Journal articles on the topic 'Video game storytelling'

This article illuminates the transmedia storytelling techniques in The Walking Dead comic book and video game. Telltale Games' The Walking Dead localizes itself within the comic book world of The Walking Dead by acting as a transmedia storytelling device and using intertextuality comics to assist game players with meaning-making. By participating in the game, Telltale rewards players with additional information about The Walking Dead universe, as well as creating a contingent but separate narrative that expands upon the existing Walking Dead world. This exploration of The Walking Dead offers insights into the specific methods that are being employed by creators to further engage the audience in the transmedia storyworld.

Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay, “The Storyteller” (2006) defines storytelling as a mode of communication that is defined in part by its ability to offer listeners “counsel”, or meaningful wisdom or advice. This article considers the earmarks of storytelling as defined by Benjamin and by contemporary writer Larry McMurtry and argues this type of narrative experience can be offered via interactive media and, in particular, video games. After identifying the key characteristics of storytelling as set forth by Benjamin, the article proposes and advocates for a set of key characteristics of video game storytelling. In doing so, the article argues that effective narrative immersion can offer what Benjamin calls counsel, or wisdom, by refusing to provide pat answers or neat conclusions and suggests these as strategies for game writers and developers who want to provide educational or transformative experiences. Throughout, the article invokes historic and contemporary video games, asking for careful consideration of the ways in which games focused on sometimes highly personal narratives rely on storytelling techniques that instruct and transform and that can provide a rich framework for the design and writing of narrative games.

Abstract One of the most important features in a transmedia structure, as Max Giovagnoli argues in his book Transmedia: Storytelling e Comunicazione [Transmedia: Storytelling and Communication], is the development of the user’s decision-making power, defined by the author as “choice excitement.” In this, every choice of the user should have a consequence in the fictional universe of a specific franchise. Consequently, a narrative universe that wants to emphasize choice excitement and the active role of people can focus on video games, where the interactive approach is prominent. This essay will discuss a specific video game, based on the famous franchise of The Walking Dead. This brand, which appears in comic books, novels, TV series, Web episodes and video games, is analysable not only as an exemplary case of transmedia storytelling, where every ramification of the franchise published in different media is both autonomous and synergistic with the others, but also by focusing on the choice excitement of users in the first season of the video game The Walking Dead: A Telltale Game Series.

The video game industry, by its wider reputation, is not commonly regarded for its deep and thoughtful experiences. In its common media presence it is represented as frequently dealing with content that is excessively violent and usually expressing themes and genres that are otherworldly: science-fiction, horror, or fantasy. However, the broad reputation of video games’ reputation is not wholly deserved, partly due to an arthouse-esque movement growing rapidly alongside the larger, traditional releases. In the last decade, and five years especially, there have been an increasing number of games which tell personal stories that are either inspired by life or that are autobiographical and that defy that broader reputation. These games are often highly concerned with creating vivid and believable characters, telling personal stories, or conveying emotional experiences using interaction to enhance the narrative. This article discusses some of the key titles in this area, the debates in video game culture surrounding them, and some of the choices made in the development of the author's own narrative game experience 'Fragments of Him'.

The ergodic (participatory) element of games is often cited as the core barrier to overcoming a perceived divide between good ludic (gaming) design and powerful storytelling. The present study examines two Indie games, Braid and Actual Sunlight, and their nuanced treatment of player participation in service of effective storytelling. These games in particular test the limits of player agency by asking the player to make ethically and morally problematic decisions, such as killing the main character, en route to completing the narrative. Such unusual narrative methods allow Braid and Actual Sunlight‗s game designers to unveil the mechanisms that afford, constrain, and ultimately revitalise the player‘s agency within the bounds of ergodic interaction. Narrative here, rather than restricting gameplay, instead enhances it, offering a tragic moment of cathartic relief as the player is exculpated for his or her decisions during the game. The insights drawn from these two examples and larger-studio offerings like Bioshock and Assassin’s Creed suggest a deeply traditional mode of storytelling at work in many narrative video games, an assertion that allows the ludological/narratological divide to be reknit and sets up ergodic media as a whole (video games, physical roleplaying games, interactive books, and more) for critical reconsideration.

