Games and Culture

Interactive storytelling has been a topic of much debate for the past two decades. Many have foreseen exciting new works; while others have cast doubt on the whole endeavor. In terms of actual titles, most games express a familiar story of a hero triumphing against the odds in order to save the day. However, a number of recent titles have attempted to innovate. The Path is one such game. Rather than a tale of heroism, The Path is a tragedy of shattered innocence, powerfully told through play. The authors perform a close reading of this work and highlight the importance of the ludic contract between the player and the game. The authors distinguish two different contracts employed by the work, antagonistic and exploratory, which make different appeals and offer different rewards. The Path manipulates these contracts to lead the player into being both the architect of the tragedy and its helpless victim.

The Nintendo DS has been, given its huge popularity, relatively understudied. This article is a small step toward correcting that and, in doing so, contributes to game studies in general. Using Goffman’s and Benjamin’s theories of play and Innis’s analysis of media, this article explores the nature of play on a handheld videogame system as an illuminating case of the tension between time-based storage media and space-based transmission media. Storage, transmission, space, and time are intertwined and made complicit in the ways in which the Nintendo DS is used and played. By engaging with non-diegetic aspects of the video game experience, such as saving and pausing, we can begin to address the materiality of handheld video gaming systems as objects with which we play with and rework time and space. In turn, mobile play itself is highly contingent and spatial–temporal practices take on special significance in this light.

This article discusses the relationship between the user interface (UI) and the game world in computer games, with point of departure in qualitative studies including players and game developers. The developers’ evaluation of the relationship from a design point of view will first be presented, before the article goes on to discuss the degree to which the players accept the presence of UI features within the game world. We will see that developers find it challenging to balance between functionality and fiction, but see system features as a necessity that must be present for usability purposes. From the point of departure of players, they rarely consider system features intrusive to the game world, but accept them as integrated to the conventions established within modern computer game aesthetics.

This article discusses knowledge production in game studies by exploring notions of emotion, closeness and (queer) desire in new media ethnography. It uses field notes and experiences from an ethnographic study of the online game World of Warcraft. As opposed to the kind of fieldwork where being, living, and staying in the field is the only option, new media ethnography brings with it the possibility of moving through different locations and bodies to the point where the borders between them may start to blur. The text positions itself within this very uncertainty to investigate its consequences for ways of knowing online game cultures. Drawing on autoethnography, as well as the body of ethnographic work interrogating erotic subjectivity and desire in the field, the discussion makes use of personal experiences - in particular an in-game as well as out-of-the game love affair - as potentially important sources of knowledge. Was it her, regardless of the game? Was it her through the game? Or was it the game “itself ”? The article provides the story of a particular way of being introduced to and of falling for a game, a woman, and the ways in which these two were intensely connected. Set against the backdrop of “the affective turn” in cultural and feminist theory, and in making visible how desire may circulate through game spaces, the article argues for an articulation of desire as intimately related to technology; of desiring technology and of technological, or perhaps technologized desires.