Strategy games

The ‘‘fortress simulator’’ game Dwarf Fortress (Bay 12 Games, 2006-present) allows players the space to conduct experiments in economics. The player is not granted an avatar in the world, but this does not mean the player is granted the role of a transcendent deity either. Instead, the player operates on the relational level—completely managing all economic interactions and assigning social codes to different spaces. Lacking a ‘‘win’’ condition, players are free to engage with the game however they wish, including allowing for the immediate and unsympathetic demise of the community. As play continues, Dwarf Fortress ceases to be a fortress and becomes what the autonomists describe as a ‘‘laboratory.’’ The social relations of the fortress are upturned and become the site for experiments in production. The fortress too becomes the site for thought experiments on alternative economies, containing not one but many social laboratories.

It is quite usual in strategy games to claim that strategies have a history of their own, chess being the canonical example (Murray 2002). The common strategies of a certain game change over time-often called the "metagame"and can be retraced from a historical perspective. StarCraft II's (Blizzard Entertainment, 2010-) community goes as far as to write histories of specific matchups (Alejandrisha et al. 2012), but every strategy game in some regards opens a space where gameplay can evolve.

Games played directly inside the web browser have many benefits. Browser games do not need software installation. Furthermore since the web has become the ultimate collaboration environment, the games are available for numerous players that can play in collaborative fashion. Through history online communities have birth alongside with browser games. Nowadays online communities have achieved massive user numbers and those can be important part of the browser game itself. This article targets at analyzing and categorizing of browser games. We also discuss financial opportunities relating to browser games and technologies used in those.

This article deals with the philosophical idea of worldmaking pursued through techné, meaning the fusion of the technical means of artistic creation, theorizing, and analysis, but specifically occurring in a feedback loop involving introspection and computation (cybernetic phenomenology). The discussion ranges over a wide variety of topics, including (1) the history of music theory from Ancient Greece to the present (including a rebuttal to Daniel Chua’s (2001) account of music history); (2) emergent properties in music arising from self-organization (explored through the Ancient Chinese abstract strategy board game go); (3) the ontology of musical qualities (properties) and categories (including their relation to visual, tactile, and olfactory qualities and categories). 
Various repertoires, artists, and philosophies are referenced. The essay analyzes aspects of Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, Carter’s String Quartet No. 5, and Lachenmann’s Kinderspiel.  Connections to the author’s own previous analytical and theoretical work are also discussed in relation to his interactive algorithmic audio-visual works (such as Fluxations and FluxNOISations). The techné of these is discussed in terms of logistics as well as aesthetic influences, including Wagner, Liszt, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Crawford, Babbitt, Carter, Xenakis, Parker, Reich, Ligeti, Truax, Oliveros, Kandinsky, Miro, Pollock, Pollock, Hofmann, Rothko, Louis, Frankenthaler, Moholy-Nagy, Newman, Richter, and Brakhage.  The essay touches on philosophical ideas of Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, Harman, and Bogost, and more fully engages the philosophies of Nelson Goodman and Hannah Arendt in connection with artistic creation as relating to the theorizing and analysis of artistic works.     

Contact the author at jmailman@alumni.uchicago.edu
Download the article through JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7757/persnewmusi.54.1.0005
or http://tinyurl.com/zdvkllr

A diferencia de otros géneros del videojuego,
el de estrategia no parece haber atravesado
grandes cambios ni mayores reconfiguraciones
a lo largo de los años. Esa estabilidad puede
observarse comparando las primeras entregas
de Civilization con las últimas: todas
comparten una escena discursiva similar en la
que el texto elabora un jugador modelo a
partir de atribuciones vinculadas con la
interpretación y la gestión de variables, a la
manera de un administrador. Esta relativa
estabilidad, a su vez, puede comprenderse
mejor si se entiende el género de estrategia
como mediatización de una forma lúdica
previa de larga vida social: el juego de mesa de
temática bélica. El pasaje de uno a otro
evidencia la emergencia de una gran cantidad
de novedades (aunque también de
permanencias) que surgen como producto de
cambios de carácter material y discursivo: de
soporte, de dispositivo y de la nueva
centralidad de la interfaz. Este trabajo parte de
un análisis sociosemiótico que trata de dar
cuenta de las particularidades del género de
estrategia en tanto forma mediatizada de los
juegos de mesa bélicos, señalando aspectos
del medio del videojuego que ofician el pasaje
y atendiendo al desplazamiento enunciativo
que parece haberse producido en relación con
la escena discursiva.

Since at least the arrival of 3D graphical displays in the mid-1990s, video games have employed visual perspective to make the flat computer screen appear to be a deep and immersive game world. This essay delineates the three major perspectival modes present in video games today—the first-person, the third-person, and the strategy mode—in order to identify the way in which they make certain political structures operable within the game’s architecture. While periodization is typically elaborated by the historian, sociologist or cultural theorist, here we find a form of periodization internal to the perceptual architecture of contemporary digital media. Such a periodization, this essay argues, is central to the classificatory tools by which subjects and non-subjects are marked out within the societies of control.