Browsing by Subject "Video games"
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Item Becoming a gamer : cognitive effects of real-time strategy gaming(2012-05) Glass, Brian Daniel, 1981-; Maddox, W. Todd; Love, Bradley C.; Huk, Alexander C.; Miikkulainen, Risto; Schnyer, David M.Video gaming has become a major pastime in modern life, and it continues to accelerate in popularity. A recent wave of psychological research has demonstrated that core perceptual changes coincide with video game play. Video games incorporate highly complex and immersive experiences which invoke a range of psychological mechanisms. This complexity has led to intractability which precludes determining which specific attributes of video gaming lead to cognitive change. The current work represents a research initiative which uses real-time strategy (RTS) games to boost executive functioning. In order to establish a link between video game features, video game behavior, and cognitive changes, an attention-switching tests two different forms of the same RTS game. Additionally, a difficulty titration paradigm attenuates individual differences in gaming skill. Thus, this project represents a critical advancement over prior research in that aspects of the video game itself were controlled and used to experimentally examine resulting cognitive change. Participants completed a psychological task battery before and after video game training, as well as at a mid-test. The battery covered a range of cognitive abilities including long-term memory, working memory, several attention-related constructs, risk taking, visual search, task switching and multitasking. These tasks were divided into two groups depending on the level of executive functioning components associated with the task performance. This resulted in a group of executive tasks and a group of other tasks. Because the high-switching gaming condition involves control and maintenance over a larger spread of gaming situations, performance on the executive task cluster was expected to improve more for this condition relative to the low-switching gaming condition. To reduce the impact of practice effects and the peripheral aspects of video gaming in interpreting the results, the Sims group was used a control baseline. A meta-analytical Bayes factor technique was used to determine the strength of performance changes from pre-test to mid-test, post-test, and follow up. By post-test, there was evidence that RTS training in the high attention-switching condition had improved on executive functioning tasks but not on other tasks. These results provide further evidence that video game training leads to psychological benefits over time.Item Checkpoint : a deconstruction of the video game violence debate and proposed strategies to create solutions(2013-05) Hamilton, Grayson Lee; Coleman, Renita; Quigley, Robert J. (Senior lecturer)In the months following the Sandy Hook elementary school tragedy, there has been increased attention and debate regarding violent video games and how they affect those who play them. While some lobby for increased regulation of their sale, others argue that video games are not the reason such tragedies continue to happen. In this report, I approach the debate from social, personal and political dimensions to better identify the inconsistencies regarding how violent video games are presented to and received by the public. I also interview video game developers, critics, and researchers to uncover solutions and new strategies to increase video game education and perception about the use of violence in a video game.Item Competitive video gaming, the sport of the future(2013-05) Salinas, Efren Julian; Todd, RussellCompetitive video gaming is experiencing exponential growth. Advances in technology and global Internet penetration has created highly dedicated fan bases for games played at a competitive level. Game developing companies are beginning to focus their attention on making games for the new eSports market. How avid eSports fans view competitive gaming is disrupting traditional consumption models. Twitch.TV a site that streams live gaming content is seeing massive growth. Now, more than ever, dedicated gamers can live off of playing games – whether by competing in tournaments as sponsored players or running ads on their Twitch.TV live stream while they play. The communities that have developed around different genres of competitive games are as varied as traditional sports such as Major League Baseball or the National Football League. A new industry with a complex infrastructure is developing in this new market.Item Designing a Real-time Strategy Game about Sustainable Energy Use(2011-08-08) Doucet, Lars AndreasThis thesis documents the development of a video game about sustainable energy use that unites fun with learning. Many other educational games do not properly translate knowledge, facts, and lessons into the language of games: mechanics, rules, rewards, and feedback. This approach differs by using game mechanics in new ways to express lessons about energy sustainability. This design is based on the real time strategy (RTS) genre. Players of these types of games must manage economic problems such as extracting, refining, and allocating resources, as well as industrial problems such as producing buildings and military units. These games often use imaginative fantasy elements to connect with their audience, but also made-up economic numbers and fictional resources such as magic crystals which have little to do with the real world. This thesis' approach retains the fantasy elements and gameplay conventions of this popular genre, but uses numbers, resources, and situations based on research about real-world energy production. The