corporate or group interests. Here are some thoughts for the purpose of this study.

For the past 10 years, lack of emotion in video games has been a staple topic of discussion among game developers, despite the fact that numerous studies have shown that video games are capable of awakening a vast array of emotions in their players. The purpose of this study is to see what exactly is discussed when the topic is brought up and to delineate how this discussion is connected to the potential of the video game medium. I will be using a method called affinity diagram to analyse two sets of data: interview data on future trends industry professionals are following, and a selection of articles gathered from Gamasutra.com. The interview data is used for placing the emotion discussion on the map of contemporary industry trends, whereas the data gathered from Gamasutra gives us a more in-depth look into the topics and themes that industry professionals bring up when talking about emotion. The data shows that not only is emotion considered an important element in all games, but the discussion is moving away from the very high-level ”there should be more emotion” -type to the more solution-focused ”how to bring in more emotion” -type. It also shows that games are believed to have notable potential, and that emotion is seen as being closely tied to reaching this potential.

TEXT Journal, Special Issue , 2018

Though recent years have seen an increase in scholarship exploring the links between games and the classroom (such as gamification and game mechanics in education), far less research has engaged with the practical challenges involved in the pedagogy of games writing itself. In this article, I explore the unique challenges that arise when teaching creative writing for non-linear and ludic contexts. When our exposure to more traditional forms of storytelling structures such as those in film or literature is so much greater than our proficiency in creating branching story structures, the introduction of player or reader agency to a piece of fiction requires a massive shift in process within a practitioner. Students are still trained from a young age to understand stories as following certain rules based on linear and non-interactive media contexts. These rules are at times contradictory to what is required when writing games. Students of game writing often fall into familiar and observable patterns as they become proficient in the requirements of interactive practice for the first time. Throughout this article I reflect on these pedagogical issues through my observations teaching interactive storytelling, and examine the importance of exposure to peers from other creative disciplines for game design and game writing students.

International Journal of Cultural Studies

This article examines the relationship between exceptionalism and nationhood in media classification. The history of age-ratings is an international one, and the present challenges associated with digital media circulation are similarly international. We argue that the nation nevertheless provides an appropriate frame for understanding age-rating by attending to the ways national agencies have struggled to articulate the specificity of their work based on the specificity of domestic constituencies. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, our central examples include the resistance of the Motion Picture Association of America to age-based film classification, the British Board of Film Classification's examination of American films in the 1980s, contemporary Japanese videogame regulation, and the emergence of the International Age Rating Coalition. We argue that national exceptionalism is itself generalised and that media content regulation is less about producing national culture than about laying claim to a nation by differentiation.

UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012

Gamic Race: Logics of Difference in Videogame Culture makes race central to the study of videogames and videogame cultures. The project emphasizes the need for critical race theory in game studies to understand how race is informed and reshaped by the logics of gameplay resulting in the multi-layered, politically complex, and agile concept of gamic race. Displaced racialization, the project's other key concept, revises former studies of race in digital media that focus predominantly on representation, shifting interest to racialization occurring alongside or beyond bodies within game code and player experience. Moving along this trajectory, the first three chapters of Gamic Race explore different layers of gamic race and its formulation through displaced racialization: spatial, technologic, and discursive. The final chapter attempts to put theory into practice via an analysis of racially inflammatory raids of virtual worlds by users of the popular message board 4chan. These raids serve as a compelling but flawed model for future viprogressive performative interventions in gamespace. The conclusion considers how to progressively transform videogame design by placing African American expressive traditions, indie games, ethics, philosophy, and the interaction design of Erik Loyer in conversation. It's within this nexus that the project ends, gesturing toward a future paradigm of interaction and aesthetics within videogames that handles difference productively, and does not rely solely on strategies of visual inclusion.

2012

This thesis studies four web games that have been released in Estonia in 2004-2011 and have been sponsored by the Estonian Centre Party. Using video games in political campaigning is a recent and not very widely spread trend. Therefore, these web games provided an opportunity to examine the ways how political messages can be inserted into video games and how the qualities that are unique to video games can form political arguments and persuade the players.

The representation of women in videogames often relies on poorly gendered stereotypes in order to generate characters. Female characters in videogames are often one dimensional and overtly sexual – often with the express purpose of providing male players with gratification. These negative stereotypes have at least in part led to a male-dominated sub-culture that rejects any attempt to examine the portrayal of women and gender in games. The reaction to this cultural criticism is often extreme, with threats of sexual violence against the female academics, critics, and journalists looking to examine videogames as a creative medium. This paper shows that feminist art history methodologies can be successfully applied to videogames as objects of art. The visuals, the stories, the characters, and the creators of the games can all be written about from a feminist ideology that would not be out of place in journals and textbooks on the subject of art history. However this paper also shows that only using a feminist methodology is limiting, and does not do justice to the society that surrounds the sub-culture of videogames. A new way of looking at works of art and writing art history must be formulated that doesn’t prioritise just women, but instead looks at the intersectionality between various other forms of systematic oppression that make up the societal kyriarchy. In order to discover if feminism is an appropriate art historical methodology for applying to videogames this paper considers two case studies, the 1981 videogame Ms. Pac-Man and the 2015 videogame Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. These two videogames feature female characters that can be successfully considered as subjects using an art historical feminist methodology. This paper also asks if other intersectional theories should be applied alongside of, or instead of feminism, in order to consider the diverse society that videogames are a part of.