The article touches on the issues of humanization of modern technologically advanced education, analyzes the synergy factors of information technology and spiritually-oriented pedagogy to prepare a new generation of humanist managers. For this, the role of narrative and storytelling in the process of creating educational computer games that form the competence of making managerial decisions is determined. An analysis of the knowledge structure of educational games on the basis of the proposed methodology for developing their plot shows the need to balance the processes of formalization of educational processes in the game, preserving narrative by referring to works of folk art, classical fiction as sources of implicit knowledge. The threats of formalization and automation of modern education are described. It has been found that “relay” learning is superficial, it does not contribute to the formation of critical and systemic thinking. As a result, this leads to the emergence of a generation of techno-button-managers. It is indicated that the preservation and effective translation of deep narratives containing educational humanistic meanings is a priority for designers of educational video games. The components of the game by D. Gray, game history and pedagogical strategies in the MDA model are compared, which made it possible to clarify the meaning of the terms “narrative”, “plot”, “storytelling”, to determine the place of their greatest actualization in the process of creating educational computer games. Considering the general tendency of the techno-environment to reduce, optimize and formalize, the task of preserving tacit knowledge, correct translation of it into over-formalized knowledge (morals, formulas) through effective storytelling, embodied in "active learning" of computer games, is crucial. In this case, the narrative plays the role of a base of spiritual-oriented knowledge, and with the help of storytelling it balances the spiritual-ethical meanings and educational results of a business video game. The meaning of the terms "narratives" and "storytelling" is considered, the Ukrainian-language terms-analogues are proposed. The importance of adhering to the principle of non-linear game plot for increasing the effectiveness of business games is revealed. The close relationship of business games with case studies, project- and problem-based training was emphasized. The correlation of narratology and ludology of the game is shown in the matrix of transformation of professional competencies and procedures for making managerial decisions into the rules of the game, their metaphorization and translation into script phrases. It is shown that the gamification of training exercises and situations is a synergy of creative and information-analytical work with databases and game design project documents. The core of educational game design is the balance of narrative and storytelling, explicit and implicit knowledge. This balance is achieved through effective collaboration and communication between all participants in the educational and business processes. Creation of virtual learning environments in which a future leader has an opportunity to formulate and comprehensively develop the competencies of business communication and managerial decision-making in situations of uncertainty and ethical dilemmas is a promising area of digital education.

In this article, I examine the phenomenon called Let’s Play (LP) and conduct a narrative analysis on two LPs made of Sierra Entertainment’s Phantasmagoria games. The LPs tell viewers a story different from the one told in the games, that is, they tell the story of the player rather than that of the game. In that story, the experience of playing a video game is revealed to the audience. This story would be hidden without the player-narrators know as LPs around the world. I conduct my analysis by describing seven different narrative elements that form the narration of a LP and explain how these elements together form this story of the player.

Spatial design and placemaking are fundamental to create a vibrant urban life, whereas video games are designed primarily for temporary amusement. However, they both share the same essence of creating large-scale artificial environments for human interaction as their fundamental value. Video game developers have been successfully using spatial design tools to create virtual environments to engage players and build narratives, understanding, and appropriating many characteristics of what makes a place tick. In this article, we argue that spatial design and placemaking could learn from video games development, by incorporating features ranging from storytelling and multiple viewpoints to participatory practices and flexible design.

The evolutionary trajectory of digital journalism has been fuelled by the convergence of visual storytelling unique to documentary filmmaking with the graphics and procedural rhetoric of digital games. The reciprocal influences between gaming and documentary forms coalesce in this new highly engaging interactive journalism. This research demonstrates how game mechanics, design and logics combine with cinematic storytelling conventions in documentary games published since 2014. As forms of civic engagement more intimate and immersive than traditional print and broadcast journalism, documentary games leverage alternative depictions of violence for social critique. Case studies examine products of independent developers including the documentary games We Are Chicago by Culture Shock Games and iNK Stories’ 1979 Revolution: Black Friday along with its related vérité virtual reality experience, Blindfold. These cases represent major advances in the activist depiction of oppressed populations in narrative documentary journalism. All these projects feature atypical video game protagonists anathema to those of mainstream games.

