Video Games for Health

Principles & Strategies for Design and Evaluation by Ivan Leslie Beale

DANIELLE STOCK 1 Comment

While commentators in the health and technology sectors frequently tout the potential of video games to enhance patient involvement in their own healthcare and to provide avenues for interactive health education, this enthusiasm seems yet to be fully supported by developments in the health or gaming industries. Video games for health are a relatively new genre of ‘serious game’ and, thus, the body of literature dedicated to defining, analyzing, and theorizing them is currently quite limited in both depth and breadth. In Video Games for Health, Ivan Leslie Beale is particularly concerned with this deficit, and he wants to ensure that future approaches to creating media for health management follow rigorous standards that support a commitment to scientific validity. Centrally, Beale asks: how can we employ findings from the more established realm of educational video games in the development of the emergent sphere of video games for health? Because of Beale’s interest in developing this sphere, the text also takes up the broader task of defining the health genre of video game, and, in that respect, it breaks relatively new ground. Continue Reading →

Voluntary Constraints

How Players Can Impose an Ethical Critique

Rob Parker 5 Comments

Developers and publishers may seek to define what constitutes gaming capital through engagement with the player community, but it is the players that typically have the final word on what gaming capital is and how best to accrue it. As such, the production of more paratexts through player-authored walkthroughs, popular YouTube channels or mod communities has a sympathetic relationship with the exchange of gaming capital. Consalvo concludes the book by re-articulating the shaky definition of “cheating” in games and how that relates to “cheating” outside of games, where players that would never cheat outside of digital worlds think nothing of tapping out IDDQD for god mode in Doom. She uses this fracture to suggest that “we need a better understanding of how ethics might be expressed in gameplay situations, and how we can study the ethical frameworks that games offer to players.” (187). I’d like to extend some of Consalvo’s work on paratexts and gaming capital into the realm of voluntary or non-coded constraints that players impose upon themselves. Continue Reading →

Mimesis as Make-believe

On the Foundations of the Representational Arts

Michael Hancock 2 Comments

Like all truly interesting epic endeavors, game studies has its own origin myth. It’s a story about battling against stories, with narratology and the study of videogames as essentially narrative on one side, and ludology and the study of videogames as essentially games or play on the other. Its battle sites were websites, and traces of its force can still be seen in gamestudies.org, grandtextauto.org, and others. And like any myth, it’s not exactly true, either because, as some ludologists claim, the narrative defenders “never showed up” or because, as others postulate, it was never a disagreement to begin with (see: Bogost http://www.bogost.com/writing/videogames_are_a_mess.shtml). But whether the conflict ever actually happened, there is a case to be made that it ideologically happened, as the myth is constantly returned to and debunked in an almost ritualistic fashion (as, for example, what I’m doing now). What is at stake here is a single question: How do we study videogames? Kendall Walton has no direct answer to this question. Though Mimesis as Make-believe was published in 1990, the closest it comes to any sort of digital medium is a few examples that touch on film. But I still think that its premise—that all forms of representation should be regarded as potential props for games of make-believe—provides a useful contribution to the ongoing myth of game studies. Continue Reading →

Allegorithmic Art

The Art of Making Games and the Game of Making Art

LAUREN BURR

Are videogames art? The question has sparked heated debate in recent years, perhaps most notoriously in 2010, when film critic Roger Ebert published a piece in the Chicago Sun-Times stating quite brashly that “Video games can never be art.” Although Ebert later issued an apology, it seems that the gaming community has been fighting to prove him wrong ever since. Continue Reading →

Acting Social

Prom Week & Performative Authorship

Stephen Fernandez

Recently, my research on new media performance has led me to investigate the interface between performativity and video games. Having played the one-act interactive drama game, Façade (2006), whereby the player is invited to salvage the failing marriage between Grace and Trip through a series of dialogical exchanges with them, I am interested in examining the player’s ability to shape the narrative of an interactive drama game that features more than two characters who are engaged in dramatic intrigue. In particular, I want to know how the player can propel the dramatic action of game by performing different relationships with various characters in the virtual game world. Building on the interactive dramatic gameplay in Façade (2006), Prom Week (2012) seeks to test the limits of interactive narrative in game design… Continue Reading →

Utopic Dreams

Critical Approaches to Researching Video Game Play

Michael Hancock 1 Comment

Michael Hancock is the Book Reviews editor on First Person Scholar.  He is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo.  Currently, his grey matter is engaged in writing a dissertation on… Continue Reading →

The Other Difficulty Mode

What Halo Can Tell Us About Identity & Oppression

Samantha Allen 4 Comments

If being a “straight white male” is, as John Scalzi argues, like playing a game on the easiest difficulty, then those of us who are less privileged are playing on a harder difficulty. While I think that this metaphor is a sound tool for initial conversations about privilege, its underlying theory of power is too simplistic. This metaphor splits the world into straight white men and everyone else, leaving the reader with no way to account for the many different kinds of oppression that affect us (racism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ableism, etc.) and the specific ways in which these oppressions interact. Difficulty settings in games also tend to be arranged on a bipolar line with predictable, quantifiable changes being made to the gameplay as the difficulty increases. Our social identities, by contrast, are multidimensional and we cannot simply arrange them on a line from “most oppressed” to “least oppressed.” Continue Reading →