Christina Sommerfeldt, "The Embodied Adventurer: Women as Player-Characters, Gamers, and Module-Builders in BioWare's Neverwinter Nights"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Relation between player/avatar and player/game as "a mode of gendered subjectification"
- Character creation and modding as a performance of gender that draws attention to its construction and contingency
- Gender can be subverted in various ways in mods
- Character creation foregrounds gender as an essential feature of personhood
- Romantic subplot options to attract female gamers (Dragon Age is a more recent, highly successful, example of this... a "girlfriend game")
- Female-created mods often deal with gender, sexuality
- Avoid essentializing male and female gaming styles and simply reifying the categories we are trying to challenge
- Need to highlight the construction of gender, race and other categories in digital games
- Sommerfeldt makes some good points but much of the chapter seems sort of empty, disjointed

Harry J. Brown and Michael Oren, "Living Art: Commercial Modding and Code-Illiterate Gamers"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Games "animate our interior desires" -> mods actualize these desires in a particularly vivid, personal/customized way
- Modders "make the games their own"
- Inventive new uses for modes (aesthetic, pedagogical, etc.) thanks to accessible mod tools released by game developers
- Modding is also now a marketing strategy
- Cooperation, not friction, between modders and the industry (allows industry to regulate more closely)
- Mods in which learning is entangled with gameplay
- Brown and Oren have a pretty uncritical, rosy-eyed view of things

Nicholas Taylor, Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell, "Pimps, Players and Foes: Playing Diablo II 'Outside the Box'"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Emergent interactions that leave the "intended" game behind
- Player is constructed by and constructs the game
- Jenkins: "poaching" game elements for a different purpose
- Acquisition and character customization-oriented practices ("pimping") undermine the "official" quest narrative
- Diablo II community is agonistic and individualistic
- After an ordinary, linear play-through of the game, online non-linear jumping enables/encourages emergent narratives and practices based on better weapons and equipment (this is the primary incentive for prolonged engagement with the game)
- Players in this context don't identify with their avatars, rather they see them as tools and status symbols
- Newman: avatars as "sets of capabilities, potentials and techniques"
- Avatar names tend to be instrumental, indicating use value
- Status gained from inventing or achieving novel character builds (especially those that require require wealth and rare items)
- Experimentation and exhibition with/of items and builds
- Rushing: high level character runs new character through the main quest narrative (in order to get it over with), new player leeches XP off higher-level characters
- Community and collaboration are entirely based on bartering and selling, motivated by the desire to cheat, scheme, betray others and individual gain (contrasts with the usually positive associations with those concepts)
- Farming and hacks as "instrumental non-engagement with the game" for wealth and status ("beating" the game)
- Cutthroat trading practices, "hard lessons" rather than help for n00bs
- Accumulation > play

David J. Leonard, "To the White Extreme: Conquering Athletic Space, White Manhood, and Racing Virtual Reality"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Importance of sports games to the industry
- A racialized project
- Black coolness as constructed by white ideology (minstrelsy, not in any way transgressive or liberatory)
- Love/hate for blackness is present in sports games
- Black = athletic, white = intellectual
- Extreme sports as an "alternative" white masculine athletic space (rebellious, dangerous), reaction against "pollutant" blackness in "mainstream" sports
- White male athletes conquer urban black spaces (such as the ghetto, absent of black people in digital game versions), or wild natural landscapes (frontier imagery)
- Affirm/reinforce "common sense" notions about race, gender, sexuality
- Naturalized privilege/superiority of whiteness (race = non-white)
- "it is futile and contemptible to treat cultural productions as pure texts."
- White male as victim, subsequent white male backlash (Beck's Loser as an example of this? Seems a bit different than what Leonard is describing, maybe.)
- Risk-taking, sexual prowess, male bonding and small community, rule-breaking, "alternativeness," individual masculine success, performativity are all celebrated in extreme sports
- Non-white male characters in extreme sports games are either tokens or caricatures
- Non-white female characters are exotic sex objects
- Cultural cache of hip-hop authenticity within virtual ghettos empty of black people, existing to be dominated by white male extreme athletes
- Complete erasure of women in some games, hypersexualization as objects of male pleasure in others
- BMX XXX as exemplary, not isolated and unique, in its construction of a racialized, sexualized space for white male athletic superiority
- (Virtual) white male disregard for the law (graffiti, property damage, skater "mayhem") is marked as badass or extreme, while in reality black males are brutalized and incarcerated for the same crimes
- Would have liked more discussion by Leonard of the relationship between "mainstream" sports games that capitalize on black stars and extreme sports games.

