Tanya Krzywinska

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• Professor at Falmouth University

The “Cozy” game has gained traction as a concept in contemporary game culture as a set of formal generic features. While we examine the way that Cozy Games are often now defined as a genre, we demonstrate that “coziness in games” has widespread formal and engagement functions and can be experienced in a whole range of games, not simply those define...

Background: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are associated with poorer mental health outcomes later in life. Research to date has focused on utilising qualitative and quantitative measures to understand possible mechanisms, and interventions for those who may have experienced ACEs. Objectives: This study aims to co-design a novel digital game,...

Folk Horror and Videogames

Background The smartphone market is saturated with apps and games purporting to promote mental wellness. There has been a significant number of studies assessing the impact of these digital interventions. Motivation The majority of review papers solely focussed on the impact of strict rules and award systems of the apps. There is comparatively lit...

Immersive technologies can be used to broaden the possibilities of storytelling in heritage contexts to enrich the ways in which museum collections are interpreted and to facilitate more active engagement with history. To this end, as part of the United Kingdom’s Industrial Strategy, new models, methods, and workflows are being developed to help re...

…he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their purpose. (Lovecraft, “The Dreams in the Witch House,” 2005, p. 303) Through close consideration of the multiplayer online game The Secret World (2012), this paper works towards a definition of “Weird Games” as a basis for advocating t...

With many videogames falling into the generic categories of Science Fiction (SF) and Horror, you’d expect at least one or two direct adaptations of Shelley’s Frankenstein. While there are legions of vampires and zombies, the legacy of Frankenstein for games is manifest far more subtly than with other monsters. The chapter examines the debt that gam...

This last chapter explores the connections between the design of player agency and formations of gender in Gothic video games. The conditions of player agency drain power from the more radical and subversive gender formations often found in Gothic fiction itself but in some games a more subtle, ambiguous or subversive approach to player agency is t...

Women and the Gothic revitalises the long-running debate about women, the Gothic and identity. Containing fourteen original essays by established scholars and emerging critics in the field, it prioritises the concerns of woman as reader, author and critic. Recognising that since the 1970s theorisation of gender has become increasingly sophisticated...

Anthony Vidler wrote that William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer ‘voiced a peculiarly contemporary sense of haunting: that provoked by the loss of traditional bodily and locational references by the pervasive substitution of the simulated for the real in the computer’s virtual reality’ (Vidler 1992, 10). Published in 1984, Neuromancer provided a narrat...

This position article outlines a personal perspective on the way that Horror games create affect in a complex play between representation and performance and that, in some cases, operate against the usual Vitruvian coordinates of games that are used in order to work with the types of affect associated with pleasure, agency and assuredness. The auth...

Genre is used by game developers as a means of targeting certain markets by providing easily identified product differentiation. This entry provides an overview of the development and diversity of genre in online games and maps out the major factors that drive genre formations. In addition, academic approaches to the study of genre are applied to o...

Anthony Vidler wrote that William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer ‘voiced a peculiarly contemporary sense of haunting: that provoked by the loss of traditional bodily and locational references by the pervasive substitution of the simulated for the real in the computer’s virtual reality’ (Vidler 1992, 10). Published in 1984, Neuromancer provided a narrat...

This essay shows that the American Gothic has a powerful presence in digital games and that it has become a part of contemporary game grammar. There is a close investigation into the ways in which the formal, participatory characteristics of games shape the ways in which the American Gothic appears. Close textual analysis is made of Alan Wake and T...

Videogames may rely on computing technology, but that does not mean they are immune to the dark touch of the Gothic – far from it. Gothic themes, characters, stories, and environments can be found across a wide range of games, from puzzle games to multiplayer online games and from shoot‐em‐ups to strategy games. Given that the Gothic is strongly th...

Videogames may offer new ways of telling stories and engaging players by virtue of their interactive characteristics, but do they offer any differences from cinema in terms of content and representation? While videogames are formally distinctive, this chapter shows that, to a lesser or greater degree, they nonetheless draw on vocabularies developed...

It’s common for news media to relish stories about sex in games in order to generate the attractions of salacious capital. The Grand Theft Auto franchise has been particularly good at soliciting such interest and making its own capital from the lure of sexual transgression. But despite the lurid copy, there has, in fact, been very little explicit s...

One of the pleasures of playing in the “World” of Warcraft is becoming part of its pervasive mythology. This article argues that to understand the game’s formal, aesthetic, and structural specificity, its pleasures and potential meanings, it is essential to investigate how the mythic functions. The author shows that the mythic plays a primary role...

What are the pleasures and the dangers of theway that the study of digital games has crystallized over the past 3 years? The author argues here that a pluralistic approach is required if the full complexity of games is to be addressed and analyzed, and as such, textual approaches to the analysis games should not be dismissed no matter what the part...

An analysis of the scope for exploration and the extent to which impressions of presence are created in domes- tic videogames. This paper argues that exploration is an important dimension of play in many games, whether employed in relation to other objectives or as a source of pleasure in its own right. The first part of the paper examines the rela...

An analysis of the scope for exploration and the extent to which impressions of presence are created in domes- tic videogames. This paper argues that exploration is an important dimension of play in many games, whether employed in relation to other objectives or as a source of pleasure in its own right. The first part of the paper examines the rela...

What is the relationship between computer games and cinema? Spin-off games based on major fi lm franchises are common, especially in genres such as science fi ction, action-adventure and horror. Some games have also made the transition to the big screen, none more prominently than the Tomb Raider series in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001). The potentia...

Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1996). Pp. 239. ISBN 0 226 09816 8. - - Volume 32 Issue 3 - TANYA KRZYWINSKA

My focus here is to explore the ways in which World of Warcraft can be said to have a long narrative. Core to my argument is that 'worldness' is key to understanding how it is that long narrative can be sustained and make sense. I will historicise long narrative formats through reference to epic poetry--taking as my starting point the battle of nar...

'There's nothing like a spot of demon slaughter to make a girl's night' Since the phenomenal success of the Tomb Raider (1996) videogame series a range of other videogames have used carefully branded animated female avatars. As with most other media, the game industry tends to follow and expand on established lucrative formats to secure an establis...