Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Video game fiction'

Video games have suffered a negative reputation regarding their influence on children and adolescents, in comparison to its “well-behaved” counterpart, books. Nevertheless, the world of video games is much more diverse than imaginable – from fantasy to reality – and it is possible that different types of video games have different effects on human cognition and behavior. To fill a gap in research, fantasy and non-fantasy genres were the focal point of the correlational study. In this study, we analyze how video game playing habits, video game genre preference, book reading habits and book reading preferences are correlated with creative thinking. Construal level theory explains the importance of psychological distances in enhancing creativity. Fantasy and fiction content, as well as role play, are theorized to be part of creativity due to generation of distance and abstract thinking. Creativity was measured by insight problems and a categorization task. Abstract thinking was also measured by the Behavioral Identification Form. The questionnaire was given out to 154 students during lunch hours at a university in Sweden, throughout the period of March 2019. The results indicated that preference in a genre, whether gaming or literature, did not indicate significant differences in creative thinking. However, the consumption and habit of playing role-play games showed a significant correlation to creativity in comparison to its “rival” – action games. Results showed the same effects for fiction literature versus non-fiction. Theoretical and practical implications for organizations and the workplace are discussed, as well as limitations of the study.

This thesis explores the diverse and intricate ways the psychological horror game genre can characterise a narrative by blurring the boundaries of reality and imagination in favour of storytelling. By utilising the Freudian uncanny, four video game fictions are dissected and analysed to perceive whether horror needs a narrative to be engaging and pleasurable. A discussion will also be made if video game fictions should be considered in the literary field or its own, and how it compares to written fiction in terms of interactivity, engagement, and immersion.

Ce travail s’attache à étudier les figures de la posthumanité en s’appuyant sur un corpus transmédial et transnational et à répondre à deux questions principales : Peut-on, au travers de la figure du posthumain, percer à jour les désirs et les angoisses de l'homme de ce millénaire encore naissant ? Comment l'expérience de pensée posthumaine, mise en mouvement par la fiction, questionne-t-elle la notion même d'humanité ? Dans un premier temps, il met en relief les liens existant entre la posthumanité et ce territoire homogène et récurrent dans le corpus, qu’on nommera à la suite d'Antonio Negri et Michael Hardt, l’Empire. Dans un second temps il s’intéresse à la plasticité du corps et de l’esprit posthumains, à la façon dont leurs multiples avatars se déploient à travers le temps ainsi qu’aux raisons qui sous-tendent cette extrême plasticité. Enfin, dans un dernier mouvement, il s’attelle à montrer que, loin de s’inscrire dans un imaginaire radicalement nouveau, le post-humain procède en fait du réagencement ou de la reconfiguration d’un imaginaire anthropologique déjà bien ancré dans l’inconscient collectif
This work focus on the study of the posthuman figures. It is based on a transmedial and transnational corpus. It seeks to answer two key questions : can we expose, through the posthuman figure, the desires and the anguishes of this still rising millennium’s man ? How the posthuman thought experiment, set into motion by the fiction, challenge the very concept of humanity ? As a first step, this work emphasizes on the links that exist between posthumanity and this homogeneous and reccuring, in our fictions, territory that Antonio Negri and Micharl Hardt call Empire. Then, it’s interested in the plasticity of the posthuman bodies and minds, in the way that their numerous avatars expand through time as well as the reasons that underlie this extreme plasticity. Lastly, he tries to show that the posthuman do not fall into a dramatic new imagination, but that it proceeds, in fact, of the reordering or the reconfiguration of a anthropological imagination already well rooted in the collective unconscious