The video-game industry has become a significant force in the business and entertainment world. Video games have become so widespread and pervasive that they are now considered a part of the mass media, a common method of storytelling and representation. Despite the massive popularity of video games, their increasing variety, and the diversification of the player base, until very recently little attention was devoted to understanding how playing video games affects the way people think and collaborate across cultures. This paper examines the recent literature regarding the impact of video games on players from an intercultural perspective. Sixty-two studies are identified whose aim is to analyze behavioral-change, content understanding, knowledge acquisition, and perceptional impacts. Their findings suggest that video games have the potential to help to acquire cultural knowledge and develop intercultural literacy, socio-cultural literacy, cultural awareness, self-awareness, and the cultural understanding of different geopolitical spaces, to reinforce or weaken stereotypes, and to some extent also facilitate the development of intercultural skills. The paper provides valuable insights to the scholars, teachers, and practitioners of cultural studies, education, social studies, as well as to the researchers, pointing out areas for future research.

The Binding of Isaac, a 2011 video game by Edmund McMillan, is a postmodern take on the biblical episode of the same name which can be characterized as a displacement, in terms of Lubomh Doležel's Heterocosmica. It presents a radical intervention on the original narrative, one that creates a polemical anti world transmitted through the perspective of Isaac, a boy suffering abuse from his televangelism-obsessed mother. The main fabric of the game is his grotesque, gamified fantasy about encountering the delusional parent, which is filled with anxiety about his own sinfulness, with a counterweight that can be found in entities imported from popular culture, especially video games. The game's roguelike genre enables a procedural expression of the experience of abuse through an iterative storytelling technique, with the interplay of difference and repetition forming a cyclical narrative about the (im)possibilities of contemporary ludism to amend trauma.

This study proposes a procedural analysis on the implementation of ludic linguistics to analyze gaming language with wordplays, the core of focus in ludic linguistics, as the point of departure. To formulate the procedural analysis, theories of language play by Crystal ideology of influence and ludonarrative model by Aarseth, wordplay in gaming context by Paul, intended meaning level by Stiles, wordplay transmission by Winter-Froemel, game interface types by Stonehouse and indexical storytelling by Fernández-Vara were applied as the theoretical foundation. To provide a vivid application of the proposed procedural analysis, wordplays appearing on game assets from Konami’s Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater were taken as examples of analysis. The five steps procedure is able to show how wordplays in gaming context are designed as mechanical cues to help gamers complete the games and as narrative cues to help them comprehend the story. Further, this proposed procedure is able to indicate that the mechanical and narrative cues have particular ideology of influence, which affects gamers in reacting and responding to particular problems presented by the games. The result of this study discloses future research on the roles of wordplays in gaming context, signifying the importance of ludic linguistics as a bridge between language studies and game studies. Keywords: Wordplay; Gaming Language; Ludic Linguistics; Game Dtudies; Metal Gear Solid

Abstract As transmedia franchises increasingly populate our cultural environment, many questions arise about the effect of the different media involved in the depiction of storyworlds. Through the analysis of different examples, with special emphasis on the particular case of The Walking Dead, and drawing primarily from Henry Jenkins’s concept of “transmedia storytelling” and Jens Schroter’s concept of intermediality, this paper aims to show how different media aesthetics contribute to the process of storytelling and enrich the experience of the consumer. Usually overlooked in other analyses, we argue that these formal and aesthetical characteristics, such as the interactive nature of video games, call for a broader approach that transcends the accustomed search of common narrative aspects. This will be exemplified by a closer comparative look at the adventure game The Walking Dead: The Ganie (Telltale Games, 2012) and The Walking Dead: Survival Instiiict (Terminal Reality, 2013). The transformations that the different media demand contribute not only to the narrative, but also provide different tools for the construction of storyworlds and different ways to engage with it.

