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1. Slow Games, Slow Poems: The Act of Deliberation in "Slow Year"

   “Video games are actions,” declared Alexander Galloway in a manifesto that stakes out the
   essential differences between videogames and other forms of expressive culture, such as
   literature, photography, and cinema. But what about videogames in which action looks like
   inaction? What about videogames in which action means sitting still? What about a videogame
   that purports to be less a game and more a meditation—a work of literature? In this paper
   I explore a prominent yet remarkably understudied example of a slow game—a game that
   questions what counts as “action” in videogames. This game is A Slow Year (2010), designed
   for the classic Atari 2600 console by Ian Bogost. Comprised of four separate movements
   matching the four seasons, A Slow Year challenges the dominant mode of action in videogames,
   encouraging what I call “acts of deliberation.” These acts of deliberation transform the core
   mechanic of games from “action” (as Galloway would put it) into “experience”—and not just
   any experience, but the kind of experience that Walter Benjamin identifies as Erfahrung, an
   

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 21.06.2012 - 12:55

2. Mining the Arteroids Development Folder

   In September 2008 Jim Andrews shared with me the “Arteroids Development Folder:” a collection of drafts, versions, source files, and other materials that document the work that led to the publication of his “poetic shoot 'em up" Arteroids (http://www.vispo.com/arteroids/index.htm).

   Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 09:54

3. Do Games Really Ever End?

   During the 1990’s, reports of people dreaming about arranging geometric shapes became so widespread that newscasts worldwide dubbed the phenomena the “Tetriseffect.” In The Aesthetics of Play, Brian Upton posits that we play games by acting on internalized analogues of the game’s formal constraints. We need not understand the complexity of its code, so long as “we have constructed a set of internal constraints that correctly predict future evolutions of the game’s state, ... we can make meaningful decisions” (Upton 119). Between play sessions, these mental models of gameworlds allow players to continue playing the game by planning new strategies or considering difficult puzzles, thus never really ceasing to play the game. My proposed paper will build on Upton’s epistemological model of play to explore how we play our favorite games even after the computer has been shut down by looking at activities such as metagaming, coaching, and training in the competitive on-line shooter Overwatch.

   Stian Hansen - 03.09.2018 - 18:41

4. Walking Simulator Video Games–A New Digital Storytelling Artefact–Transportation, not flow

   In the past decade a new genre of video games has emerged; with little action or traditional gameplay this new form has been described as audiovisual novels, ‘freeform unstructured narrative’ (Heron & Belford, 2015), ‘narrative avant-garde’ (Koenitz, 2017), ‘walkers’ (Muscat et al., 2016), ‘literary games’ (Ensslin, 2014), or ‘Walking Simulators’ which was added to the Urban Dictionary in April 2014 as a pejorative description of games where the main purpose appears to be walking around. This new genre has its antecedents in text adventure games, Point and Click adventure games, digital fiction, and art games, yet defining the Walking Simulator as ‘simply’ a game is an unproductive argument in itself (Fest, 2016). Aims and research questions: How do we categorise Walking Simulators? How should we analyse them? What can we find out from that analysis? Methodology and analytical framework Taking a broadly representative sample of Walking Simulators published in the past ten years (most have received critical acclaim and also won BAFTA and similar awards) some common features were identified.

   Vian Rasheed - 12.11.2019 - 21:20

5. American Utopia - Analyzing the Far-Right politics of BioShock: Infinite and Trump's America

   Video games are mirrors to our contemporary reality that reflect our society's philosophies, rhetoric, and more. Published in 2013, BioShock: Infinite offered a glimpse into the reality of a Utopian America ruled by conservative far-right identity politics. In 2016, Donald Trump's election as the 45th President of the United States brought to the forefront of America what is often ignored. In this essay, I argue what Utopia is to the far-right by analyzing the society of Columbia, the use of media in the state, and more. Overall, I argue that politics and ideas of Utopia can be simulated into video games to understand far-right narratives of Trumpian politics better.

   Milosz Waskiewicz - 25.05.2021 - 15:24