intended result is a game in which the player learns about energy use simply by trying to overcome the game's challenges. In addition, a combined quantitative/qualitative study was performed, which shows that players of the game learned new things, enjoyed the game, and became more interested in the topic of energy use.Item I don’t want to set the world on fire…or do I? : playing (with) history in Fallout 3(2010-12) Gonzales, Racquel Maria; Kackman, Michael; Kumar, ShantiWhile considering the role of media in shaping and examining histories, we must also grapple with formal limitations in approaching and understanding the past. The thesis aims to bring video games into critical conversations regarding history, memory, and nostalgia by considering the similar and unique perspectives the medium can bring alongside film, television, radio, and literature. Player positionality and interactivity within the unconventional, non-linear game storytelling form allows for different engagements with history. Focusing on the futuristic, post-apocalyptic role-playing game Fallout 3 (2008), this study interrogates the game’s nuanced presentation of genre as a cultural mediation of the past, the negotiation of memory with history, and our problematic assumptions about technology and narratives of progress. While the study finds games may provide rewarding and potentially critical explorations of history, the self-reflexive nature of video gaming emphasizes the medium’s possibilities, limitations, and implications as a cultural product shaped by the very forces constructing history.Item Masculinity at the video game arcade : 1972-1983(2012-05) Kocurek, Carly Ann; Engelhardt, Elizabeth S. D. (Elizabeth Sanders Delwiche), 1969-As the United States shifted toward a service-based economy and an increasingly digital media environment, American youth -- particularly young men and boys -- found an opportunity to play with these values in the then-novel video game arcade. The video game industry first came of age between the successful commercialization of Pong in 1972 and the U.S. gaming industry crash of 1983. In the interim, economic and play practices in the arcade itself and media representations of the arcade and its habitués shaped and responded to the economic and cultural upheavals of the period. Arcade machines were the first computers many Americans confronted. Through public discourse about gaming and gamers, Americans engaged in a critical debate about computerization, the move to digital media culture, the restructuring of the U.S. labor economy, and the competitiveness of American youth -- particularly boys -- in a Cold War culture conceived as both hostile and technologically oriented. This study demonstrates that video gaming was an arena in which Americans grappled with larger tensions about masculinity, globalization, labor, and digitalization. By analyzing gaming as a practice of everyday life, this work not only offers a cultural history of this period of gaming, but critical insights into the crystallization of masculine identity in a postindustrial, postmodern economy.Item Medium of modulation: the contradictory configurations of power in video games(2016-05) Fong, Byron Tuck; Scott, Suzanne, 1979-; Mallapragada, MadhaviVideo games have formal structural properties that create tensions between simplicity and complexity, transparency and obfuscation, systems of power and individual empowerment. This thesis investigates these tensions in two directions of inquiry: 1) video games as software and 2) video games as assemblages within media ecologies. One dives into video games’ code. The other challenges video games’ boundaries to understand how they intertwine with other media systems. These two perspectives complement each other to expose the contradictions of power within video games as a medium. Drawing on Wendy Chun and Alexander Galloway, this thesis uses software studies to investigate how the properties of software condition video games’ ludological structures. A theoretical approach to video games’ existence as software exposes that they are not media objects with clearly defined, static boundaries. Instead, a video game is an assemblage of many component parts and interacting systems. Using Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s understanding of assemblages, I argue that video games are constituted not only of the software contained within the game’s executable code; they are always-already interacting with other media systems, which in turn become component parts of the game. Matthew Fuller’s theorization of media ecologies provides a framework for conceptualizing video games as software-based assemblages within intersecting media ecologies. Player-encoders, a term I develop in the thesis, are a site where both perspectives visibly intersect. Player-encoders are players who create paratextual media to complement existing video games. They decode games’ structures, and then re-encode this knowledge into paratexts that other players can utilize. By encoding new media objects through the process of decoding existing games, player-encoders expose the tensions between powerful systems and individual empowerment. Video games as software, as assemblages in ecologies, and as affected by player-encoded paratexts, reveals them to be unstable media objects modulating within contradictory configurations of power.Item No bad memories : a feminist, critical design approach to video game histories(2014-05) Weil, Rachel Simone; Lee, GloriaCertain unique sights and sounds of video games from the 1980s and 1990s have been codified as a retro game style, celebrated by collectors, historians, and game developers alike. In this report, I argue that this nostalgic celebration