Among The Sleep (2014) follows an infant in his quest to search for memories of his mother. The game receives mixed opinions regarding its overly simple puzzles and confusing juxtaposition of the dream symbols; nevertheless, it is still praised for its storytelling and visuals used to build the momentum leading up to the resolution invoking strong emotions in players. Contrary to a popular belief that infants are incapable of understanding the events around them, in this game the infant can process his surroundings with the help of dreams and fantasies. In Freudian perspective, they will unconsciously affect an infant’s personality when growing up. This research aims to understand the infant’s dreams using Freud’s interpretation of dreams. The findings show that the dream elements are the wish-fulfilment part of the infant’s cognitive ability to cope with his surroundings. Moreover, using the concepts of abjection and hysteria, it is revealed that memories of his mother are often filled with feminine monstrosity to satiate her desire for having a penis by attempting to castrate him. Similar to many other video games, Among The Sleep carries a message through its storytelling elements, and it is to encourage the audience to tackle their own trauma.

My daughter has always been drawn to the frightening and the spooky, with a special interest in zombies. When she was four years old, she and I played a zombie video game together which instigated a series of zombie-related events. This article is a collection of metonymic moments rendered in comics and writing, that revisits these events as memories and experiences grouped conceptually, aesthetically, and narratively around zombies. Presented as a series of narrative fragments, this article explores the tension between parenthood and childhood, and considers the chaotic, unpredictable, and pedagogical entanglements between storytelling, literacy, drawing, and playing.

Gris, an independent Spanish video game, explores the expressive possibilities of this creative medium through a story that is, on one hand, a symbolic representation of the psychological process of the protagonist, and, on the other hand, a foundational narrative about the loss and recovery of identity. This title employs the expressive tools of the history of art to build its aesthetic proposal; in particular, it is categorically placed in the line of surrealism as an artistic current. The analysis of this elements is realized through fundamental notions of rhetoric and poetics, referencing authors such as Helena Beristáin and Carmen Bobes, and the narrative hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur, as well as theoretical perspectives that allow building bridges of analysis between literature and the visual arts.

The article analyzes the video game Batman: The Telltale Series and its „paratexts” such as comics through the lens of remediation as a basic tool of constructing a transmedia environment. Superheroes depend, to a great extent, on their „transmedia” superpowers as they constantly oscillate between various media iterations and theirs stylistic/narrative features. Superheroes should not be perceived as comic books-based inventions, but rather as entities organically connected with both transmedia visual styles and transmedia modes of storytelling.

Surveying narrative applications of artificial intelligence in film, games and interactive fiction, this article imagines the future of artificial intelligence (AI) authorship and explores trends that seek to replace human authors with algorithmically generated narrative. While experimental works that draw on text generation and natural language processing have a rich history, this article focuses on commercial applications of AI narrative and looks to future applications of this technology. Video games have incorporated AI and procedural generation for many years, but more recently, new applications of this technology have emerged in other media. Director Oscar Sharp and artist Ross Goodwin, for example, generated significant media buzz about two short films that they produced which were written by their AI screenwriter. It’s No Game (2017), in particular, offers an apt commentary on the possibility of replacing striking screenwriters with AI authors. Increasingly, AI agents and virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, Alexa and Google Assistant are incorporated into our daily lives. As concerns about their eavesdropping circulate in news media, it is clear that these companions are learning a lot about us, which raises concerns about how our data might be employed in the future. This article explores current applications of AI for storytelling and future directions of this technology to offer insight into issues that have and will continue to arise as AI storytelling advances.

