Canons—of music, video games, or people—can provide a shared pool of resources for scholars, practitioners, and fans; but the formation of canons can also lead to an obscuring or devaluing of materials and people outside of a canon. The four authors in this colloquy interrogate issues of canons relating to video game music and sound from a var…[Read more]

This presentation brings together and builds on previous studies of queer representation using the LGBTQ Video Game Archive and the Represent Me games database (Cole et al. 2017) in order to investigate unexplored trends and invisible queer intersections in video games. Specifically, we draw on Queer Intersections in Video Games (Mejeur 2018), a…[Read more]

Abstract: In Star Wars Episode I: Racer (1999), players choose between several different podracers (including Anakin Skywalker and Sebulba), and compete in racing tournaments on several planets. While the game currently holds the Guinness record as the best-selling sci-fi racing game of all time and was re-released for Nintendo Switch in 2020,…[Read more]

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected our lives in many ways, including how we choose to spend our time and deal with unprecedented circumstances. Anecdotal reports suggest that many have turned to playing video games during the pandemic. To better understand how games are being used during the lockdown, we conducted an online survey (N = 781) that…[Read more]

The Star Wars films have probably spawned more video game adaptations than any other franchise. From the 1982 release of The Empire Strikes Back on the Atari 2600 to 2019’s Jedi: Fallen Order, around one hundred officially licensed Star Wars games have been published to date. Inevitably, the quality of these adaptations has varied, ranging from t…[Read more]

This is a reflection zine from a course I taught in Spring 2020, ENG 342: “Studies in Popular Culture,” which had a course topic of “Playful Literature and Literary Games.” My goal with this course was to teach students about the ways in which games and literature overlap, particularly through the frame of the zine — DIY print publications that…[Read more]

This is the zine-version of my syllabus from a course I taught in Spring 2020, ENG 342: “Studies in Popular Culture,” which had a course topic of “Playful Literature and Literary Games.” My goal with this course was to teach students about the ways in which games and literature overlap, particularly through the frame of the zine — DIY print…[Read more]

O presente artigo propõe-se a analisar o primeiro jogo da franquia de videogames Sid Meier’s Civilization, concentrando-se em demonstrar a fundamentação de sua representação do tempo histórico em concepções sobre a “aceleração da história” que Reinhart Koselleck considera terem surgido apenas com a modernidade, mas que no jogo são universaliza…[Read more]

This study measured the effects of playing commercial video games on the development of the desirable skills and competences sometimes referred to as ‘graduate attributes’. Undergraduate students in the Arts and Humanities were randomly assigned to either an intervention or a control group. Previously validated, self-report instruments to mea…[Read more]

Qualitative interview data is presented in support of previously-published quantitative evidence that suggests commercial video games may be used to develop useful skills and competencies in undergraduate students. The purpose of the work described here was to document the attitudes of those students involved in the quantitative study and to…[Read more]

Focussing the Nasa’s Opportunity Rover, the essay claims the field of creativity as definitively human, supported by Vilém Flusser’s understanding the the “apparatus”.

Zusammenfassung
In diesem Beitrag beschreibe ich einen Typus von Glücksspielen, der über mehrere Jahrhunderte in Mittel- und Westeuropa verbreitet war. Meines Wissens gibt es weder für das Spielgerät noch für das damit gespielte Glücksspiel eine einheitliche Bezeichnung. Nach einer einleitenden Beschreibung (1) und einem Vergleich mit ähnli…[Read more]

As Sue Kim noted at the Narrative 2018 conference, the field of narrative theory is long overdue for a reckoning with its lack of diversity and its frequent silence on issues of race, gender, and sexuality in favor of supposedly neutral, universal qualities of narrative (Hogan 2010). To be sure, the recent works by scholars such as Warhol, Lanser,…[Read more]

Developed by British game studio The Chinese Room, Dear Esther belongs to a contemporary genre of games known as “walking simulators”. These titles involve little more than travelling from one point to another, sometimes interacting with the occasional object while leisurely taking in the surrounds.

Narrative has been a central topic in game studies since the beginnings of the field, particularly in the foundational debates between narratology and ludology over whether or not games are narrative. Yet in the aftermath of those debates narrative has remained significantly limited to being a linear or at best multilinear form, and studies of…[Read more]

Glückshaus is a relatively modern version of the larger family of Games of Seven (games played with two six-sided dice and a stake board with felds usually numbered 2-12, often with an emphasized 7.). This paper looks at various historical versions of the game and shows how the modern Glückshaus version and its pecularities (e.g. a missing feld f…[Read more]

ELO2019 Programme & Books of Abstracts, University College Cork, July 15-17, 2019

Fluff means fiction, framing and flavour; it’s the material around a game’s actual rules, that illustrates and indicates but has no substantive impact on how the game is played.

Rules are crunch. They are – particularly if you’re a serious player or a traditional ludologist – the important bit.

“If your game doesn’t blend the two, it says o…[Read more]