Ted Friedman, "Civilization and its Discontents: Simulation, Subjectivity and Space"

(In On a silver platter: CD-ROMs and the promises of a new technology)

- Video games seem to restructure/reorganize perception (driving like a game example)
- New frameworks for interpreting, understanding, mapping the real world
- Games are still new, not yet codified/familiar ("killer apps," rapid technological advancement and demand for novelty)
- Always-ideological ways of seeing -> presented in a fresh light? Radical possibilities?
- Civilization combines radical challenge and conventional ideological assumptions
- Omnipotent, almost omniscient leader-god with many roles (although, all the roles are essentially the same - resource management)
- "Internalize the logic of the program" -> teaches systems of thought -> identify with the computer (I might argue that these systems of thought are already internalized)
- Neither competition nor collaboration: synthesis, being-with, melding
- Immersion as being an extension of the machines (not the other way around)
- Cybernetic circuit/feedback loop
- Player is integrated into the system
- Simulation games create the opportunity to think through/reflect on what it means to be a cyborg
- New kinds of stories based on geography, space (encounter, transform, master spaces) Jenkins and Fuller, "spatial stories"
- Transform places into spaces (Heideggerian summoning forth of nature as standing-reserve?)
- Ther eis never a personal, subjective "tour" experience of Civilization's spaces (it remains abstract)
- "The story of the map itself" (ie: the system itself) -> not just an environment, the hero also
- Maps (and charts, graphs, etc.) are collections of subjective judgements in which subjectivity is ideologically erased (objectivity, scientific "god's-eye view")
- Does the technological aura of computers enable this erasure?
- Felxibility of multiple strategies (war, technology, etc.)
- Underlying truth that "global co-existence is a matter of winning and losing"
- Abstractness oversimplifies the complexities of imperialism, colonialism, etc.
- Transhistorical conceptions of science, religion, nation, etc.
- Purely functional role of religion and the humanities
- Scientific determinism
- Absence of hybridity -> nationalistic destiny (later versions of Civilization mediate this somewhat with the addition of Culture as a quantifiable gameplay element, but this carries with it another set of ideological assumptions)
- Possibility of transcending these assumptions through play -> mastery requires an understanding of how the system works (But can't this "understanding" just as easily take the form of precisely the same transparent, implicit, normalized ideological truth that Friedman suggests it might help to transcend?)

William Uricchio, "Simulation, History and Computer Games"

(In Handbook of Computer Game Studies)

- Sierra's Grand Prix Legends - demands for historical accuracy from fans, source of pleasure
- What are the claims and implications of historical games?
- Interaction between present-day player and representation/simulation of historical moment challenges fact/fixity
- Tension between the ludic and documentation (specific vs speculative)
- How do human subjects encounter textualizations of the past/how are they "written into" the past -> "interactions with the process of historical inscription"
- New ways of understanding history and historiography
- Two extremes of historical computer game approaches - specific events (accuracy, structured by re-created conditions) and historical process (abstract, simulation games, long-term historical development, structured by historical principles/ideology)
- Both extremes paint historiy as a multivalent process, many possibilities, interpretations, outcomes
- Some parallels to filmic representations of history, but the crucial difference is that games also simulate process
- Poststructural turn in history -> historical endeavour as play ("what if?")
- Destabilize heirarchies, subvert master narratives
- Some historical games value both accuracy and opportunities for creative intervention -> play emerges in the space between detail and improvisation
- Non-specific simluation-oriented games are less detailed, more abstract, but encourage broader engagement with historical process
- Civilization: broad epochal development
- Actual complexity of lived historical events vs the mediated snapshot of representation (inevitably partial, deforming, delimiting and presentist)
- Poststructural critique of re-presentation (how?) and of authority/objectivity (by whom?) "question reality, question authority" (Berkhofer)
- Coincides with the new representational possibilities of computers
- How do historical games mediate the past? (As opposed to textual mediations)
- "History as time-bound meaning situated in an ever-changing present"
- Simulation as process guided by certain principles -> pedagogical application
- "Virtual history," speculative
- Problem of a fixed beginning to a historically-specific game (where does an event actually begin?) -> structuring assumptions branch into an array of possibilities (hindsight)
- Simulation approach allows radical reframing -> structuring assumptions about long-term historical development, "ideologically-positioned maxims," organizing principles
- Poblocki: Civilization as the history of the Western state (implicit and explicit)
- Historical games fulfil demands for historical reflexivity, subjectivity and possibility but adhere closely to historiographic status quo in other ways (working against the speculative "freedom" celebrated by the games?)
- Uricchio thinks they succeed more generally as a means of reflecting on the past
- What if historiographic epistemologies were used as structuring agencies for games? Explicit and reflexive rather than underlying assumptions (What would this look like? Civilization could be customized to follow a Hegelian or Marxist theory of history rather than a Heideggerian technological determinism?)

