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E-book Videogames and Agency

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Penilaian

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Technological advancement makes it possible for videogames1 to ofer increasingly complex gameplay experiences (Dovey and Kennedy 2006: 51; Kerr 2017: 29–30). This is perhaps even more powerfully felt now that we are on the doorstep of the next console cycle, with PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X set to launch in late 2020, and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 (Asobo), a game which recreates Earth’s detailed geography, live traf-fc, dynamic weather, and its every airport using Bing Maps and Microsoft Azure’s AI, having come out to PC in August 2020. With more sophisticated hardware and software comes more complex content, and the more power the player is promised to have over said content, the more attractive and marketable the product is—as seen, for example, throughout the marketing campaign leading up to the release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo 2017), which ofers the vast open world of Hyrule, the big-gest and most homogenous one in the franchise yet.2 This tendency to aspire for games ofering more agency is ever so apparent when looking at the kinds of products videogame publishers have been favouring over the past decade or so: The Witcher (CD Projekt Red 2007), Assassin’s Creed (Ubisoft Montreal 2007), Elder Scrolls (Bethesda Softworks 1994), or Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar San Diego 2010), just to name a few, are all vide-ogame franchises with numerous instalments, all designed as open worlds where the player has more freedom to do as they please compared to other, more restricted videogames. Recent installations of long-standing fran-chises ofering linear gameplay also embraced this trend. For example, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s Spec Ops mode (Infnity Ward 2019) and Call of Duty: Warzone (Infnity Ward 2020) both feature more player freedom than previous instalments of the franchise, as does Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Kojima Productions 2015). This book will look into how this freedom to act is discussed by designers, and how that in turn refects in their design principles. It will explore salient case studies to discover what these discourses around player action reveal about the nature of agency and game design. Game studies is a vast interdisciplinary feld, with clusters like education, humanities/social sciences, or computer science (Karhulahti and Koskimaa 2019; Martin 2018). That being said, as Deterding (2017) points out, a divide seems to be emerging, as human-computer interaction and commu-nication researchers are increasingly favouring their respective disciplinary outlets. This observation is supported by the fndings of two recently con-ducted meta-analyses into the state of digital games research, where the more technically oriented survey (Nguyen et al. 2018) and a more humanities and social sciences oriented one (Quandt et al. 2015) both pointed out that the other was notably missing from their datasets. Such a growing divide reduces the opportunities for knowledge exchange. Valuable and useful critical obser-vations about how game design works, or could work, can be made from a perspective not necessarily informed by the observer’s own design practice. Collins (2004) calls this ‘interactional expertise’, or ‘the ability to converse expertly about a practical skill or expertise, but without being able to prac-tice it, learned through linguistic socialisation among the practitioners’ (ibid. 125). My ‘interactional expertise’, cultivated over the years by playing and talking about games, reading design textbooks and forums, and attending the Game Design Workshop at GDC 2016, demonstrates that there is a space for non-practical expertise in better understanding game design.3 The broader topic of games and gaming can be studied from multiple angles of course, such as looking at the games themselves, how they are structured, or how they convey meaning (see, e.g., Atkins 2003; Juul 2005; Ryan 2006; Wardrip-Fruin 2009); observing players to see how they make sense of games, or what playing means for them (see, e.g., Gallagher 2017; Taylor 2006, 2018); or asking questions about how games are made, and what impact circumstances of production have on gameplay experiences ofered (see, e.g., Nicoll and Keogh 2019; Deuze 2007: 123–144; Dovey and Kennedy 2006; Kerr 2006, 2011, 2017). This book pursues a design-oriented approach towards studying videogames and is concerned with bet-ter understanding player agency from this perspective. As such, it follows in the footsteps of similar studies that link agency to game mechanics (see, e.g., Boonen and Mieritz 2018; Cheng 2007; Habel and Kooyman 2014; Harrell and Zhu 2009; Jørgensen 2003; King and Krzywinska 2006; Sicart 2008; Tulloch 2014), as opposed to approaches with a more narrow understand-ing of agency as a player’s ability to change the course of a videogame’s story (see, e.g., Domsch 2013; Hammond et al. 2007; Stang 2019; Tanenbaum and Tanenbaum 2009, 2010). Several of the above listed contributions at least acknowledge, if not explicitly draw on, Janet Murray’s widely cited defnition of agency as the ‘the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices’ (Murray 1997: 126). This defnition, I will argue, and the larger discussion within which it sits, frames agency as a concept relevant to videogame narrativity, and is therefore somewhat limited. However, in Murray’s argument several observations are made concerning diferent parts of the ‘game structure’ (ibid. 129–140), and this will be the starting point for the multidimensional conceptualisation of agency presented in this book.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

004.21 BOD v

Penerbit

USA : Taylor & Francis., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

226 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781003298786

Klasifikasi

004.21

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Systems Analysis and Computer Design

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

-

Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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