![]() It will also be useful for those interested in the wider role of culture, technology, and consumption in the transformation of society, identities, and communities.Īim. This book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers, interested in fields such Video Games, Sociology, and Media and Cultural Studies. Drawing on new and original empirical data – including interviews with gamers, as well as key representatives from the video game industry, media, education, and cultural sector – Video Games as Culture not only considers contemporary video game culture, but also explores how video games provide important insights into the modern nature of digital and participatory culture, patterns of consumption and identity formation, late modernity, and contemporary political rationalities. Video games are becoming an increasingly central part of our cultural lives, impacting on various aspects of everyday life such as our consumption, communities, and identity formation. But what does their popularity say about our contemporary society? This book explores video game culture, but in doing so, utilizes video games as a lens through which to understand contemporary social life. Video games are becoming culturally dominant. The final section looks at the conclusions working together to achieve the dual aims of proposing a new model for game reading which centres around a willed disavowal of presence on the part of the gamer combined with the gamer's taking up of a role offered by the game-text, and rehabilitating both the term and the concept of suspension of disbelief. The three chapters which follow looked in more depth at the problems of the skilled reader, fundamental activity and dissonance through investigations into games’ textual construction, the mindsets they engender in players and their reformulation of the fourth wall. Beginning by defining the differences of games compared to other media, the thesis goes on to define suspension of disbelief in both its historical and modern contexts and see how it fits with games, isolating three key problems with uniting the concept with the medium. Digital games themselves are also seen to be an intense new realm of possibilities for the suspension of disbelief, and textual analysis of games which approach the fourth wall or the suspension of disbelief on their own terms helps to make this clear. Proposing that Samuel Taylor Coleridge's concept of suspension of disbelief is a complicated process often cited rhetorically rather than given its theoretical due, this thesis aims to rehabilitate the term and turn it into a useful, sharpened tool for games studies. Primarily concerned with how players relate imaginatively to the often major dissonance between gameplay and narrative in digital games, this thesis questions how the literate players of games reconcile these complex texts imaginatively. This thesis explores the ways in which suspension of disbelief works in digital games. They also underscore the fact that gamers cannot access a game’s algorithms directly and must instead construct an image of the game system, whose degree of fidelity towards the actual rules of the game may greatly vary (depending, for instance, if the gamer is playing to progress through the game, as opposed to playing to master the game mechanics). Their gamer- and gameplay-centric model features three interconnected spirals which represent the cycles gamers have to go through in order to answer gameplay, narrative, and interpretative questions, in both heuristic and hermeneutic fashion. To cast off the implications of redundancy or stagnation contained in a circle, they resort instead to the figure of the spiral, which accounts for the gamer’s progression through the game. As video games will always be defined by what the player is doing, Dominic Arsenault and Bernard Perron tackle the concept of gameplay in “In the Frame of the Magic Cycle: The Circle(s) of Gameplay.” Opposed to the spatial metaphor of Huizinga’s “magic circle” of gameplay, they conceptualize the partaking in a game as a cognitive frame, as an ongoing process. ![]()
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