Simon Egenfeldt Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca, "What is a Game?"

(In Understanding Video Games)

- Half Life 2 vs poker (both games, so different)
- Importance of specific definitions (not a question of correctness)
- Political dimension to definition
- Wittgenstein: family resemblances (does not actively seek a common feature, uses arbitrary examples, problem of formal/informal games)
- Huizinga: magic circle (ideological agenda to protect play as valuable)
- As special context were specific rules apply, games are not unique (but does Huizinga ever say they are? Why does a definition have to identify specific, unique features? -> exemplification structure?)
- Different to say they are separate than to say they are unique in their separateness
- Castronova: maintain separation or else play will lose its appeal
- Ways games extend into the real world and are not separate: time investment, moods, communication of ideas and values, behaviour, direct impact such as buying in-game items
- Callois: play is voluntary, uncertain, unproductive and make-believe
- Agon/competition, alea/chance, mimicry/imitation, Illinx/vertigo (and many hybrid combinations)
- Paidia vs ludus (not entirely distinct)
- Arbitrary categories? Too blurry?
- What about open-ended/free-form play within rules (SimCity example)
- McLuhan: games are tied to and reveal the nature of culture, and release tention (but can also create tension)
- Bateson: games as meta-communication, communication about communication, play is not taken at face value, communicates its un-reality (link to fiction)
- Sutton-Smith: multifaceted nature of games, definition is determined by purpose
- Games emerge as societies develop
- Finite, fixed, goal-oriented
- "An excercise of voluntary control systems in which there is an opposition between force, confined by a procedure and rules in order to produce a disequilibrial outcome."
- Meade: make-believe as part of the genesis of the self
- Adopt temporary selves (different from animal play)
- Rules enable/require consciousness of other palyer's roles, integration into a group
- Internalize the generalized other
- Jenkins: game as popular/lively art, popular aesthetics, emotional impact (parallels to earlier popular media)
- Infancy argument, still banal, formulaic, but have potential
- Player control, feedback are central
- Parlett: games have ends and means (requires a winner)
- Suits: restrictive rules to inhibit progress towards a goal (ie: inefficient means)
- Crawford: representation, interaction, conflict, safety
- Representation and safety are debateable (abstract games, indirect consequences)
- Formal definitions of digital games...
- Salen and Zimmerman: system, artificial conflict, rules, quantifiable outcome
- Juul: rule-based formal system, variable and quantifiable outcome, different outcomes have different values, players exert effort, influence and are attached to the outcome, optional/negotiable consequences
- Attitude towards the activity
- Digital games do not always match the classical definition
- Formal definitions help identify biases in our understanding of games, clarify whether observations are unique to video games (again, why do they have to be unique? Surely games share many, many features with other things and phenomena, why should a definition have to entail uniqe features?)
- Pragmatic definitions, "tools for action" (not so much pragmatic definitions as game design philosophies... aren't there also pragmatic definitions that scholars use?)
- Meier's "series of interesting choices" is an aesthetic stipulation or personal philosophy, not so much a definition
- Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek: mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics (rules/code, gameplay, response); sensation, fantasy, narrative, challenge, fellowship, discovery, expression, submission
- Design tools, not an actual account
- Genre
- Wolf's ridiculous list
- Aarseth's series of genre variables that apply to all games to varying degrees (questionably useful)
- Genres are arbitrary, but create expectations, financial function of genre
- Some systems of genre are more consistent (based on one clear criterion)
- Nielsen et al suggest categorization based on a game's success criteria
- Problem: games without explicit goals -> special category, process-oriented games
- Action games: motor skill, hand-eye coordination
- Adventure games: thinking, solving, patience
- Strategy games: between action and adventure, distant role of the general/god (turn based is closer to adventure, real-time is closer to action)
- Process-oriented games: system to play with for entertainment (toy), player character within (closer to action/adventure), or control over the system (closer to strategy)
- Process-oriented games may still encourage certain types of play over others
- Simulation games (sub-category of process-orienteD) mimic concrete, real-world experiences, so SimCity and SimEarth don't count (uh...)
- Nielsen et al's system of genre is just as problematic as any other system, and is hardly consistent (what exactly is the clear, single criterion? Successful gameplay actions? Then why aren't Strategy games simply divided up between action and adventure? It seems like the categories are also defined by whether the player controls one singular character or commands multiple characters)
- Additionally, the categories are confusing because they use familiar generic language ("action game," "simulation game") but disregard some colloquial understandings of those terms
- As with virtually all other approaches to genre in digital games, Nielsen et al miss the point that genre is a meaning-making discursive construct, not an objective tool and should be approached as such

