Suzanne de Castell

Alienated Playbour Relations of Production in EVE Online

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.

From Simulation to Imitation: Controllers, Corporeality, and Mimetic Play

Background We contend that a conceptual conflation of simulation and imitation persists at the heart of claims for the power of game-based simulations for learning. Recent changes in controller-technologies and gaming systems, we argue, make this conflation of concepts more readily apparent, and its significant educational implications more evident. Aim This article examines the evolution in controller technologies of imitation that support players’ embodied competence, rather than players’ ability to simulate such competence. Digital gameplay undergoes an epistemological shift when player and game interactions are no longer restricted to simulations of actions on a screen, but instead support embodied imitation as a central element of gameplay. We interrogate the distinctive meanings and affordances of simulation and imitation and offer a critical conceptual strategy for refining, and indeed redefining, what counts as learning in and from digital games. Method We draw upon actor-network theory to identify what is educationally significant about the digitally mediated learning ecologies enabled by imitation-based gaming consoles and controllers. Actor-network theory helps us discern relations between human actors and technical artifacts, illuminating the complex inter-dependencies and inter-actions of the socio-technical support networks too long overlooked in androcentric theories of human action and cognitive psychology. Conclusion By articulating distinctions between simulation and imitation, we show how imitative practices afforded by mimetic game controllers and next-generation motion-capture technologies offer a different picture of learning through playing digital games, and suggest novel and productive avenues for research and educational practice.

Re-Mediating Research Ethics: End-User License Agreements in Online Games

This article is a theoretical and empirical exploration of the meaning that accompanies contractual agreements, such as the End-User License Agreements (EULAs) that participants of online communities are required to sign as a condition of participation. As our study indicates, clicking “I agree” on the often lengthy conditions presented during the installation and updating process typically permits third parties (including researchers) to monitor the digitally-mediated actions of users. Through our small-scale study in which we asked participants which terms of EULAs they would find agreeable, the majority confirmed that they simply clicked through the terms presented to them without much knowledge about the terms to which they were agreeing. From a research ethics standpoint, we reflect upon whether or not informed consent is achieved in these cases and pose a challenge to the academic research community to attend to the socio-technical shift from informed consent to a more nebulous concept of contractual agreement, online and offline.

“The Entrepreneurial Gamer”: Regendering the Order of Play

The designation “gamer” is structurally bound to networked economies of digital play that are rewarded fiscally, socially, and publically, an order of play that is proving difficult to overturn. That girls and women have enjoyed at best marginal positions within video game cultures is by now well recognized, yet at the very same time is too easily dismissed in light of persuasively documented increases in the numbers of women who play. This article traces a large-scale transformation of ludic engagement from participation to spectatorship that parallels the professionalizing and commodifying of traditionally embodied sports, games, and play to demonstrate how new and emerging economies of gameplay, far from opening up the playing field, threaten a further entrenchment of gendered relations.

Videogames and Learning: Ethics, Ontology and Epistemology

Videogames have flourished economically and culturally in the first two decades of the twenty-first century and their educative possibilities have concomitantly been both lauded and elusive. Yet a relatively scant literature to date examines videogames through philosophical lenses, including but not limited fundamental questions of ethics, ontology, and epistemology. This chapter seeks to address that important omission in light of the increased attention paid to videogames in the past two decades in educational theory and research. It focuses on ethical, ontological, and epistemological questions and problems related to video games and learning generally.

Playing and Learning: An iPad Game Development & Implementation Case Study | Jouer et apprendre : une étude de cas du développement et de la mise en œuvre d’un jeu sur iPad

There is a great deal of enthusiasm for the use of games in formal educational contexts; however, there is a notable and problematic lack of studies that make use of replicable study designs to empirically link games to learning (Young, et al., 2012). This paper documents the iterative design and development of an educationally focused game, Compareware in Flash and for the iPad. We also report on a corresponding pilot study of 146 Grades 1 and 2 students playing the game, a paper and pencil related activity and completing a pre- and post-test. The paper outlines preliminary findings from the play testing, which included high levels of student engagement, an approaching statistical improvement from pre- to post-test, and a discussion of the improvements that needed to be made to the game following the pilot study. L’utilisation du jeu dans les contextes educatifs officiels suscite beaucoup d’enthousiasme. Cependant, le manque d’etudes qui utilisent des modeles pouvant etre repetes pour relier les jeux et l’apprentissage de maniere empirique est remarquable et problematique (Young et coll., 2012). Cet article documente la conception et le developpement iteratifs d’un jeu aux accents educatifs, Compareware, en Flash et pour l’iPad. Nous traitons egalement d’une etude pilote correspondante dans le cadre de laquelle 146 eleves de 1re et 2e annee ont joue au jeu, realise une activite connexe a l’aide de crayons et de papier et passe des tests avant et apres. L’article resume les conclusions preliminaires des essais du jeu, y compris des taux eleves d’engagement des eleves, l’amelioration statistique entre les tests avant et apres le jeu, ainsi qu’une discussion des ameliorations a faire au jeu apres l’etude pilote.