has escaped critical scrutiny and in particular omits the diverse experiences of girls and women who may have been alienated by the tough, intimidating nature of a twentieth-century video-game culture that was primarily created by and for boys. Indeed, attempts to attract girls to gaming, such as the 1990s girls' game movement, are usually criticized in or absent from mainstream video-game histories, and girly video games are rarely viewed with the same nostalgic fondness as games like Super Mario Bros. This condition points to a larger cultural practice of trivializing media for girls and, by extension, girlhood and girls themselves. My critical design response to this condition has been twofold. First, I have recuperated and resituated twentieth-century girly games as collectible, valuable, and nostalgic, thereby subverting conventional historical narratives and suggesting that these games have inherent cultural value. Second, I have created new works that reimagine 8-bit style as an expression of nostalgia for twentieth-century girlhood rather than for twentieth-century boyhood. This report contains documentation of some relevant projects I have undertaken, such as the creation of a video-game museum and an 8-bit video game called Electronic Sweet-N Fun Fortune Teller. In these projects and in future works, I hope to disrupt dominant narratives about video game history and nostalgia that continue to marginalize and trivialize girls' and women's experiences and participation in contemporary game cultures.Item Playing the war on terror : military video games and the military-entertainment complex(2006-05) Payne, Matthew Thomas; Strover, SharonThis thesis argues that a select group of commercially available, military-themed video games developed, in part, by the US Department of Defense (DOD) engenders militarized play opportunities for gamers. The DOD's emerging game genre is analyzed holistically by first situating today's wargames in their historical, cultural, and industrial contexts. Next, the thesis develops an innovative interpretive strategy for understanding how these titles' formal gameplay conventions shape player experiences. Lastly, this work examines what the gamer is asked to do in two canonical military games, exploring what it means to play the Global War on Terror.Item Post-spatial disorientation letter cancellation test performance after video game exposure(2012-08) Banda, Jacob; Hsiang, Simon M.; Patterson, Patrick E.; Smith, James L.While spatial disorientation (SD) may cause anywhere from 25% to 33% of all aircraft mishaps, the limited availability of training programs and devices to combat SD is often a problem that arises due to their complexity and cost. As a result, finding alternative means of providing similar training could be of great benefit. Literature shows the powerful influence of the visual system on vestibular sensations and thus orientation. In addition, the fact that spatial disorientation impairs cognitive function and that habituation is helpful in protecting against spatial disorientation has been established. However, habituation gained from flying may be lost after a brief period away from flight, thus a different method of obtaining habituation is desirable. The goal of this research study was to evaluate the effects of video game experience on performance in a letter cancellation test after spatial disorientation. To determine these effects, experienced and inexperienced game players were assigned to either game playing or observing conditions. All subjects took a letter cancellation test at rest and after experiencing a coriolis illusion before and after five days of video game exposure. Test scores and time to completion served as performance measurements. Although the data was not significant and failed normality and variance homogeneity requirements, results revealed time and score tradeoff trends that suggest video game exposure may have beneficial effects for post disorientation performance. Major findings included 1) that the disorienting stimulus had a lesser effect on the performance of subjects with gaming experience than on subjects who were inexperienced 2) inexperienced subjects benefited from game exposure more than experienced subjects 3) the magnitude of the effect of game exposure on players was less than it was for observers.Item The re-mediation of the archive : situating new media in moving image archives(2010-05) Jannise, Stephen Tatum; Frick, Caroline; Winget, MeganThis thesis outlines the changing landscape of moving image archives in light of the emergence of new media. Whereas, in the twentieth century, these archives were once responsible for the preservation of endangered films and television programs, I argue that, in the twenty-first century, moving image archives will redefine their value to society not through preservation but through the decisions they make, which will affect not simply the intellectual community but the culture at large. The ways in which moving image archives situate new media materials and extend cooperation between institutions will determine, in large part, the discourse surrounding moving images throughout the upcoming century.Item Reorienting representation : gender and space in Ocarina of Time(2015-05) Mallindine, Jayme Dale; Traphagan, John W.; Hindman, HeatherGendered video game spaces, spaces in which particular types of gendered performance and play are considered welcomed, appropriate, or intended, has been a topic of conversation in game studies since the 90s. While previous research on this topic successfully broadened the discussion on gender representation to include virtual space, it also simultaneously narrowed it by either implying feminine game spaces