Simon Egenfeldt Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca, "Studying Video Games"

(In Understanding Video Games)

- Financial, cultural, aesthetic significance of games
- Is game research science? Methodologically not necessarily, but in terms of "systematic, rigorous and self-critical production of knowledge," it can and should be
- Raise our standards to gain academic credibility, rather than vilifying other disciplines and the academy generally for not recognizing game studies
- Renewal of interest in popular culture, scholars who grew up with games, growing complexity of games have contributed to the emergence of game studies
- Relationships with game designers are a unique feature of the field (but for how long?)
- Many appraoches to games tackle many different questions
- Game/Rules, Player, Culture, Ontology as the four main perspectives one can take on games
- Simulation community vs game studies community
- Formalist vs "situationist" (poor choice of words) groups within game studies

Simon Egenfeldt Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca, "Introduction: Games as a Field"

(In Understanding Video Games)

- Many are no longer satisfied with "passive" entertainment (weird place to start...)
- Distinction between pre-digital/digital games
- Survey most influential/important developments and perspectives in game studies
- Interdisciplinary variety
- Game studies still young, messy
- Unanswered questions: What is a game? Why are there games? Why do some people prefer certain games? How to games affect the player?
- "There is much to be done."

Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, "Build It to Understand It: Ludology Meets Narratology in Game Design Space"

(In Worlds in Play)

- If game scholars are contribute to game design/the advancement of the form (why would they want to?), they must understand design, rather than only analyzing existing games -> explore the new territory they imagine in their theory (but why should they be imagining new territory?)
- Player agency as the heart of the tension between ludology and narratology
- Mateas and Stern created Façade to explore this tension
- Complexity of game design problems requires the construction of experimental games to map/discover new areas of game design space
- Existing games only represent a small fraction of the possibility of games, so game scholars need to speculate on and explore those spaces to truly understand games
- So, according to Mateas and Stern game studies should be guided by a hypothetical, imaginary gamespace that will somehow reveal to us what games truly are/will be as we explore it? That's dumb. Games are whatever they are at any given moment, and are changing constantly... why would we assume that the true nature of games are in it's hypothetical future development, and not in their actual cultural-historical contexts? And for that matter, why would we assume that games have a true nature that can be revealed by making new games? Absurd.

William Huber: "Fictive Affinities in Final Fantasy XI: Complicit and Critical Play in Fantastic Nations"

(In Worlds in Play)

- How does FFXI generate space/tasks of play and situate the player?
- Altman's genre theory: semantically fantasy, syntactically an MMO (why does everyone ignore pragmatics?!)
- Fantasy as a fictional geography for working out questions of race, nation, ethnos, etc.
- Playable as procedure in games (actualization)
- Fantasy as an episteme created by always-ideological processes of replacement, subtraction and augmentation
- In-game races reference real-world ethnicities, relationships (and hybridize)
- Mechanisms of complicity: relation between nation-state and aboriginal/subaltern enemies; conquest, dominance of regions in the game; necessity of coordinated efforts (ie: partying up) that overshadows individual choice/agency
- This inescapable complicity is revealed through backstories, etc., but there is still no "real" historical agency
- So where, then, is the critical play promised by the title? (Expansive gameplay could be an example of this.)