Connecting Haraway’s recent observations about “making kin” to video games, this essay examines how particular elements of the medium might cultivate nuanced considerations for multispecies relations. To fully grasp how video games broadly redefine relations between human and nonhuman animals, we must consider the role of game aesthetics and play mechanics in players’ experience of becoming-with. These elements of games fundamentally shape players’ engagements with the medium and are inextricably linked to their storytelling and production. Moreover, game aesthetics and play mechanics (in conjunction with storytelling) demand that players take specific actions and inhabit distinct roles during play, enabling players to not only think alternative kinships, but also enact making them. To demonstrate these points, I examine the aesthetics and gameplay of two tentacular video games, analyzing how they offer rhetorical models for productively thinking about humans’ relations to nonhuman species. I primarily focus on games that heavily feature cephalopod creatures because this specific animal class is often viewed as a rich site for phenomenological and ontological investigations (including in Haraway’s work). Thus, my research attends to specific video games and their tentacled characters to determine how they challenge players to entertain and enact alternative ontologies and human-animal relationships through play. Resumen Conectando las observaciones recientes de Haraway sobre "hacer parentesco" con los videojuegos, este ensayo examina cómo elementos particulares del medio pueden cultivar consideraciones matizadas para las relaciones multiespecies. Para comprender plenamente cómo los videojuegos redefinen ampliamente las relaciones entre los animales humanos y los animales no humanos, debemos considerar el papel de la estética del juego y la mecánica del juego en la experiencia de convertirse en jugador. Estos elementos de juegos fundamentalmente conforman los compromisos de los jugadores con el medio y están inextricablemente ligados a su narración y producción. Además, la estética del juego y la mecánica del juego (junto con la narración) exigen que los jugadores tomen acciones específicas y ocupen roles distintos durante el juego, permitiendo a los jugadores no sólo pensar en parentescos alternativao, sino también promulgarlos. Para demostrar estos puntos, examino la estética y la jugabilidad de dos videojuegos tentaculares, analizando cómo ofrecen modelos retóricos para pensar productivamente sobre las relaciones de los humanos con las especies no humanas. Me centro primordialmente en los juegos que caracterizan fuertemente a las criaturas cefalópodas, ya que esta clase específica de animales se ve a menudo como un sitio rico para investigaciones fenomenológicas y ontológicas (incluso en el trabajo de Haraway). Así, mi investigación atiende a videojuegos específicos y sus personajes con tentáculos para determinar cómo desafían a los jugadores a entretener y promulgar ontologías alternativas y relaciones entre humanos y animales a través del juego.

The relevance of the subject “game-related phenomena” is associated with the increasing importance of new cultural phenomena in modern culture (cosplay, let’s play, video blogging, fan art, fan fiction), which nonetheless rarely become the subject of cultural and philosophical reflection. We suggest exploring “game-related phenomena” from the standpoint of modern mythmaking. The concept of “game-related phenomena” is proposed to denote a number of sociocultural phenomena related to video games, but which are not their immediate part (cosplay, let’s play, fan fiction, fan art, e-sports, etc.). The object of this research are cosplay and let’s play. The purpose of the article is to analyze these cultural practices as forms of modern mythmaking manifestation. It should be noted that there are very few works devoted to the study of “game-related phenomena” through the perspective of modern mythological consciousness. Cosplay is a specific practice of creating and wearing a costume that allows fans reconstruct the image of a fictional character in popular culture. In this work we highlighted the main approaches to the study of cosplay: cosplay as (1) a way of constructing an identity; (2) a form of escapism; (3) a mass culture phenomenon; (4) a subculture. We have also presented a critical reflection on a number of existing approaches. Let’s play is a video created by users in the process of walking through a particular video game, combining gameplay and commenting it. Main results of the research. Firstly, we have proven the imaginative nature of cosplay. A cosplayer is an active participant in the creative reality transformation and myth construction. A cosplayer appropriates cultural texts and images, creatively processes them, creating one’s own myth on their basis, which attracts the audience. Secondly, we have revealed mythological identification of a reality image and reality itself, as well as the work of the mystical participation. Mythological images created by a cosplayer are thought of as quite real, one can quite feasibly interact with them. The image depicted by a cosplayer is at the same time the original, which introduces him/her and the audience to something larger, for example, to the fictional world, to the fandom, etc. Mythological images and meanings constructed in the framework of cosplay have a sacred meaning. Thirdly, we have shown the interconnections of cosplay with archaic mysteries, carnival performances, medieval theatrical performances that transmitted the sacred into the real world. The cosplay phenomenon itself, in our opinion, is rooted in archaic ritualized practices within which the mythological narrative attained its being. However, unlike archaic mysteries, cosplay is more eclectic and kaleidoscopic in terms of constructing images with different semantic and symbolic content. Fourthly, we can interpret the let’s play as online storytelling. Like a myth narrator, a let’s player narrates on one’s own behalf, constructing one’s own story not based on the original source. Let’s play from the standpoint of studying forms of modern mythmaking appears before us as a space of imagination, creativity, and playing with the original source. A let’s player makes secondary marking of video game elements, building on new meanings and meanings based on them, which allows you give new meanings to original narratives. So, we have come to the conclusion that such “game-related phenomena” such as cosplay and let’s play can be considered as forms of modern mythmaking.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The paper compares two workflows for the achievement of 3D models aimed at in-depth studies on the geometric features of Cultural Heritage artefacts and their dissemination. The purpose is the outlining of pros and cons of different techniques coming from entertainment and video games industry, starting from highly reliable 3D documentation of cultural assets, i.e. architectural/archaeological/urban sites. Two different possible applications are described: (i) procedural modelling used for understanding and visualising reconstruction hypotheses of the vaulted pavilions at Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli, Rome; (ii) optimisation of 3D high-detailed models, as input files, turned into visual reliable and highly portable assets for game-engines. The first case study is focussed on creating a flexible model for evalueting reconstruction hypotheses and supplying restorers with useful hints for shape completion of ruined pavilions. The second case study makes available detailed digital contents for storytelling historical and cultural events in an attractive way, as in the case of the urban explorative model of Chiuro, a small town in northern Italy.</p>

