Literature and Videogames: Adaptation and Reciprocity

SGEM International Multidisciplinary Scientific Conferences on Social Sciences and Arts, 2017

The paper deals with the theoretical reflection of digital gameplayers (sub)culture. The authors examine these aspects in connection with the media studies and also with the theory of digital games. The main objective of this paper is to point out the status of digital gameplayers community in a current socio-culture reality. The introductory part of the study defines the key terms as the audience, subculture, gamer and digital game. In the next part of the paper the authors explain the problematic of gamers´ subculture from the perspective of media studies and theory of digital games. Special attention is focused on the characteristics, manifestations and interpretations of this culture subsystem. The primary objective of the authors is therefore an effort to explication of the phenomenon. In conclusion the authors aimed at the description of particular type of digital gameplayers community with emphasis on its status in a contemporary media culture. The research material is based on the FPS game (First-Person Shooter game) Counter Strike. To achieve the main goal the authors use the method of logical and discursive analysis.

Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Ephemerides, 2017

The ambition of this paper is to discuss the possible ways of analysing one of the latest media of our times, the video games. By way of preliminary, we attempt to define the new media element that we call video game, followed by an investigation into the possibilities of narrative/discursive and medial analyses applied to video games. We deem our article necessary as video games define our present to a great extent, filling in a considerable amount of time in the life of young and middle-aged individuals alike-still, there are very few domestic analyses on the complex narrative structures, rhetorical practices, and intermedial relationships of computer games. News on the extreme 'overuse of computer games' take charge of public discourse, reportingotherwise rightly-on cases featuring computer game users for whom these media served as sources of inspiration for their engagement in violent acts. But, at the same time, we often tend to overlook the fact that this new medium offers excellent new possibilities for 'taking possession' of complex virtual worlds, establishing new types of communication media, and creating first-class narratives.

This undergraduate dissertation from 2009 postulates that videogames are an exemplary postmodern medium, as per an understanding of postmondernism garnered from the writing of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. It elaborates that the medium can illustrate Douglass Kellner's postmodern appropriation of neo-Gramscian hegemony, and contributes to a growing understanding of a participatory culture. Hideo Kokima's Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001) is analysed as an example of a postmodern text within the medium.

2012

2019

This paper discusses the contemporary relevance of video games within the larger context of an increasingly technologyoriented societies. The argument proposed is that an optimistic view of the future as imagined by transhumanism could lead to an anticipation of radical goals like prolonged lifespan and immortality which, at present, remain unattainable, thereby creating a disconnect between expectations and outcomes. This paper argues that video games act as platforms for subconscious attempts at subverting this disconnect by providing players with the opportunity to create and/or inhabit game avatars. The existence of players within virtual game worlds as avatars is compared to the act of creating horcruxes in the fictional world of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series where horcrux is a contraption that helps overcome death. By comparing the notion of horcrux to the habitation of game avatars, this paper argues that a video game is a potential site for the manifestation of figurat...

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2017

In this paper, I discuss videogames as a form of cultural ecology using the examples of Flower (2013) and Shadow of the Colossus (2011). As foundation for this thesis I deploy Farca's " Emancipated Player " as a player-type receptive for representational art and as a form of dialectic meaning-production between an actual player of this type and the implied player (the game's design). This will be connected to Zapf's notion of literature as a cultural ecology. Addressing similarities in function and differences in the mediality of literature and videogames and considering recent studies in game-theory and ecocriticism, I will demonstrate that emancipated play of aesthetically complex videogames can be considered a condition for videogames to function as a form of cultural ecology and thus also as a regenerative force in the larger cultural context akin to literature. The exemplary analyses consider especially the use of unnatural anti-conventions as a self-reflexive technique for reflections about videogames themselves, which are connected to reflections about the empirical reality. The games offer perspectives creating blanks for the player to be filled with her imagination and consequently unfold arguments about the aesthetic condition and conventions of videogames as a mirror of a neoliberal society without regard for the environment or the non-human. It becomes clear that representation or procedural rhetoric alone cannot be sufficient to describe the aesthetic effect of the videogame as a Gesamtkunstwerk (an all-embracing art form). They can only function as cultural ecology, if we consider them as multimedia artworks offering a degree of openness for the imaginative power of the player. To play videogames is not either to observe or to inhabit, it is the amalgamation of both which enables their creative force to influence the discourse as cultural ecology.

Article, 2022

The relevance of the article is fixed by the situation of methodological revision of media theory tools in the context of the analysis of modern media phenomena. The purpose of the article is to identify the place and status of narratological analysis, which has become a classic method of video game analysis. To achieve this goal, the authors consider it important to turn to a critical revision of the narratological analysis of video games and perform an act of reassembling the methodology under the new requirements of the time. For this purpose, the article analyzes the development of both the current situation and the dynamics of the use of the narratological method.

ABSTRACT: This article aims at relating a research project about locality of videogame content to the larger body of knowledge in game studies. Based on the belief that video games function as a cultural voice that is not generation-specific, in the same way films are, the research project Local Videogames seeks to create and apply a special model of building game narratives out of local experiences; stories from the collective popular memory of one region as opposed to the familiar and metropolitan narratives. The goal of our article is to place the project and its game production in the perspective of game studies. We attempt to construct this relation in the light of Melcer’s (2015) study and based on key concepts in game studies: gamification, textuality, flow, meaning-making, and affordance. RESUMO: Este artigo tem como objetivo fazer um relato de projeto de pesquisa sobre localização de conteúdo de video game, como parte da área de estudos de jogos eletrônicos. Com base na crença de que os jogos de video game funcionam como uma voz cultural, que não é específica de uma geração da mesma forma que os filmes são, o projeto de pesquisa Local Videogames procurou criar e aplicar um modelo especial de construção de narrativas de jogo a partir de experiências locais; histórias originárias da memória popular coletiva de uma região em oposição às narrativas familiares e metropolitanas. O objetivo de nosso artigo é situar o projeto e sua produção de jogo na perspectiva dos estudos de jogos. Nós tentar construir essa relação à luz dos estudos de Melcer (2015) e com base em conceitos chave em estudos de jogo: gamificação, textualidade, fluxo, construção de significado e permissão.

XIV Symposium of Mexican Students and Studies “Knowledge into Solutions”, 2016

[This material was Published by the Committee of the Symposium of Mexican Students in Edinburgh, UK Edinburgh, Scotland, UK December 2016.] Addresses videogames as an ergodic audio-visual narrative medium, in which we are allowed to explore the borders between interpreters and receivers. Pointing that in the forms of narrative expression and transmission of the story, the mode of acquisition thereof greatly influences the way of use. Reaffirming there are forms of narrative that can only exists or be consumed in certain media, referring specifically to those in which it requires direct intervention and a non-trivial reader, in this case video games. Also describes video games as a narrative form, which offers an open path of the experience of "be" and "being there" through the erlebnis, the act that generate knowledge through interpretation. mexsoc(.)org(.)uk/proceedings/ All rights reserved. This work is registered with the UK Copyright Service. Registration No. 284712509. Symposium of Mexican Students and Studies. ISSN 2514-314X Copyright © 2017 Organising Committee of the Symposium of Mexican Students and Studies. Edinburgh, Scotland, UK December 2016. Romano Ponce-Díaz.

Poetics is the message, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, being transmitted in our time from all media of literature. P i o t r K u b i ń s k i M a r i u s z P i s a r s k i T o m a s z U m e r l e E l ż b i e t a W i n i e c k a spring/summer 2016 B a r r e t t W a t t e n AS MEDIUM P spring/summer 2016 Polisemiotyczność, digitalizacja, reklama (