Clara Fernández-Vara, José Pablo Zagal, Michael Mateas, "Evolution of Spatial Configuration in Videogames"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Spatial configurations from early games to today, how they position the player, how they affect gameplay
- "Cardinality of gameplay," how the player can have in the game (1D, 2D, 3D), distinct from spatial representation (2D, 3D)
- Discrete vs continuous spaces, segmentation (contiguous would be a better word here!)
- Unlikely for more spatial configurations to emerge, but possibly new, impossible cardinalities (Portal, etc?)
- 2D single screen (discrete); 2D space/1D gameplay (discrete or continuous); 2D space/2D gameplay (discrete or continuous); 3D space/1D gameplay (continuous); 3D space/2D gameplay (discrete or continuous); 3D/3D (discrete or continuous);

Stephen N. Griffin, "Push Play: An Examination of the Gameplay Button"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Crawford: simple input devices (button) -> cognition-centred approach to games
- By contrast, long history of games that involve the abilities/idiosyncrasies of the body, no reason why symbolic input is the only way
- Importance/prevalence of the button as the primary means of taking action in digital games
- Buttons on the border of the magic circle (accept limits by participating)
- Transparancy (presumed) of simple input devices
- Reduces gesture and performance to symbolic action, automation, functional value, productivity, efficiency, not expression
- Lack of embodied interaction impedes the medium?
- Importance of physicality of input (example of musicians and instruments)
- It would seem that the Wii (and Kinect, and Move) actualizes this argument, but does it also reduce gesture to merely symbolic action? (Diagonal slash is more or less the same thing as the Y button... or is this just a function of technology not being advanced enough?) Maybe Guitar Hero is a better example - performance, expression

John A. L. Banks, "Opening the Production Pipeline: Unruly Creators"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Ethnography of game developer/fan relationships (Banks worked for the developer in question)
- Changing relationships between users and producers in the games industry
- Fan communities, end-user creativity
- Voluntary fan labour, distributed co-production
- What are the implications of opening the commercial development to voluntary fan content creators? (Not an opposition)
- Lower cost of production by using fan labour (otherwise game could not be released)
- Problems with delays, consistency, support, etc. (logistics)
- Not unwitting exploitation, fan-creators are aware participants in a mode of practice
- What if the development process was actually organized around fan content creation?
- Banks' perspective is very much from the commercial side of things ("how can/are the industry" questions, not "how can/are the fans")

Kenji Ito: "Possibilites of Non-Commercial Games: The Case of Amateur Role-Playing Games Designers in Japan"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Role of users in technology
- Blurs boundary between user/manufacturer -> creative amateurs
- Amateur RPG designers in Japan (RPG Tkool 2000)
- Community network of circulation, interaction outside commercial realm
- Emphasis on story in these games
- Synthesis between socioeconomic and content studies (text and context)
- Textual difference between games made in different socioeconomic conditions
- Amateur RPGs: "old-fashioned" graphics (otaku nostalgia?)
- Versatility (simple to extremely complicated games)
- Low technical threshold
- Accessibility of games (no powerful PC required)
- Free distribution (standalone)
- Active community of users
- Not necessarily computer experts
- Mostly young males
- Pleasurable, not utilitarian activity (fantasy, world-making, imagination)
- Telling stories, sharing
- Fan games/tributes/inspired-by games
- Downloadable resources
- Collaboration is common (if only for beta testing)
- Reviews, evaluation, competitions (distinction)
- After-release support
- Darker or taboo thematic elements, social critique, unconventional narratives, self-reflection, personal expression are possible outside the mainstream (the same old "indie" or "alternative" argument)
- Greater technological sophistication = more homogeneity in the mainstream games industry? (Ito doesn't really offer any evidence of this)
- Amateur designers accomodate this lack and the diversity of personal taste, potential for artistic expression in this context, not just entertainment
- Ito's view of amateur game design is much too rosy-eyed and uncritical

Seth Giddings: "Playing With Non-Humans: Digital Games as Technocultural Form"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Games as everyday technoculture (not just futuristic/cyborg content)
- Technological agency
- Sociology of Science and Technology, Actor-Network Theory: challenge social constructivism
- Problems with encoding/decoding model: limits analysis of materiality of technology (agency, effects, affordances)
- Production, physical form, capabilities are meaningful, have effects , constraints, facilitates certain uses and resists others
- Society and material reality are mutually constitutive
- World and artifacts are both physical and symbolic
- Humans are not the only agents in the world (reject the "object hypothesis")
- ANT: "reciprocal relationship between artifacts and social groups," "networks linking human beings and non-human entities"
- Scoieties are fundamentally technological
- Symmetry of agency between humans/non-humans -> no firm conceptual distinction
- Notion that games both aestheticize and realize the cyborg idea: blurred boundary between subject and object still privileges the human
- Rather, a cybernetic circuit (indissociable)
- Practical, pragmatic to undestand computers as intentional systems (rather than as designed artifacts, too difficult to anticipate: chess programs); side-step question of actual consciousness
- Gameplay as engagement with artificial intelligence (ie: an agent)
- Advance Wars 2 (GBA) example
- Code/simulation, not text/representation
- AI as simulation (automata) -> intentional system we play with/against
- Mundane, playful, everyday, ubiquitous example of relationships between human and non-human actors (technoculture)
- "distributions and delegations of agency between technologies and players in the act of playing"

