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]