John Unger, Porter Lee Troutman, Jr., and Victoria "Tori" Hamilton, "Signs, Symbols and Pereceptions in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Poor critical reception of Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2
- Theoretical approach to sign/symbol in GTA: Vice City, study of 11 players' use of these signs and symbols
- Signification as both individual and social (in and out of the game)
- A mediated activity
- Avatar as symbolic text "read" by other symbolic texts in the game, informed by real-world player's subjectivity (unorthodox account of what goes on in a digital game)
- Interdiscursive, intrapersonal "planes of development"
- Burke's Pentad: Act/Scene/Agents/Agency/Purpose
- Why do Unger and co. use "agents" and not "actors?"
- Signs become symbols when they are habitual
- Positioning - different ways of being that people appropriate as individuals and members of groups
- How are signs/symbols internalized over short periods of time (microgenetic); how they constitute individual agency (ontological); sharing of strategies, discussion, interaction (sociocultural/historical); large-scale cultural and/or biological changes (phylogenetic)
- All of the above are mutually constitutive, linked through social activity, which is mediated through symbolic means
- Unger and co. overemphasize the interface elements of GTA:VC as if they are the only symbolic elements at play, and treat the actual game-world/space uncritically as if it is more or less equivalent to reality
- Arbitrary condition changes during empirical study? (Why do they choose to use cheat codes to change Tommy Vercetti into a female porn star? No theoretical explanation is given.)
- Wanting your avatar to run in the game as a consequence of knowing that you can run in the game (this is reductive - the desire to run in the game could also come from experiences with other games, or the existence of a running button could be inferred by a novice player based on how slowly the avatar moves without it)
- Knowledge about digital games is distributed (Gee)
- How to use the findings of this study to create games for learning? (What findings?)
- "moments of tension between players (agents) and mediational means (language, symbols)"
- An ongoing process of signification (and of changing conventional systems signification) unfolding in the GTA series and in digital games generally

Shira Chess, "Playing the Bad Guy: Grand Theft Auto in the Panopticon"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- GTA as a scapegoat for real-world violent crime
- Evidently not a game for kids, but is it causing adult violence?
- Player as both criminal and authority, "productive play that reinforces Western moral standards" (Foucault)
- Digital games discipline players using similar tactics to those Foucault describes (both in terms of game mastery and moral values)
- GTA teaches the futility of criminal behaviour by having players judge themselves
- Spatial environments, enclosure, testing in-game limits, space as a reward and a control
- Also the physical space of gameplay (sitting still in front of a screen)
- Temporal control (in-game timed events, real-world time investment/loss)
- Constant, precise movements, attention (repetition is key to producing docile bodies) -> console controller buttons
- McLuhan: games teach us to surrender to collective demands
- Ranking systems, rewards/punishments
- Delinquency as a necessary function of disciplined society
- Player is reminded constantly that criminal actions = harsh punishment
- Delinquency as necessary function of disciplined society
- Interplay of gazes in the Panopticon, invisible surveillance
- Players monitor themselves while playing (they are the invisible authority, watching, judging, even punishing) - the "little voice"
- "Grand Theft Auto," named for a legal term for crime
- Cartoon cover of the game, exaggeration, caricature
- Real vs imaginary (realistic details, exaggerated world)
- Player should not want GTA to be real (people shouldn't want Scarface, Taxi Driver or Fight Club to be real, either, but and they do... problem with anti-heroes, etc.)
- GTA both mocks and reinforces the values it represents
- Control over camera angle can create distance or identification, or both (internal vs external gazes)
- Difficulty condemns violence subtly (violent, extreme losses/punishments for failure)
- 'Crime doesn't pay!'
- Endless cycle of killing/being killed (downwardly cyclical nature of crime)
- Cheating acknowledges the rules (the "wrong" way to play)
- "supporting and reenacting the values of the Western legal system"
- Creates/supports self-monitoring, "inner penal system"

Marc C. Santos and Sarah E. White, "Playing With Ourselves: A Psychoanalytic Investigation of Resident Evil and Silent Hill"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Fear/desire are the same
- We engage our psychology in confronting horror in survival horror games
- Psychological repression of horror (the death drive, the Lacanian Real) allows us to enter into subjectivity
- Player as defender/preserver of subjectivity, re-asserting stability and the Symbolic Order
- The player as champion of the symbolic order partakes in two kinds of activity/pleasure: Proaretic pleasure in resolving action/threats; hermeneutic pleasure in ordered narration, solving mysteries, linearity and coherence (Barthes)
- Silent Hill, the law of the Father
- Repressed desire for nihilistic assimilation (with the pre-subjective maternal) in the form of zombie/monstrous consumption of the self
- Eradication and repressing of this desire by killing monsters
- Loss of language as key to the (impossible) return to the Real and transformation/assimilation into abject monstrosity
- Monstrous mother-Others as final bosses (maternal phallus: umbilical cord)
- In addition to the proaretic pleasure in destroying the abject Real, players must attempt to provide the ontological meaning/structure and create coherence (hermeneutic pleasure)
- Narration as symbolic killing of multiplicity, ambiguity in lieu of One true self, illusory objectivity
- Gameplay as therapy for the disturbed avatar (player as detached analyst)
- Silent Hill 3 calls into question this distance by suggesting that we have shared our avatar's psychosis and delusions in our attempts to restore the Symbolic order
- Digital games as a safe space to engage with a simulated Lacanian Real and then turn it off and return to an unquestioned (but no less illusory) Symbolic order and social reality