Holin Lin and Chuen-Tsai Sun, "'White-Eyed' and 'Griefer' Player Culture: Deviance Construction in MMORPGs"

(In Worlds in Play)

- "White-eyed player" = Taiwanese griefer
- Deviancy in gaming societies
- Move beyond individual conception of grief play -> collective recognition/reaction
- Power in social interactions
- Technopower (code); administrative power (GMs); normative power (explored here)
- "Social control mechanisms"
- Labelling as an othering process
- Uncertain age/gender distinctions in online play
- Grief/white-eyed play associated with imagined youngage
- Players can have separate avatars for normative and deviant play (explorative?), transfer benefits (items, etc.) from one to the other
- Stigmatizer/other griefers in order to define/secure normative identity
- "Griefer roles as collective player reactions to a yet-to-be-normalized environment"
- Explicit (identifiable, deviant, self-aware) vs implicit (occasional, fluid, accidental) griefers
- Definition of griefer is ambiguous, changing, subjective
- Blame motivation/experience level; RW identity/characteristics
- Percieved helplessness against griefers (better to ignore, "don't feed a troll")
- Self-aware griefers "professionalize" grief play (clans, notoriety, etc.), while unconcsious, occasional griefers stigmatize along with everyone else, rationalize as mistakes (us/them, cannot be both a griefer and "normal")
- Anxieties about cross-age play enabled on a large scale by MMOs -> griefers are young, kids, immature
- MUDs: gender anxiety, MMOs: age anxiety
- Calling griefers kids is an attempt to define the "right" age to be playing (reject stigma that games are childish by othering percieved "childish" play)

Patrick Crogan, "Playing Through: The Future of Alternative and Critical Game Projects"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Interrogate the critical potential of games
- Relationship of games to their contexts
- Frasca opposes simulation vs narrative, theatrical forms - simulation as the form of the future
- Complicate notion that simulation stands alone/is uniquely suited to face the future (military past must be considered)
- Tekken Torture Tournament, Painstation (theatrical, public exhibition/performace)
- Relation to reality TV -> spectacle of pain and suffering (military training connection?)
- Real-world consequences
- Both made real/actual and theatricalized, made virtual, removed in the staging
- Defining, delimiting, controlling (military "theatre of operations")
- Undermines the suspension of the real/normal
- Games reproduce the "primal scene" of military cybernetics -> in doing so they can modify it, critically in some cases
- Framing/placing/situating, not representing
- Projective, not reflective (future, means of speculation?)
- Frasca: narrative = past, drama = present, simulation = future (projective, experimental, hypothetical)
- Aesthetic development of simulation also future-oriented in Frasca's conception
- Origins of simulation in military technoscience are ignored
- This refusal of the past is echoed in the presumed future-orientation of simulation
- Where is the past in simulation?
- September 12: subvert conventional forms, open critical reflection
- Donkey John: ironic "skinning," references real politics
- Under Ash: inversion/reproduction
- Frasca: simulation as a tool to promote critical thinking and highlight relationship between model and reality
- Narrative can also be future-oriented (produced to be read), tool for arranging/understanding experience
- Simulation reproduces this aspect of narrative, anticipating future
- War gaming, tension between historical record and complexity, unpredictability that created it and needs to be simulated
- Simulation (and narrative, and drama) as mnemotechnic: technologies for the retention of human experiences (Stiegler)
- "Draws on the past with a view to the future"
- Simulation emerges out of narrative, drama, inherits/reproduces them as a process of memorization for orienting the individual/culture in time and space, in the present and towards the future
- Pre-emptive force of simulation is a product of modern rationality
- Its heritage must be remembered as simulation is proliferated, and adopted in the name of different futures