Creative Project Abstract: The creative project of this thesis is a script prototype for Underland, a crime drama video game and digital playable story that demonstrates writing and design methods for negotiating narrative and player agency. The story is set in October 2006 and players are investigative psychologists given access to a secure police server and tasked with analysing evidence related to two linked murders that have resulted in the arrest of journalist Silvi Moore. The aim is to uncover what happened and why by analysing Silvi’s flat, calendar of events, emails, texts, photos, voicemail, call log, 999 call, a map of the city of Plymouth and a crime scene. It is a combination of story exploration game and digital epistolary fiction that is structured via an authored fabula and dynamic syuzhet and uses the Internal-Exploratory and Internal-Ontological interactive modes to negotiate narrative and player agency. Its use of this structure and these modes shows how playable stories are uniquely positioned to deliver self-directed and empathetic emotional immersion simultaneously. The story is told in a mixture of enacted, embedded, evoked, environmental and epistolary narrative, the combination of which contributes new knowledge on how writers can use mystery, suspense and dramatic irony in playable stories. The interactive script prototype is accessible at underlandgame.com and is a means to represent how the final game is intended to be experienced by players. Thesis Abstract: This thesis considers writing and design methods for playable stories that negotiate narrative and player agency. By approaching the topic through the lens of creative writing practice, it seeks to fill a gap in the literature related to the execution of interactive and narrative devices as a practitioner. Chapter 1 defines the key terms for understanding the field and surveys the academic and theoretical debate to identify the challenges and opportunities for writers and creators. In this it departs from the dominant vision of the future of digital playable stories as the ‘holodeck,’ a simulated reality players can enter and manipulate and that shapes around them as story protagonists. Building on narratological theory it contributes a new term—the dynamic syuzhet—to express an alternate negotiation of narrative and player agency within current technological realities. Three further terms—the authored fabula, fixed syuzhet and improvised fabula—are also contributed as means to compare and contrast the narrative structures and affordances available to writers of live, digital and live-digital hybrid work. Chapter 2 conducts a qualitative analysis of digital, live and live-digital playable stories, released 2010–2016, and combines this with insights gained from primary interviews with their writers and creators to identify the techniques at work and their implications for narrative and player agency. This analysis contributes new knowledge to writing and design approaches in four interactive modes—Internal-Ontological, Internal-Exploratory, External-Ontological and External-Exploratory—that impact on where players are positioned in the work and how the experiential narrative unfolds. Chapter 3 shows how the knowledge developed through academic research informed the creation of a new playable story, Underland; as well as how the creative practice informed the academic research. Underland provides a means to demonstrate how making players protagonists of the experience, rather than of the story, enables the coupling of self-directed and empathetic emotional immersion in a way uniquely available to digital playable stories. It further shows how this negotiation of narrative and player agency can use a combination of enacted, embedded, evoked, environmental and epistolary narrative to employ dramatic irony in a new way. These findings demonstrate ways playable stories can be written and designed to deliver the ‘traditional’ pleasure of narrative and the ‘newer’ pleasure of player agency without sacrificing either.

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic developments must be framed within the post-Internet sphere.

This thesis examines key examples of materially experimental writing (B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1, and Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch), hypertext fiction (Geoff Ryman’s 253, in both the online and print versions), and video games (Catherine, L.A. Noire, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Phantasmagoria), and asks what new critical understanding of these ‘interactive’ texts, and their broader significance, can be developed by considering the examples as part of a textual continuum. Chapter one focuses on materially experimental writing as part of the textual continuum that is discussed throughout this thesis. It examines the form, function, and reception of key texts, and unpicks emerging issues surrounding truth and realism, the idea of the ostensibly ‘infinite’ text in relation to multicursality and potentiality, and the significance of the presence of authorial instructions that explain to readers how to interact with the texts. The discussions of chapter two centre on hypertext fiction, and examine the significance of new technologies to the acts of reading and writing. This chapter addresses hypertext fiction as part of the continuum on which materially experimental writing and video games are placed, and explores reciprocal concerns of reader agency, multicursality, and the idea of the ‘naturalness’ of hypertext as a method of reading and writing. Chapter three examines video games as part of the continuum, exploring the relationship between print textuality and digital textuality. This chapter draws together the discussions of reciprocity that are ongoing throughout the thesis, examines the significance of open world gaming environments to player agency, and unpicks the idea of empowerment in players and readers. This chapter concludes with a discussion of possible cultural reasons behind what I argue is the reader’s/player’s desire for a high level of perceived agency. The significance of this thesis, then, lies in how it establishes the existence of several reciprocal concerns in these texts including multicursality/potentiality, realism and the accurate representation of truth and, in particular, player and reader agency, which allow the texts to be placed on a textual continuum. This enables cross-media discussions of the reciprocal concerns raised in the texts, which ultimately reveals the ways in which our experiences with these interactive texts are deeply connected to our anxieties about agency in a cultural context in which individualism is encouraged, but our actual individual agency is highly limited.