primarily attract woman players (and vice versa) or by forcing spaces into a "feminine-masculine" binary and leaving little room for overlap of gendered spaces. In what follows, by focusing on a key Legend of Zelda title, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, I broaden the discussion of representation beyond purely narrative or visual gender cues by bringing together theories of gender performativity with research on gendered game space to more thoroughly nuance what is specific about gender representation when presented via the medium of a video game. By closely analyzing overlapping gendered spatialities within Ocarina of Time, we not only reinfuse gender with a sense of malleability destabilized from a concrete connection to specific types of character or player bodies, we’re then also forced to confront the historical privileging of masculine game spaces over feminine ones. The inclusion of multiple gendered spatialities within an older game such as Ocarina of Time means that games, rather than having such a clear cut history as a hotbed of singularly masculine coded digital playlands, have also contained alternative or additional gendered readings that have yet to be fully fleshed out in scholarship.Item Texts and reading in virtual environments : history and prospects(2012-05) Herr, Timothy Paul; Clement, Tanya Elizabeth; Winget, MeganThis thesis examines the activity of pleasure reading as conducted within three kinds of virtual environments: role-playing and adventure video games, Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) such as World of Warcraft, and graphical online social worlds such as Second Life. I ask how and to what extent different types of virtual environments are able to provide immersive reading experiences. This analysis relies upon the concepts of telic (purpose-driven) and paratelic (pleasure-driven) modes of reading, and I examine how virtual environments provide affordances for one or the other mode. How they do so usually has to do with how their situate reading materials in relation to the environment’s diegetic world, as well as whether the diegetic world is coherent and bounded. I conclude that while paratelic reading is encouraged in all virtual environments, role-playing and adventure video games are conducive to partially telic reading experiences, with players reading in order to better understand the diegetic world in which they act. MMOGs feature largely immutable diegetic worlds lacking normal relations of causality, but they still manage to some degree to encourage telic reading by circumscribing and enriching the world with lore. Virtual social worlds are generally unable to provide this sort of telic reading experience due to their lack of coherent diegetic worlds, and their effectiveness for paratelic reading is currently hampered by unwieldy interfaces and lack of innovation in the format of virtual books. Although MMOGs and social virtual worlds both feature synchronous collaboration between players with the potential for emergent narratives, neither has been able to leverage this advantage for the creation of immersive reading experiences. Finally, all three forms of virtual environment have inspired innovative user-created narratives and interfaces, but they have done so outside the contexts of their diegetic game worlds, in the sphere of participant culture.Item To build the impossible : narratology and ludology in the BioShock trilogy(2015-05) Reblin, Elizabeth Anne; Strover, Sharon; Blood, JohnIn 2007, Irrational Games released the steampunk first-person shooter BioShock. Months after the game's release, Clint Hocking wrote a blog post entitled "Ludonarrative Dissonance in BioShock." The essay brought the debate between narratology and ludology in game studies from the realm of academics, theorists, and developers, to the average gamer. No longer were players and critics analyzing a game based on just its gameplay and/or aesthetics. Now there was the pre-conceived notion that video games should aim to have its narratives element reflect the ludological components as well. The primary objective of this thesis is to explore the relationship between the narratological and ludological components in the BioShock trilogy that went into creating its unique experience as a player-driven narrative. I will be performing three case studies, comparing and contrasting BioShock, BioShock 2, and BioShock Infinite in regards to ludonarrative synchronicity. Rather than using Hocking's term, "ludonarrative dissonance," which is loaded with negative connotation, I will analyze the games based on their attempt to reach "ludonarrative synchronicity." This term of my own signifies moments when the narratological elements of a game converge with the ludological elements in a harmonious fashion. Unlike Hocking’s word choice, ludonarrative synchronicity does not seek to find fault in a game from the outset. The strength of analyzing the BioShock trilogy in depth, rather than focusing on a group of separate, unrelated titles, is two-fold. First, BioShock's creator Ken Levine's stated goal was to build a game in which the players were not an observer of narrative, but a participant. The other advantage of having three related games to analyze is that it allows for multiple points of comparison and correlation that appear in all three games. I will detail specific narratological and ludological aspects of each game for those who have not played them, followed by an examination of three key points of comparison between the three games where the intersection of narratology and ludology are prominent within the entire trilogy. Those three key points, not necessarily exclusive of one another, are theme, level design, and immersion.