This paper provides a critical overview of the notion of genre in game studies and in the video game industry. Using the concept of genre requires one to acknowledge the recent developments of genre theory in other fields of research; one such development is the contestation of the idea of generic evolution. After a comparative analysis, video game genres are found to differ from literary and film genres precisely on the basis of evolution. The technological imperatives that characterize video game production are also pinpointed as relevant to the establishment and development of video game genres. Evolution is linked to the processes of innovation, and so a model of innovation is laid out from a compare-and-contrast approach to literary and film genre innovation. This model is tested through the history and analysis of the First-Person Shooter genre. This results in new insights for the question of genre in video games, as it is established that genre is rooted not in game mechanics, but in game aesthetics; that is, play-experiences that share a phenomenological and pragmatic quality, regardless of their technical implementation.
Czym różnią się gatunki gier cyfrowych od gatunków znanych nam z filmu czy literatury, takich jak western bądź kryminał? Czy znane gry, takie jak rodzimy „Wiedźmin”, jedynie czerpią z repertuarów gatunkowych swoich książkowych lub ekranowych źródeł, czy też może oferują osobne i unikatowe wzorce gatunkowe? Autorka omawia zagadnienie gatunku w grach cyfrowych w relacji do innych mediów na przykładzie współzależności fantasy, komputerowych gier fabularnych („computer Role-Playing Games”) i gier angażujących („hardcore games”). Interesuje ją nie tylko wymiar reguł i związana z interaktywnością mechanika, ale także rama semantyczna świata gry oraz - łączące dwa poprzednie aspekty - doświadczenie rozgrywki. Jednocześnie Autorka zwraca szczególną uwagę na kontekst historyczny kultury gier cyfrowych i za pomocą licznych przykładów umieszcza prowadzoną argumentację w szerokiej perspektywie kulturoznawczej. Wprowadza do języka polskiego tłumaczenia istotnych terminów, które konsekwentnie stosuje i wyjaśnia, na potrzeby analizy wykorzystuje także własne pojęcia (m. in. model fuzji gatunkowej). Dzięki temu osadza groznawstwo w dyscyplinarnym kontekście akademickim.
This article approaches the historiography of digital games by suggesting a categorization of four different genres that can be utilized in the presentation of the history of digital games: enthusiast, emancipatory, genealogical, and pathological. All of these genres are based on various conceptions of what is important in the history of digital games and to whom the history is primarily targeted. The article also evaluates the premises of the authors of the histories. The present article’s main objective is to create suggestions for a unique classification that would be especially suitable for the historiography of digital games.
In Unit Operations, Ian Bogost argues that similar principles underlie both literary theory and computation, proposing a literary-technical theory that can be used to analyze particular videogames. Moreover, this approach can be applied beyond videogames: Bogost suggests that any medium—from videogames to poetry, literature, cinema, or art—can be read as a configurative system of discrete, interlocking units of meaning, and he illustrates this method of analysis with examples from all these fields. The marriage of literary theory and information technology, he argues, will help humanists take technology more seriously and hep technologists better understand software and videogames as cultural artifacts. This approach is especially useful for the comparative analysis of digital and nondigital artifacts and allows scholars from other fields who are interested in studying videogames to avoid the esoteric isolation of "game studies."
The richness of Bogost's comparative approach can be seen in his discussions of works by such philosophers and theorists as Plato, Badiou, Zizek, and McLuhan, and in his analysis of numerous videogames including Pong, Half-Life, and Star Wars Galaxies. Bogost draws on object technology and complex adaptive systems theory for his method of unit analysis, underscoring the configurative aspects of a wide variety of human processes. His extended analysis of freedom in large virtual spaces examines Grand Theft Auto 3, The Legend of Zelda, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Joyce's Ulysses. In Unit Operations, Bogost not only offers a new methodology for videogame criticism but argues for the possibility of real collaboration between the humanities and information technology.
Histories of computer games in the 1980s are often fixated on American and Japanese perspectives with the developments of pre and post-crash America being used as a way to contextualize the global gaming scene. However, the 1980s in Britain saw a computer game culture emerge, embedded with writing code, with numerous programmers releasing their games on tape or floppy disk in response to the demand of games for home computer systems at the time. This is a culture that developed separately to 'pre-crash' American gaming and one that is so often lost in global histories of videogame cultures today. Similarly, mainstream nostalgia for games of the 1980s can be seen to mask the original responses and sites of game creation. This article explores the landscape of British computer games through a case study of Elite. Utilising archival methodologies inherent in media archaeology, combined with approaches from platform studies, a history of Elite is approached through both its original development and the players' responses to the game at the time. In doing so, the importance of British videogame history is placed amongst other more dominant histories to show how its influences continue in the development and production of games today.
The idea of the earth as a vessel in space came of age in an era shaped by space travel and the Cold War. Höhler's study brings together technology, science and ecology to explore the way this latter-day ark was invoked by politicians, environmentalists, cultural historians, writers of science fiction and many others across three decades.
An exploration of the way videogames mount arguments and make expressive statements about the world that analyzes their unique persuasive power in terms of their computational properties.
Videogames are an expressive medium, and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. In this innovative analysis, Ian Bogost examines the way videogames mount arguments and influence players. Drawing on the 2,500-year history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, Bogost analyzes rhetoric's unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. The field of media studies already analyzes visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. Bogost argues that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric. Bogost calls this new form "procedural rhetoric," a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. He argues further that videogames have a unique persuasive power that goes beyond other forms of computational persuasion. Not only can videogames support existing social and cultural positions, but they can also disrupt and change these positions themselves, leading to potentially significant long-term social change. Bogost looks at three areas in which videogame persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and learning.
This article explores the play practices of EVE Online industrialists: those primarily responsible for generating the materials and equipment that drive the game’s robust economy. Applying the concept of “immaterial labor” to this underattended aspect of the EVE community, we consider the range of communicative and informational artifacts and activities industrialists enact in support of their involvement in the game—work that happens both in game and crucially outside of it. Moving past the increasingly anachronistic distinctions between digitally mediated labor and leisure, in game and out of game, we examine the relations of production in which these players are situated: to other EVE players, in-game corporations, the game’s developer, and the broader digital economy. Seen from this perspective, we consider the extent to which EVE both ideologically and economically supports the extension of capital into increasing aspects of our everyday lives—a “game” in which many play, but few win.
No Man’s Sky is an existential crisis simulator disguised as a space exploration game