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 in making a consistent fantasy world in terms of game play, morality, culture, time, and environment. It provides a rationale for players’ actions, as well as the logic that under- pins the stylistic profile of the game, its objects, tasks, and characters. In terms of the “cultural” environments of the game, the presence of a coherent and extensive myth scheme is core to the way differences and conflicts between races are organized. And, as a form of intertextual resonance, its mythology furnishes the game with a “thickness” of meaning that promotes, for players, a sense of mythological being as well as encouraging an in-depth textual engagement.
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 author argues that against the usual informative pleasures of self-affirmation and a clockwork universe, Horror games configured against normative game vocabularies have the potential to create a more complex form of ‘pleasure’ that is both complex and transformational.
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 particular focus of attention. To understand a game's design, the way it seeks to shape the player's experience and to make the game meaningful, it is essential to take account of the formal features of a given game. Being up close and personal forces one to think through the specificities of a game and what it is like to play that game. The author therefore advocates a combination of a formal and phenomenological approach as a means of exploring the complex relationship between game text and player.
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