Cette étude porte sur la « culture geek » et son émergence en tant que sous-culture et identité culturelle revendiquée en France depuis le milieu des années 2000. En effet, ce mouvement d’abord américain a fait une entrée remarquée dans l’espace public qui incite à s’interroger sur sa réalité sociologique. Les geeks sont abordés ici comme fans de mondes imaginaires fantastiques (science-fiction, fantasy…), passionnés de nouvelles technologies et en tant que public premier et fondateur du processus de convergence culturelle théorisé par Henry Jenkins. La montée en visibilité du phénomène geek est ainsi liée dans cette étude à celle de pratiques médiatiques associées à ce processus (fanfictions, démocratisation des outils numériques, œuvres transmédiatiques et immersives, etc.). Dans ce cadre, le tournant réflexif (vers un sentiment d’appartenance à une identité collective) et la mode médiatique autour de la culture geek ces dernières années trouvent leurs racines dans les moments fondateurs de la convergence culturelle (depuis les pulps fictions et la naissance des comic books jusqu’à la sortie de Star Wars, du Seigneur des anneaux, des premiers jeux de rôles et jeux vidéo). Mais cela doit aussi à la radicalisation récente des croisements médiatiques, des pratiques participatives, de la mondialisation des partages liée aux technologies numériques et au passage des identités prescrites aux identités choisies dans les sociétés contemporaines marquées par l’individualisme
This dissertation is about « geek culture » and the emergence of this subcultural identity in recent years in France. This movement, born in North America, has entered the public sphere in a spectacular way and it encourages us to study its sociological reality. Geeks are seen here as fans of imaginary worlds (science-fiction, fantasy…), new technologies lovers, and as first and original audience of the process of cultural convergence defined by Henry Jenkins. The increasing visibility of the geek phenomenon is connected to many practices associated with this process (fanfictions, wide use of digital technology, transmedia and immersive storytelling, etc.). From this point of view, the reflexive moment (the feeling of being part of a collective identity) and the geek trend are both rooted by the beginnings of cultural convergence (from the pulp fictions, and the birth of comic books, to the release of Star Wars, the Lord of the Rings and the first role-playing or video games). It also has to do with the recent growth of links between media, with the success of participatory culture, the possibility of worldwide share thanks to digital technologies and the shift from preassigned identities to chosen ones in our individualistic society

Films, séries télévisées ou jeux vidéo, les fictions audiovisuelles populaires encouragent et alimentent la consommation de produits culturels variés, apparentés instinctivement à un univers fictif, une marque, un genre ou une organisation spécifique. L’analyse de ce réflexe au moment de la réception permet de mettre au jour les mécanismes établissant les liens entre les œuvres, au moyen du concept central de marqueur, élément en apparence anodin dans la fiction mais fondant une allusion compréhensible sous certaines conditions. L’étude des stratégies de réduction du risque mises en place par les organisations produisant les fictions audiovisuelles montre que les marqueurs jouent un rôle essentiel dans la conception, la production et la mise sur le marché de ces produits culturels, sans en garantir systématiquement le succès, difficilement mesurable. Ces stratégies autorisent, voire encouragent un usage et une appropriation ludique des marqueurs qui conditionnent l’exploration des univers fictifs (parfois génériques) de la culture populaire par ses publics, et sa réutilisation par ses créateurs
Be they video games, movies or TV shows, popular audiovisual fictions encourage the consumption of diverse cultural works, instinctively linked to a specific fictitious universe, brand, genre or organisation. Analyzing this audience’s reflex leads to the inner working of how cultural products are linked together, thanks to an apparently innocuous element which indeed supports an allusion. This marker, as we will call it, can be understood as such only under certain conditions. When it is, it can play a central role in the risk-reduction strategies implemented by entertainment industries during the design, production and marketing of mainstream fictions, with no guarantees of of a success that can hardly be summed up by box-office numbers. These strategies, in turn, promote a playful use of markers in fictions, allowing the audience’s exploration of popular culture universes, and their recycled use as allusions by creative teams in the TV show, film and video game industries