Ian Bogost, "Frame and Metaphor in Political Games"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Political success comes from representation of issues
- Metaphor/cultural construction as an "active conceptual framework that is central to how we understand the world." (Lakoff and Johnson)
- Framing (in Luntz's terms, "context") of the world is central to political discourse
- Words that reflect ideas
- 2004 - first endorsed political games
- Analyze political rhetoric, metaphor and frame as procedural
- Three kinds of ideological frame: reinforcement, contestation and exposition
- Reinforcement: explicitly draw attention to the frame (verbally, outside the game), demonstrate how to think about an issue (Tax Invaders)
- Contestation: rule systems also create frames, challenge apparent ideological frame (Vigilance 1.0) -> satire
- Exposition: expose underlying ideological frame created by the interaction between rules and content (socio-economic disadvantage in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is ignored -> crime as decadence/depravity)
- Exposition is the work of the critic, not the designer
- GTA: SA less stylized than previous GTA games, engaging directly with a cultural-historical moment? I disagree - where GTA: Vice City invokes Scarface and Miami Vice, GTA: SA invokes Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society, and the now-iconic, highly mediated television news coverage of 1990s race riots, etc. As with other games in the series, the game is engaging with popular culture, not "real" history

Ulrike Spierling, "Interactive Digital Storytelling: Towards a Hybrid Approach"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Approaches to interactive storytelling from film production, HCI, game design, AI
- Virtual autonomous characters vs interactive stories
- Accessibility of authoring tools to actual authors
- Author must take responsibility for outcome/effect of interactive narrative (anticipate?)
- Author must maintain control over autonomous agents?
- "Humans are the storytellers, not 'the computer.'"
- Incomprehensible diagrams
- "Having a conversation" with a computer-based artifact ("agent-based conversation")
- Where exactly is the hybrid approach promised in the title?

Renata Gomes, "The Design of Narrative as an Immersive Simulation"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Attempt to generate cinema-style narrative in games has caused a new form/concept of narrative to emerge: immersive simulation
- Agency allows player to be part of the story universe
- Story is more than just a theme
- Two kinds of narrative game: character-oriented and simulation games
- Presence = greater potential for agency? (Why?)
- Affordances: surface is "stand-on-able," for example (Gibson)
- Character-oriented games have a clear journey/goal, sims do not
- "System history" as narrative in sim games
- "Poetic potential of simulation games"
- Narrative as an index of emergence in a complex system? (Personal narratives/narrativization)
- Eisensteinian ideal of pure formal discourse/communication/rhetoric could be achieved through simulation?

Laura Ermi and Frans Mäyrä, "Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Complement game definition/ontology with the player/act of gameplay
- Experience emerges in the "unique interaction process between the game and the player"
- Player and context, take part in the construction of the experience
- Elusive concept of "gameplay"
- Different games, different experiences
- Playing a game as a goal in itself
- Active vs passive (participation), absorption vs immersion (connection)
- Digital games as active, immersive (escapism)
- Immersion as one of the key components of the gameplay experience (is it really? Or is it just desirable?)
- Important aspects for interviewed children: audiovisual quality/style, level of challenge, imaginary world/fantasy
- Gameplay experience/immersion as a multidimensional phenomenon (well, yeah.)
- Sensory immersion, challenge-based immersion, and imaginative immersion (some games combine all three)
- Meaning-making contexts
- Survey to determine levels of immersion, all quite high (people choose favourite games, which tend to be more immersive?)
- Is immersion being confused/conflated with enjoyment, appreciation or aesthetic value? Ermi and Mäyrä say no, but in spite of their efforts to divest it of that value it seems like those connotations remain
- Modality of gameplay experience?

