Jesper Juul's Blog, page 7

Game Studies vol 20, issue 1

For your theoretical inspection: Game Studies 20/01. 

“I Harbour Strong Feelings for Tali Despite Her Being a Fictional Character”: Investigating Videogame Players’ Emotional Attachments to Non-Player Characters

by Jacqueline Burgess, Christian Jones

This study investigated players’ emotional attachment to two non-player characters from BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy. Qualitative analysis of forum posts found players expressed intense emotional attachments but from different viewpoints. These emotional attachments also influenced how players engaged with the game mechanics of Mass Effect 2.

Sick, Slow, Cyborg: Crip Futurity in Mass Effect

by Adan Jerreat-Poole

Can science fiction stories imagine more just futures for disabled bodies? Turning away from a future where technology has eradicated disability, this article explores crip encounters in Mass Effect 1-3 and interrogates the complex relationships between technology, culture, and disability.

Playing Virtual Jim Crow in Mafia III – Prosthetic Memory via Historical Digital Games and the Limits of Mass Culture

by Emil Lundedal Hammar

This article applies the concept of prosthetic memory to Mafia III in order to discuss the significance of both contexts of production and reception in determining memory-making potentials of historical digital games with attention to racialized oppression in and beyond games.

I’d Like to Buy the World a Nuka-Cola: The Purposes and Meanings of Video Game Soda Machines

by Jess Morrissette

Why do soda machines appear so frequently in video games? What purposes do they serve? What values do they represent? This article examines how virtual soda machines help anchor video games in a world we recognize as similar to our own, while simultaneously reinforcing the consumerist values of modern capitalism.

Liminality and the Smearing of War and Play in Battlefield 1

by Debra Ramsay

This article interrogates how war and play are smeared together in Battlefield 1, the first AAA game set in World War I. It advances liminality as a conceptual framework to investigate the ambiguities and contradictions that emerge in the tension between the history, memory and cultural meanings of World War I and the game’s ludic qualities.

When Mobile Games became bigger than PC and Console Games

There are lots of retrospective overviews of the 2010s going around.

But I haven’t seen anyone mention that this was the decade where mobile games became a bigger market than PC + Console combined. It really happened.

(Source: https://www.superdataresearch.com/insights/?section=market-data)

RomCHIP journal vol 1, issue 2

For your theoretical ingestion, RomCHIP journal vol 1, issue 2.

ARTICLES



Gravity in Computer Space

Noah Wardrip-Fruin





Rumble/Control
Toward a Critical History of Touch Feedback in Video Games

David Parisi






INTERVIEWS



T.L. Taylor
A Conversation on Game Studies, History, and Interventions

Henry Lowood






MATERIALS



Archival Serendipity, Excitement, and Whiplash
Affects and Collisions in Doing LGBTQ Game History

Adrienne Shaw







Preserving Carol Shaw’s Polo

Shannon Symonds






TRANSLATIONS



Apresentando o ROMchip
O Que Poderia Ser a História dos Jogos?

Bhernardo Henrique Viana; Laine Nooney, Raiford Guins, Henry Lowood

 

Game Studies 19/02

For your theoretical dissection, Game Studies journal issue 19/02.

Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Games Research is out now (Volume 19, Issue 2).

Editorial

Game Studies: How to play — Ten play-tips for the aspiring game-studies scholar

by Espen Aarseth

Articles

“Gotta Catch ‘Em All” – Can Playing Pokémon Go Influence Mood and Empathy?

by Tracy Packiam Alloway & Rachel Carpenter

Don’t Fear the Reapers, Fear Multiculturalism: Canadian Contexts and Ethnic Elisions in Mass Effect

by David Callahan

The Indiepocalypse: the Political-Economy of Independent Game Development Labor in Contemporary Indie Markets

by Nadav D. Lipkin

The Open, the Closed and the Emergent: Theorizing Emergence for Videogame Studies

by Joan Soler-Adillon

Book Review

Review of Gaming the Iron Curtain

by Jaakko Suominen

The indie explosion that’s been going on for 30 years (give or take)

Polygon has kindly published an excerpt from Handmade Pixels.

This is an excerpt from my history chapter, “A selective History of Independent Games”. My concern here is the prehistory of independent games and the central question: is independent game development new or old?

https://www.polygon.com/2019/11/15/20962788/indie-development-history-handmade-pixels

Real Games: What’s Legitimate and What’s Not in Contemporary Videogames

Proud to announce Real Games: What’s Legitimate and What’s Not in Contemporary Videogames by Mia Consalvo and Christopher Paul.

This is the 8th(!) book in the Playful Thinking series.

How we talk about games as real or not-real, and how that shapes what games are made and who is invited to play them.

In videogame criticism, the worst insult might be “That’s not a real game!” For example, “That’s not a real game, it’s on Facebook!” and “That’s not a real game, it’s a walking simulator!” But how do people judge what is a real game and what is not—what features establish a game’s gameness? In this engaging book, Mia Consalvo and Christopher Paul examine the debates about the realness or not-realness of videogames and find that these discussions shape what games get made and who is invited to play them.

Consalvo and Paul look at three main areas often viewed as determining a game’s legitimacy: the game’s pedigree (its developer), the content of the game itself, and the game’s payment structure. They find, among other things, that even developers with a track record are viewed with suspicion if their games are on suspect platforms. They investigate game elements that are potentially troublesome for a game’s gameness, including genres, visual aesthetics, platform, and perceived difficulty. And they explore payment models, particularly free-to-play—held by some to be a marker of illegitimacy. Finally, they examine the debate around such so-called walking simulators as Dear Esther and Gone Home. And finally, they consider what purpose is served by labeling certain games “real.”

Loading journal, 12/20.

For your theoretical processing: Loading journal, 12/20.

“The Father of Survival Horror”: Shinji Mikami, Procedural Rhetoric, and the Collective/Cultural Memory of the Atomic Bombs

Ryan Scheiding

Playing Past and Future: Counterfactual History in Fallout 4

Sam McCready

Taking College Esports Seriously

Nyle Sky Kauweloa, Jenifer Sunrise Winter>

“No one gives you a rulebook to raise a kid”: Adoptive Motherhood in The Walking Dead Video Game Series

Sarah Marie Stang

The Role of Architecture in Constructing Gameworlds. >Examples from Dishonored>

Anthony Zonaga, Marcus Carter

Buying Time: Capitalist Temporalities in Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

Rainforest Scully-Blaker

This is not a Pipe interview about the Art of Failure

Chris Richardson was kind enough to interview me about The Art of Failure for his This is not a Pipe podcast series.

https://www.tinapp.org/episodes/artoffailure

On the page I also mention some of the books that have inspired me as a writer.

Proceedings of the 2019 DiGRA conference in Kyoto

Here are all the published papers from the 2019 DiGRA conference.

http://www.digra.org/digital-library/forums/digra-19/

Proceedings of the 2019 DiGRA conference in Tokyo

Here are all the published papers from the 2019 DiGRA conference.

http://www.digra.org/digital-library/forums/digra-19/