By Backe and Lankoski

Published in Narrative 30(2)

Article available on https://muse.jhu.edu/article/855327.

Abstract

The paper revisits a central question in the study of characters in digital games: Do players of, for example, a racing game steer the virtual car directly themselves, or are they controlling the body of a virtual driver? This seemingly technical question is shown to be primarily cognitive and conceptual: players draw on their real-life and fictional frames of reference in an ongoing epistemological process of situating themselves vis-à-vis gameworld and playable figure. The traditional metaphor for this relationship, that of a cyborg, neither captures the variety of relationships suggested by games, nor the range of interpretations open to players. To overcome this limitation, I propose six conceptual types, based on the significance that tools and vehicles have for the playable figure. I ask: is there a co-dependence between equipment and user, is it permanent, and do they have a metonymic relationship to each other? These abstract categories are shown to be connected to archetypical proto-narratives epitomized by characters from mythology and popular culture, which players implicitly refer to in conceptualizing their relationship to the gameworld. The essay, then, offers a framework for the conceptual variety of player-playable figure-relations, which, in drawing on cultural history, should be equally transparent to scholars of game studies and narratology.

https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120221084453

Petri Lankoski, Thomas Apperley, J. Tuomas Harviainen

Abstract

This article examines the prominent role of Patreon in the rapidly growing sector of crowdfunded pornographic games. Recent research has indicated that, on average, more people (patrons) are funding pornographic digital games on Patreon than other (non-adult) digital games (Lankoski & Dymek, 2020). Graphtreon’s ‘Top Patreon Creators’ list from 9 June 2021 includes six NSFW game projects among the top 50 projects (ranked by number of Patrons).1 For example, Summertime Saga (Dark Cookie), the highest-ranked pornographic game, is third in terms of the number of funders, with 27,791 patrons funding $74,657 per month. While Wild Life – An Adult RPG (Adeptus Steve), which reportedly only had 9417 patrons as of 9 June 2021, receives a monthly income of $94,129 from those pledges.2 The current funding levels for both Patreon projects are considerably higher than when we began our sampling: since January 2020, the funding level for Summertime Saga has risen by 27.86%, while for Wild Life – An Adult RPG it has risen by 21.45%.
Keywords
adult games, content analysis, heteronormativity, non-consensual sex, patreon funding, pornography

Presented by Koenitz, H., and Eladhari, M.P., at DiGRA 2019,  August 8 2019, Kyoto, Japan. Slides at SlideShare.

Paper presented at Teaching Games: Pedagogical Approaches – DiGRA 2019 Pre-Conference Workshop (TGPA:DiGRA2019) August 6 2019, Kyoto, Japan.

Paper presented at DiGRA 2019 Pre-Conference Workshop (TGPA:DiGRA2019) August 6 2019, Kyoto, Japan

Talk by M.P. Eladhari and H.Koenitz, given at NECS Conference, 14 June 2019, Gdansk, Poland

We are organizing another AI & Games focussed workshop at this year’s Foundations of Digital Games conference:
2019 Workshop on User Experience of Artificial Intelligence in Games @ FDG

How do players experience Artificial Intelligence (AI) in games? How do they feel about the AI, and how is what the AI does communicated to the player? Is there interaction with the AI, and if so, who takes the lead? Is this a social experience, a believable one? Is the AI creative, or at least perceived as such? And finally, is the AI making the game experience better?

AIs fill many roles in games, from companions to antagonists, from storytellers to architects and game testers. With all the recent focus and technical advances in AI this is likely to increase, and the recent popularity of artificial intelligence is moving AIs to the foreground of games. This raises many questions — and in this workshop, we want to look at those surrounding the player’s user experience with artificial intelligence in its many forms.
The 2019 Workshop on User Experience and Artificial Intelligence encompasses the intersection between UX and AI as it manifests in games. We wish to act as a point of interaction between researchers specialized within these fields, in the hope that this will help facilitate research that allows for the creation of more interesting and robust AI-based game experiences.

This workshop aims to build a community centered on this by putting forward demonstrations of work in the integration of these two areas, as well as models and theories that can be used to create understanding where the areas intersect. We especially welcome demonstrations of work in progress or work showcasing new ideas. We are interested in realized prototypes, demons and applications — especially designed created to explore hypotheses. We are also open to philosophical and humanities-based approaches and provocative ideas.

The workshop is co-located and organized with the 2019 Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) conference in San Luis Obispo, California, USA (August 26-30, 2019).

Here is the full CFP:
Call for Papers to the 2019 Workshop on User Experience of Artificial Intelligence in Games @ FDG

Re-Tellings: The Fourth Layer of Narrative as an Instrument for Critique by Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari was awarded the Best Full Paper Award at the 11th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2018, Dublin, Ireland, December 5–8, 2018.

Abstract:

The fourth layer of narrative in Interactive Narrative Systems (INS), such as games, is the players’ re-tellings of the stories they have experienced when playing. The occurrence of re-tellings can be considered as an indicator for a well designed INS and as an instrument of critique – the experiences of play are important and memorable to such a degree to the players that they find them worthy to tell others about. The notion of the fourth layer is added to the structural model of IN Systems having (1) a base architectural layer giving conditions for a (2) second layer of narrative design, while a (3) third layer is the narrative discourse – eg. the unique, session-specific played or traversed sequences of events. In relation to this, the Story Construction model is described.

The paper “Gamifying the perfect employee – A zombie in the organisation?”
by Mikolaj Dymek was presented at the 36th Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism and the 7th Australasian Caucus of the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism conference, August 17-20 2018, Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan

This paper explores zombies as a rewarding avenue of inquiry on the notion of so-called gamification within organisational settings, and in particular as analogy for its users and players – the organisational strive to mold the “perfect employee” transmutes its characteristics into that of the zombie. The analysis centres on implicit and explicit conceptualisations of gamification players/users (Hibbert, 2003; Ayllon and Azrin, 1968; Kazdin and Bootzin, 1972; Asplund, 1987) in gameful/playful systems such as organisations (Huotari and Hamari, 2017), as a departure point, to propose that many assumptions of players/users are based on generalisations that reduce the nature of the player/user to the point of dehumanised subjects with voracious and simplistic driving forces, which lends itself to analogies of “zombification” of users.

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