José P. Zagal, Michael Mateas, Clara Fernández-Vara, Brian Hochhalter and Nolan Lichti, "Towards an Ontological Language for Game Analysis"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Game Ontology Project, "framework for describing, analysing and studying games"
- Unified vocabulary
- Heirarchical organization of structural elements, relationships between them
- Not a taxonomy or a classification of types, not design imperatives
- Define, classify "essential" elements of "gameness" in games and gameplay
- Category membership is dependent on context, culture
- "Blackbox analyses" based on what is percieved or experienced by players
- Specific/general/middle or obvious elements, "central" (strong) and marginal/blurry/borderline (weak) examples of each element
- Iterative, adaptive, organic method, grown from the middle starting with the obvious and extending to abstract and specific elements
- Representational elements, fiction, game setting, relationships to other media are bracketed in order to focus on formal/strucutral gameplay elements (Zagal et al acknowledge that more in-depth analyses must account for both and the relationship between them, however)
- Top level abstract categories: interface, rules, goals, entities, entity manipulation
- Each element is described, weak and strong examples are given, "parent" and "child" elements are listed and "part" (compound) elements are identified
- Example: "to own/ownership" (child of entity manipulation) -> saving mushrooms in Super Mario World
- Interface: presentation, input device, input method (hardware and software)
- Rules: framework/model in which game takes place, regulate development and basic interactions
- Two types of rules: gameplay (lives) and gameworld (gravity) - Both determine the possibility space of the game... is this is a meaningful distinction?
- Rules synergies (combinations of rules)
- Goals: objectives, success conditions, whether explicit or not (includes evaluation, feedback, scores, etc.)
- Player imposed goals are not included in the ontology (why? Not concrete?)
- Agent goals, game goals, goal metrics
- Entities: objects, agents, walls, power-ups, etc. (an undeveloped part of the ontology at the time of writing, possibly removed entirely later in lieu of entity manipulation, because actions make entities significant?)
- Entity manipulation: alter the attributes (adjectives)/abilities (verbs) of objects in the game
- To collide, to create, to own, compound actions
- Gameplay space vs gameworld space vs representational space (again, I'm not too sure about the distinction between the first two)
- Levels, waves, checkpoints as sub-elements of the Segmentation of Gameplay element

Janet Murray, "Games as Joint Attentive Scenes"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Problem of rapid development of human cognition and culture
- Understand others as intentional agents (basis of culture)
- "Joint attentional scenes," participants both understand the other as an intentional agent, framework for understanding intentionality and cultural transmission
- Why are games pleasurable if they limit the explorative freedom of play? Perhaps they are joint attentional scenes
- Shared focus, intentionality, symbolic communication
- Understand self as agent, shift perspective, teach/learn
- Games as foundational element of culture, first representational media
- Play as communication (pre-linguistic)
- Games organize behaviour, serve as practice
- Similarity to and separateness from others
- Intrinsically social (spectatorship and performance)
- Unseen intentions -> sense of cause and effect -> narrative sequences
- Link between games and stories at the earliest moment of human consciousness (symbolic communication leading to language, media)
- Episodic culture -> mimetic culture -> mythic culture -> theoretical culture (all endure in one form or another)
- Dance Dance Revolution as mimetic joint attentional scene between human and machine
- Mythic culture: heroic narratives of many games
- Joint attention -> language -> writing
- Ritual -> myth -> theory
- Games (and stories, presumably) as driving force of cognitive/cultural evolution? (Or are they simply a product/side effect?)
- Digital game as mediated consciousness of an implied human programmer
- Both embodied opponent and created (art) object
- Digital games socialize pople into cyborg order, new "symbolic language of interaction"

Julian Kücklich, "From Interactivity to Playability: Why Digital Games are not Interactive"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- "Interactive" has been drained of meaning
- Lowest common denominator definition: "interactivity as a medium's ability to facilitate response" -> tautological, all media are interactive by this definition, old and new
- Digital games are less interactive than non-digital games (fixed rules)
- Games as emblematic of media generally
- Alternative concept: play/playability (also very broad)
- Play as both a mode of interaction and an attitude
- Play as a system that distinguishes between play and non-play (as well as players and non-players)
- Play emerges from tension or friction between different systems (interesting notion!)
- Playing with the rules of a game is outside of the game, but within the realm of play more generally
- Play actions denote/stand in for non-play actions
- Permeable boundaries, crossover between play and "seriousness"
- Tensions in play: constrained freedom; secure creativity; active passivity; voluntary dependence (Silverstone)
- Playability is as much about the player as about the game
- Playability helps understand, identify, model games based on different modalities, pleasures, formal characteristics including openness/closure, freedom/rules, in control/out of control
- Importance of the ambiguity of play