Dans un contexte généralisé où les cultures générationnelles otaku et geek multiplient leurs influences autant sur le plan du contenu culturel que sur les nouveaux médias qu’elles génèrent, nous nous sommes intéressés à sa propension à pénétrer les champs des arts dont la pratique contemporaine. La convergence des médias inhérents à ces deux cultures produit de nouveaux moyens d’expression donnant naissance à plusieurs types de pratiques expérimentales. Il s’est agi pour nous d’interroger nos référents autant que notre pratique sous ce nouvel angle. Une émergence de nouveaux systèmes technologiques se démocratise et intervient de plus en plus fréquemment dans le quotidien des usagers. Sur la base de ces nouvelles connaissances se développent de nouveaux rapports aux objets à partir desquels se forment de nouveaux espaces de fiction.La thèse « Expérimentations artistiques des espaces de fiction générés par les nouveaux médias issus des cultures générationnelles otaku et geek » est transdisciplinaire. Elle mêle études étymologiques, anthropologiques et sociologiques à l’étude des arts. En plus de s'appuyer sur des études réalisées par des chercheurs, la méthodologie appliquée se fonde sur l’expérimentation des œuvres présentées qui touchent à la fois à l’art contemporain, aux livres, aux bandes dessinées, aux films, aux jeux vidéo, aux jeux à réalité alternée, etc., mais aussi à la convergence de tous ces médias. L’expérimentation par une pratique nous semble dans le domaine présenté une donnée très importante du bien-fondé de la recherche qui est basée sur l’étude d’un terrain culturel en constante évolution
In a widespread background in which the influences of Otaku and Geek Generational Cultures have increased as regards both their cultural content and the new media created by them, we undertook to study their propensity to penetrate into the art sphere, whether within or outside contemporary art. The convergence of the media inherent to both cultures has produced new means of expression which have given rise to several types of experimental practices. In the light of these new aspects, we strove to review our referents as well as our practice. Emerging new IT systems are becoming more and more popular and they are increasingly affecting their users' daily lives. With such new items of knowledge, new relations to things have developed and they provide a foundation on which new Fantasy Realms are being built."Artistic Testings of Fantasy Realms Created by New Media derived from the Otaku and Geek Generational Cultures" is a transdisciplinary thesis. It blends art research with etymological, anthropological and sociological studies. The methodology applied relies on studies carried out by researchers and is based on the testing of the works presented which are related to contemporary art, books, comics, video games, alternate reality games etc., as well as to the convergence of all such media. As regards the domain referred to herein, we believe that testing through practising is a paramount aspect of the relevance of this thesis which is based on the study of an ever evolving cultural territory

Cinéma interactif, film jouable, actable : toutes ces désignations sont le reflet de tentatives visant à définir un cinéma où le spectateur aurait la possibilité d’intervenir sur le déroulement de l’histoire à partir d’alternatives proposées. Un cinéma où le spectateur serait capable de corriger et de modifier le déroulement du récit en fonction de ses choix et des conséquences de ses choix. Depuis son officialisation en 1967, le cinéma interactif n’a cessé de se chercher une forme stable, en épousant respectivement celle du cinéma, celle d’Internet et enfin celle du jeu vidéo où ce dernier semblerait se cristalliser depuis plusieurs années. Le cinéma interactif est en cela, une forme filmique interactive en devenir. Cette thèse propose de partir sur ses traces, d’en délimiter les traits et contours et ainsi mettre en lumière un objet marginal qui témoigne des mutations du champ du cinéma. Il est question d’établir une histoire du cinéma interactif et de comprendre comment ce phénomène complexe, sortant du champ traditionnel des disciplines artistiques, semblerait avoir un rôle à jouer dans la convergence entre le cinéma et le jeu vidéo. Il s’agit également d’étudier comment le récit interactif se déploie et fait participer le spect-acteur, de s’interroger sur sa viabilité dans le contexte actuel autant que sur les conditions qui prévalent à la création de telles œuvres, et enfin, de mettre en avant les enjeux socioculturels de cet objet inscrit dans un paysage artistique où la convergence des médias est devenue chose commune
Interactive cinema, playable movies, interactive movies: all these denominations are the demonstrations of attempts to define a cinema where the spectator would have the possibility to interact with the narration by choosing alternatives. In this kind of cinema, the spectator is able to correct and modify the narration proceeding, because of the consequences of his choices. Since its creation in 1967, interactive cinema has not stopped searching for a stable form to define itself. Throughout the years, it has respectively taken the shape respectively of cinema, Internet and finally video games. This latter seems to have been the more stable form and has been for several years. Interactive cinema is, therefore, a promising interactive filmic form to be. This thesis leads us on its traces, bounding the lines and outlines and so highlights a marginal object which shows the transformations of the field of cinema. By establishing the story of interactive cinema, we will try to understand how this complex phenomenon, which is out of the traditional field of artistic disciplines, could have an effect on the convergence between cinema and video games. It is also question of studying how the interactive narration deploys itself and how it makes the spect-actor participate; to wonder about its viability in this current context, about the creation’s conditions of such works, and finally, to highlights the sociocultural stakes of this object registered in an artistic landscape where convergence media has become a common thing

In this study we aimed to investigate the process through which players of video games situate, and form an understanding of their presence within the virtual game environment. This study specifically investigates this process in games played through a first person perspective with the intention of minimising the amount of visual information provided the participants. For this purpose we created two scenarios within a videogame environment specifically design for the study. A total of thirteen participants took part in the study, and after each season a semi structured interview was performed. In a qualitative content analysis we identified patterns and commonalities ascertaining to our line of questioning, and conclude that while the player-presence relationship would appear to be largely dependent on the individual’s type of play, the varying focus on either narratology or ludology in our two scenarios did indeed influence the participants to approach this relationship similarly within the separate groups. Finally we defined four types of player-presence relationship, and how they can be said to relate to the varying ludonarrative dynamics within the two specified genres, as well as the varying types of play observed amongst the participants in our study.

