Design Harmony in (Serious) Games (original) (raw)
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Using concepts from semiotics, aesthetics, and ludology, this paper is shaping a framework opening new perspectives on meaning and emotion evocation in videogames. While building upon the MDA Framework, it poses the problem of meaning production in game design when the traditional building block, the game mechanics, is a complex rule-based semiotic compound belonging to the Peircean thirdness. It proposes an alternative building block called the ludic at a higher level of abstraction, allowing for wider combinatory possibilities and deeper meaning production through the gameplay itself. It introduces an interpretation layer opening new possibilities for both narrative and emergent gameplay.
Hybrid Moments: Using Ludonarrative Dissonance for Political Critique
Game criticism, from a historic perspective, traditionally follows an objectively oriented approach. But in recent years a new tide of personally oriented writing has been emerging in online spaces alongside more traditional publishing models. Game scholars, motivated by the large audiences that online pieces can attract, are not only participating in this scene, but also promoting it as the primary source for progressive criticism. While such pronouncements are correct in many cases, the video game blogosphere is also not immune from the cultural privileging of " gamers, " a problem that has been identified by feminist and critical theoretical approaches to the study of gaming culture (Kubic, 2012; Shaw, 2012, 2013; Consalvo, 2012; Vanderhoef, 2013). To better illustrate the aforementioned point, this article will both examine and comment on the recent online debate that arose over use of the term " ludonarrative dissonance " (Hawking, 2007), a critical concept referring to formal, thematic, and ideological disconnects between ludic and narrative meaning. It will begin by contextualizing the ludonarrative dissonance debate within a brief history of methodological approaches to game criticism. The focus will then shift to discussion of the term itself, and how it provides a useful critical framing by treating simulation and representation as interacting components with the capacity to coincide and contradict. Ludonarrative dissonance, understood as a formal problem, has entered the vocabulary of many critics, but the term is also dismissed for a variety of reasons, including the insistence that experienced gamers learn to ignore inconsistencies between story and design (Yang, 2013). Rejecting this argument, this article concludes by drawing upon assemblage approaches to play (Taylor, 2009; Pearce & Artemesia, 2009; Parikka, 2010) to argue that ludonarrative dissonance does exist and that the concept provides a useful starting point for examining the political tensions implicit in many games— tensions that are often acknowledged but frequently downplayed in existing formal and political approaches to criticism. The analysis of ludonarrative dissonance, from this perspective, not only pushes criticism beyond the aesthetic appraisals gamers, it can also provide insight into the nuances of games that reinforce problematic political discourses while simultaneously simulating potential systematic alternatives to neoliberal corporate capitalism.
Ludocriticism – Steps Towards a Critical Framework for Games
2019
INTRODUCTION An essential aspect of an establishedmediated form of expression is well-developed critique. Literary and cinematic works are reflected by professional critics in broadsheet newspapers and other outlets. This kind of criticism is crucial in educating the public, in shaping public opinion, in discovering new talent and in influencing future productions. The important function of critique is well recognized for literature, the cinema, theatre, and the fine arts and consequently some critics become famous in their own right, e.g. the late US movie critic Roger Ebert. In contrast, game criticism is still a rarity in the same outlets, and mostly happens in specialized magazines, blogs, YouTube channels and the trade press. This fact alone means that games are relegated to the margins of cultural production. The absence of mainstream game critique translates into a lack of recognition – for someone not connected to games as a scholar, indie game designer or member of the game...
Game Designers and the Ludo Mix: Constructing an Aesthetic Experience
Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, 2021
A ludo mix occurs when a variety of media are organized around one or several central games. While this might be an opportunity to build worlds and create new intellectual properties, it is also a marketing strategy. These two perspectives are often contradictory, and are difficult for game designers to address: how to design games in a ludo mix? Firstly, I establish a theoretical foundation, and suggest that a definition of ludo mix can encompass the game designer’s experience more explicitly by relying on the pragmatist concept of “aesthetic experience” by John Dewey. Based on this perspective, I will demonstrate how Dewey’s concepts complement the works of two major thinkers in Japanese media studies, Eiji Ōtsuka and Hiroki Azuma. Secondly, I validate the usefulness of Dewey’s concepts for game designers by employing them in a “project-grounded” research approach. This particular project involves nine students enrolled in a narrative game design class, working on the franchise Ag...
DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere, 2020
In this paper we describe the framework we created to understand the communication process in gaming experiences and that we have used to elaborate an educational process for future game designers or teachers. This educational process uses ludonarratives as an object of both game research and production. Considering that contemporary Cultural Studies admits the possibility of a Decolonial Pedagogy, can we entertain the possibility of building a Decolonial Ludology through ludonarratives? We aim to identify some of the Eurocentric foundations in game design in order to look for Decolonial alternatives that improve diversity and, if possible, make these alternatives also seductive. We describe four actions in our exploratory research to this goal.
2014
Nowadays, the gaming instance is an increasingly popular practice. It has become a crossroad of perspectives and multidisciplinary hybridizations. Between tradition (Huizinga 1938) and innovation (Bogost 2011), from Game Studies to Social Sciences, from Design to Psychology, the game plays a fundamental role in the everyday life of common people (Fink 1957; Suits 1978) and in research activities. Our intent is to investigate through sociological and design tools how the game, as a communication system for social innovation, is capable of generating experiences that stimulate a reflection on socio-cultural issues (Flanagan 2009). The designer becomes an activator of best practices and the game becomes a facilitator for content transmission: our aim is to understand how the immersion into ludic/fictional world, delimited by the boundaries of the magic circle (Salen, Zimmerman 2004), encourages players to open their mind to new ideas. Playing, we enter the “circle”: our mental and beha...
11th Europeen Academy of Design Conference, 2015
How do video game studies, as part of the digital humanities, inspire the design research community and how does design research influence game design? How should design values lead game design education, a field where designers are instructed to operate as subordinate players within the larger economic system, just like—as many customers—gamers are? This paper explores these questions by highlighting how seriously video games and interactive media are now part of a design culture that is today intertwined in interdisciplinary discourses, reminding us of the leading role that design may play in the future of leisure development. The video game industry remains harnessed to productivity and quick profits, which produces fads, banal theming, consumerism and indifference to the growth of players. Fortunately, as is the case in many other design fields, game design also offers more personal, avant-garde and critical approaches that create opportunities to produce original visions of our future, encouraging individual reflection and performances through which critical insights may emerge. Game design is a particular, complex and multilayered design activity that takes place in a specific domain: the aesthetics of interactive systems, whereby systems of meaning are established by rule sets resulting in play. Beyond this field, many inquiries corollary to game studies such as ludology’s early epistemological deliberations or filiations to scientific or humanistic traditions sound like echoes of former design disciplinary debates. Such knowledge should transcend design domains and academic boundaries to pervade contemporary design studies and instruction. Keywords: Design research, Digital humanities, Game design education, Game studies, Interdisciplinary design discourse.
This paper introduces a tool of a framework for the observation and analysis of play experiences (PEOF - Play Experience Observation Framework). PEOF consists of a multidisciplinary set of theoretical and empirical tools and guidelines between Sociology and Design that scholars, designers and researchers may use in order to comprehend and exploit the ludic dynamics in terms of meaningful experiences. It is mainly addressed to Persuasive Games and Games for Change, as communication systems for social innovation capable of generating experiences that stimulate a reflection on socio- cultural issues. Indeed, through the play activity, we can experience (and therefore understand) perspectives that are different from our usual ones. Specifically, we describe the set of concepts of frames, patterns and scripts on the ground of the PEOF and in particular of the Evidence- Interpretation Matrix (EIM), a PEOF related research tool. EIM focuses on how the mentioned concepts can be empirically used to attest that a change is occurring by playing certain games. Through observation and interpretation of a playing activity, it aims to understand what happens when players are encouraged to open their mind to new ideas. The overall framework and related EIM tool have been tested and refined through several case studies developed at the School of Design, Politecnico di Milano, like the Persuasive Urban Game A Hostile World, here used as main example to explain and validate our suggestions. Keywords: Social innovation; multidisciplinary framework; game design; player experience analysis; persuasive games