Robin Woods, "Call and Response: Storytelling in the Neverwinter Vault"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- New forms allow us to reconfigure old theories, vice versa (rather than the imperialism argument)
- Narrative emerges between player and designer (not gamer and game)
- All choices made by the player are circumscribed by the designer
- Online forum discussions, fan communities are a channel of communication between players and designers - this is where interactivity is really located, and nowhere else, Woods claims
- "Patching" games as analogous to oral texts, emergent from dialogue, interaction
- Importance of audience to both games and oral performaces
- Neverwinter Nights modding community, feedback between players and designers
- No fixed/final text, always under revision
- Designers cede some authority to players through different versions of the game
- Woods makes an interesting point, but the Neverwinter Vault is hardly emblematic of player/designer interaction more generally

Richard J. Hand, "Theatres of Interactivity: Video Games in the Drama Studio"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Games have replaced film as the main reference point for students
- Games help challenge hegemony of narrative
- Eperiment: play games, bring experiences into the drama studio
- "Theoretical parallels" between digital games and theatre
- In addition to superficial motifs, a "shared state of being" as hermetically sealed worlds
- Player/avatar ~ actor/character (both cross the threshold)
- Force feedback, gaming implements -> props
- Unpredictability within constraints (free will/preordination)
- Avatar/character as both "I" and "he/she" (shifting)
- Hand has developed theatre games based on survival horror

Katie Whitlock, "Beyond Linear Storytelling: Augusto Boal Enters Norrath"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Player as performer in virtual world
- Game narratives are still simplistic, formulaic
- Crawford: "designers" vs storytellers
- Ignoring interactivity in lieu of linearity
- MMORPGs as the most narratively successful -> link to Augusto Boal's theatre theory
- Common features of Forum theatre/MMOs: player's time commitment determines length of experience; change and innovation within the game; continual changes; fluid experience; existing guidelines for characters and experiences
- Spectators assume a character, intervening as spect-actors
- Open forum of debate and dialogue
- Begin with a familiar conflict scenario, open up to improvisation
- Avatar as costume for spect-actor
- Everquest as a social, economic, political world
- Clearly defined world, existing social parameters (community)
- Racial tensions in EQ
- Character class (ie: rogue, warrior) does not in any way equal socioeconomic class! (Whitlock is not the first to conflate these two, and it makes no sense to do so.)
- "Ideal place" for Forum-style debate and dialogue (is it?)
- Character creation within parameters, step into any existing role
- Characters "reflect" creators task and psyche (this seems to contradict the previous statement about stepping into any role...)
- Spect-actor directly intervenes in the story
- Quests as "narrative frames" that can succeed or fail based on player action
- Instancing as different versions/performances of a scenario
- Player-driven economy
- "Rehearse revolution" or "rehearse life" through an active relationship to(simulated) models/systems
- The Sims Online as even closer to Boal (real-world, modern setting)
- Do MMOs really try to solve community problems or address political conflicts? Whitlock is unconvincing on this point.
- Importance of physical presence to Boal (Whitlock links this to EyeToy and Dance Dance Revolution... but these are offline games, so where does this leave MMOs?)
- Is a virtual, customized avatar enough to stand in for physical presence?
- Ubiquitous games that bleed into real life
- Whitlock's conclusions seem to leave MMOs behind. All of her arguments and links to Boal, it seems, would be much stronger if applied to offline games or even non-digital games such as tabletop role-playing games. She spends the whole chapter trying to explain that MMOs are similar to Boal's Forum theatre (or is she saying that they would be a good venue for Forum theatre? It's really not very clear), but I'm just not buying it, and it seems like she isn't either.

Aleksandra K. Krotoski, "Socializing, Subversion and the Self: Why Women Flock to Massively Multiplayer Online Games"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Pre-NES games less male-oriented ("family" games)
- Post-NES "did not appeal to potential female gamers" (that's a pretty bold statement)
- Removes girls and women from computer play
- Failed "girl game" movement (coopted by the industry)
- Renewed interest due to success of MMOs with women
- Community, feedback and play with self appeal to women in MMOs (apparently)
- Expand communication networks into MMOs
- Personalization of characters
- MMOs as less objective-oriented than other games (some, maybe)
- "Relevant setting" (to women) of The Sims Online (as in, the domestic space? Women should stay in the kitchen?)
- Allegiance to online friends/groups
- Feedback from the game/other players = self-confidence
- Choice of (feared/desired) fantasy selves
- Empowerment of women playing male avatars
- Krotoski demonstrates an incredibly shallow conception of gender as a more-or-less fixed concept in this chapter, assuming that there are specific features in games that appeal to women and can thus be used to target games at women... problematic to say the least