Gamification is often promoted as a user-centred initiative, engaging and motivating the alienated masses. Yet is such rhetoric reinforced by the design of these programmes? By incorporating a diverse suite of theoretical frameworks that accounts for the social, cultural and psychological effect of design features, this article argues that gamification too often invokes organization-centred design, treating users as zombies: senseless mechanisms urged onwards by a desire for extrinsic rewards. Gamification still often fails to acknowledge the user’s context and innate psychological needs. This can be accomplished in practice through an incorporation of motivational psychology and a concurrent shift towards user-centred design, accounting for the situatedness of the participant. Further, this article claims that for gamification to reach its full, radical potential, it must not only transform the way the user is evaluated and rewarded but also the activity the subject is tasked with performing.
In this article we propose a new ontology for games, synthesising phenomenology, Latourian Actor-Network Theory and Goffmanian frame analysis. In doing so we offer a robust, minimal and practical model for the analyst and designer, that clearly illustrates the network of objects within the 'Black Box' of any game, illuminating how each object (from player to memory card to sunlight) may move between three levels of the Game Event: Social World, Operative World and Character World. Abbreviating these worlds, a shorthand for the model is SOC (Social/Operative/Character).
Within videogame culture there are many references to famous breaks of the fourth wall; Psycho Mantis' reading of the memory card in Metal Gear Solid, X-Men's use of the Sega Megadrive's reset button, Startropics' use of the letter packaged with the game, and so on.Though cited by videogame media as brilliant breaks of the fourth wall, this article contends that such breaks, and numerous others, are not breaking the fourth wall at all; 'breaking' implies the shattering of the suspension of disbelief, the acknowledgement of the audience or self-referentiality.The hypothesis of this article is a new conception of the fourth wall in gamerelevant terms, instead conceived as expansions and contractions of the magic circle.Expansions of the magic circle occur when the synthetic world of the game expands beyond the screen, encompassing the technological apparatus of the console/PC or the paratexts packaged with the game, so that the console, memory card, controller, or game manual momentarily become part of the fictional world. Contractions occur when the magic circle shrinks behind the display, e.g. Sonic tapping his knuckles upon the screen or the game crashing.In unpacking and re-conceiving the notion of the fourth wall in gamic terms, this article hopes to provide a valuable analytical perspective concerning the use of these expansions and contractions by developers, players, and their impact upon wider media culture.
Alongside their material dimensions, video game arcades were simultaneously metaphysical spaces where participants negotiated social and cultural convention, thus contributing to identity formation and performance within game culture. While physical arcade spaces have receded in number, the metaphysical elements of the arcades persist. We examine the historical conditions around the establishment of so-called arcade culture, taking into account the history of public entertainment spaces, such as pool halls, coin-operated entertainment technologies, video games, and the demographic and economic conditions during the arcade’s peak popularity, which are historically connected to the advent of bachelor subculture. Drawing on these complementary histories, we examine the social and historical movement of arcades and arcade culture, focusing upon the Street Fighter series and the fighting game community (FGC). Through this case study, we argue that moral panics concerning arcades, processes of cultural norm selection, technological shifts, and the demographic peculiarities of arcade culture all contributed to its current decline and discuss how they affect the contemporary FGC.
Video gaming is often understood and narrated as an ‘experience’, and we would suggest that this is particularly notable with sports-themed video games. However, we would argue that how the game experience is curated and consumed, and how this relates to wider social process and forces, is rarely given any detailed consideration within the existing game research literature. Hence, this article explores how game experiences can be understood and articulated around four key themes. First, we begin with the argument that video games connect with, but also lead, a wider social trend: understanding social reality as a set of designed experiences. The real is progressively becoming a repository of technologically mediated experiences, and the logic of video games is anticipating this process. Second, we suggest video games are translations of phenomenological worlds: When successful, key aspects of the meaning of things remain similar even as one moves between spaces, domains, mediums and platforms. Developers often seek to bring others’ experiences into a game environment, such as translating the geography and mechanisms of sporting locations and competitions into a game environment. Third, following this translation of meaning across domains, gamers often narrate their encounters with video games as they would with any other experience, such as winning the Champions League in Football Manager becomes recounted by gamers like any other achievement. Fourth, video games are interactive and explicit bodily experiences because they must be enacted in order to exist.
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