Thomas Apperley

Genre and game studies: toward a critical approach to video game genres

This article examines the notion of genre in video games. The main argument is that the market-based categories of genre that have been developed in the context of video games obscure the new mediums crucial defining feature, by dividing them into categories (loosely) organized by their similarities to prior forms of mediation. The article explores the inherent tension between the conception of video games as a unified new media form, and the current fragmented genre-based approach that explicitly or implicitly concatenates video games with prior media forms. This tension reflects the current debate, within the fledgling discipline of Game Studies, between those who advocate narrative as the primary tool for understanding video games, “narratologists,” and those that oppose this notion, “ludologists.” In reference to this tension, the article argues that video game genres be examined in order to assess what kind of assumptions stem from the uncritical acceptance of genre as a descriptive category. Through a critical examination of the key game genres, this article will demonstrate how the clearly defined genre boundaries collapse to reveal structural similarities between the genres that exist within the current genre system, defined within the context of visual aesthetic or narrative structure. The inability of the current genre descriptions to locate and highlight these particular features suggests that to privilege the categories of the visual and narrative is a failure to understand the medium. The article concludes by suggesting that the tension between “ludology” and “narratology” can be more constructively engaged by conceptualizing video games as operating in the interplay between these two taxonomies of genre.

Literacy in the digital age: Learning from computer games

Abstract The need for literacy and the English curriculum to attend to digital literacies in the twenty‐first century is well established. Although studies in digital literacies have examined the inclusion of computer games in schools, there has not been an extended study of English teachers incorporating computer games into their teaching and learning through action research projects. This paper outlines the structure and progress of a research project exploring the uses of computer games in English classrooms. We argue that much can be learned about the teaching of both print and digital literacies from examining computer games and young people’s engagement in online digital culture in the world beyond school.

Platform Studies’ Epistemic Threshold:

In recent methodological scholarship on digital games, a strong connection is noted between “platform studies” and media archaeology. While platform studies has its critics, who primarily lament the limitations of the project, a recent spate of publications in the field suggests considerable dynamism in platform studies as the concept is further developed. This article argues that by examining platform studies from the perspective of media archaeology, it becomes apparent that platform studies establishes an “epistemic threshold”. Additionally, platform studies is a historical method which both establish continuities and mark breaks with previous platforms and technologies. From the perspective of this threshold, this article explores epistemic questions that arise from how platform studies forms an archive, and how media archaeology can enrich the method’s explicit concerns and engagements with technology and culture.

The body of the gamer: game art and gestural excess

Abstract Where is the body of the gamer in game art? While game art explores the materiality of digital games through examinations of the glitch, and in-game performances, it is less successful in revealing or examining the materiality of the body of the gamer. This presents an interesting problem for game art because, since motion sensing technologies have been incorporated into gaming technology following the introduction of the Wii, the body has reached an unprecedented visibility in popular culture, and increasingly depictions of gaming make the body part of play by celebrating gestural excess. Game art is crucial for documenting the fleeting styles of gestural excess, styles that are both amplified by the proliferation of motion sensing technologies and the integration of gesture into gaming, and constrained by the ongoing processes of being absorbed into official practices of popular gaming culture and design.

Flipping Out: Avatars and Identity

This chapter focuses on the avatar as the mediating device between real and virtual spaces. The avatar has become the key technology through which this interplay is organized and experienced by organizing our relationship between spaces, which are simultaneously “real” and “virtual.” It facilitates this relationship through multiple functions; it is a mode of identification, a vector of the users agency, and an in-world representative of the user. The role of the avatar is analyzed using the concepts of focalization, localization, integration, and programming. Together, these concepts form an operational framework for understanding the complex form of the avatar, which can take on a multiplicity of forms, both within the screen environment and in the “real world.”

Things, tags, topics: thingiverse’s object-centred network

ABSTRACT This article details findings from a multidisciplinary research team’s inquiry into the social uses of 3D printing. It applies digital research methods to 3D printing communities and their digitally shared objects. Thingiverse is one of the most well-known file repositories available for the semi-public distribution of files for use in 3D printers. The site allows for several different means of metadata classification of these files. Previous research on the site focused on the legal concerns related to the different types of intellectual property license ‘metadata’ attached to objects. Beyond these data points are numerous additional types of elected and automated connections between both users, objects and processes of creation including liking, commenting, tagging, categorising, watching, collecting, remixing, making, sharing, and attribution. Social Network Analysis of the relations between these data reveal interesting patterns towards the use and life of these objects. Our analysis also shows that despite the wealth of social functions, both actively engaged and passively automated, Thingiverse diverges from other social networks: sociality is mediated by reference to specific objects. As such, we claim Thingiverse should be considered as an object-centred social network. While such networks provoke Latourian analysis that is now well established in the study of computational culture, we also point to the need for new forms of social media analysis focused on the ways metadata constitute and guide such communities’ communications and govern their potentials.

Glitch Sorting: Minecraft, Curation and the Postdigital

Minecraft (Mojang 2011) is a mysterious game; it seems odd; its pixelated aesthetic seems out of place in a world where digital games are often characterized and judged by incremental increases in verisimilitude. It is not just that it looks odd, weird and blocky; the question is how do you play it? It is not immediately clear. What is clear is that the game is a hit, a hit big enough to be the theme of the South Park episode ‘Informative Murder Porn’.1 Naturally, the episode is about how unfamiliar Minecraft is for the adults of South Park. Corey Lanskin is hired to teach the adults how to play, he describes it as a game without an objective or goal, that is just about building. From the outside, his description is about right, although the experience of playing Minecraft is far from dull. It is a game that keeps on attracting players; by June 2014, nearly 54 million copies had been sold across all platforms. On the PC it has outstripped the sales of The Sims (EA Games 1999) franchise to become the biggest-selling PC game of all time (Campbell 2014). Its success brought it and the small Swedish independent company that made it — Stockholm-based Mojang — to the attention of Microsoft, which purchased Mojang and its intellectual property for

Literacy into action: digital games as action and text in the English and literacy classroom

2.5 billion on 15 September 2014 (Peckham 2014). In the postdigital age, blocks and pixels are worth serious money.