碩士
國立中正大學
傳播學系電訊傳播研究所
107
The video game industry grows rapidly in the past few decades. Among all kinds of video games, historical fiction video game has been proved to be one of the most popular types of video game. This research tries to investigate the enjoyment experienced by the historical fiction video game players and the relationship between history learning and video game playing. Data were collected by the in-depth interviews of 14 historical fiction video gamers. The result of research shows that the enjoyments of historical fiction video games can be discussed in three different aspects: "The enjoyment of control," "The enjoyment of cross-media," and "The enjoyment of social interaction." The enjoyment of control comes from taking up the challenges in the games, and the feeling of achievement when players complete the challenges. The enjoyment of cross-media comes from knowing-players’ knowledge of the original context. This kind of enjoyment is composited by "the enjoyment of sensory," "the enjoyment of emotion ," and "the enjoyment of cognitive." The enjoyment of social interaction comes from two different communities: actual community and virtual community. Because of the special characteristic of historical fiction video game, its virtual community interaction is weaker than its actual community interaction. This research also demonstrates that historical fiction video games do help players’ history learning experience, furthermore, game playing increases the players’ historical consciousness. For knowing-players, playing historical fiction games stimulates their interest in learning related histories. For unknowing-players, the historical fiction video games serve as an opportunity for developing fundamental knowledge of related histories.

The topic of video games is expansive, encompassing numerous domains that have yet to be thoroughly examined within a scholarly context. Modern games, especially those in the adventure and role-playing genres, are oftentimes heavily laden with text, and therefore serve as excellent subjects when formulating hermeneutical models for simulated virtual contexts. Furthermore, many games belong under the umbrella of literary studies due to their reliance upon text to forge interactive, fictional narratives. While this means many games possess qualities that render them germane to academics within the sphere of English studies, they remain neglected outliers due to manifold factors, ranging from outmoded biases against the medium, to a lack of established evaluative methodologies. As a result, the field is largely bereft of consensus strategies for engaging digital works featuring literary exposition and dialogue in the form of on-screen text; however, existing theories, including more abstruse ones relating to ergodic literature, hypertext and cybertext, provide a foundation on which to construct new modalities for assessing texts that exist within virtual environs. Research indicates that audience experiences in text-driven games are markedly different than those offered by analog texts due to their interactivity and non-linearity, thus reinforcing the need for the expansion of existing models. Of additional concern, analyses of modern text-oriented games prefigure some important implications for the areas of pedagogy and textual information conveyance in general. These considerations all coalesce to illustrate the exigency for a new or updated theory for understanding and interpreting text in digital substrates, ultimately allowing for inchoate and emergent art facilitated by technology to be recognized as academically relevant.

Orientação: Célia Quico ; co-orientação: Manuel da Costa Leite
A maioria dos jogos é desenvolvida sem ter em consideração a acessibilidade para pessoas com necessidades especiais. Esta dissertação visa contribuir para esta área, indo de encontro à carência de jogos destinados ou adaptados a pessoas com necessidades especiais visuais. Jogos para cegos já existem noutros países, mas este projecto tem como objectivo criar um audiojogo em português de Portugal. Para compreender o que torna um jogo acessível ou o que levanta barreiras para os utilizadores com necessidades especiais de visão, esta dissertação revê a evolução dos videojogos, bem como da ficção interactiva e dos audiojogos até ao presente. O resultado desta pesquisa levou ao desenvolvimento de um audiojogo de ficção interactiva, onde a informação é transmitida ao jogador através de áudio e os comandos utilizados foram simplificados. Este projecto tem como objectivo contribuir para o desenvolvimento de videojogos e audiojogos em português de Portugal, nos quais a acessibilidade para pessoas com necessidades especiais é a principal consideração.
Most games are developed without taking into account the accessibility for people with visual disabilities. This thesis aims to contribute to this issue, meeting the lack of games designed or adapted for people with visual disabilities. Games for blind people already exist in other countries, but this project aims to create an audiogame in Portuguese from Portugal. To understand what makes a game accessible or what creates barriers for users with visual disabilities, this thesis reviews the evolution of videogames, interactive fiction and audiogames over time. The result of this research led to the development of an audiogame with interactive fiction, where information is conveyed to the player through audio and the commands used were simplified. This project aims to contribute towards the development of videogames and audiogames in Portuguese of Portugal, in which the accessibility for people with visual disabilities is the primary consideration.