This paper is a reflection on the potential of narrative video games for human sense making and perspective taking. Such games are considered in the context of storytelling and reflective action as the two core foundations of human sense making. I propose that narrative video games allow a form of player storytelling at the intersection of the game’s grand narrative and reflective action in a virtual world. I further propose that such games have the potential to create empathy for other people’s situations and perspectives in life.

Computer- und Videospiele sind heute ein selbstverständlicher Bestandteil der Lebenswelt vieler Kinder und Jugendlicher, aber auch von (jüngeren) Erwachsenen, die mit diesen neuen Medien aufgewachsen sind. Lange Zeit haben elektronische Bildschirmspiele allenfalls sporadische Beachtung gefunden. Weder in der Medienforschung oder Medienpädagogik noch in der breiteren Öffentlichkeit waren sie ein Gegenstand von breiterem Interesse.* In den letzten knapp zehn Jahren sind Video- und Computerspiele allerdings zunehmend in den Fokus der Aufmerksamkeit gerückt. Dabei sind in der massenmedial vermittelten Öffentlichkeit vor allem Amokläufe in Schulen in einen direkten Zusammenhang mit den Vorlieben (der Täter) für bestimmte Computerspiele gebracht worden. Die auch von prominenten Politikern aufgegriffene These lautete, dass gewalthaltige Spiele wie der First Person Shooter «Counterstrike» ein virtuelles Trainingsprogramm für das Töten und daher als wesentliche Ursache solcher Schulmassaker anzusehen seien. Auf der Basis dieser kausalen Wirkungsannahmen bzw. der unterstellten negativen Lern- und Trainingseffekte werden seither immer wieder Forderungen nach einem Verbot solcher «Killerspiele» oder gar nach der Verbannung aller Bildschirmmedien aus den Kinderzimmern abgeleitet. Neben solcher skandalisierter Thematisierung ist aber zunehmend auch eine nüchterne wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung zu konstatieren. So haben sich seit Beginn des neuen Jahrtausends die «digital game studies» als interdisziplinäres Forschungsfeld etabliert. Im Jahr 2000 wurde innerhalb der Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft z.B. die AG Games gebildet, die sich zu einem wichtigen deutschsprachigen Forum für die wissenschaftliche Beschäftigung mit Computerspielen entwickelt hat, und im Jahr 2002 entstand die internationale Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), die im September 2009 ihre vierte grosse Konferenz nach 2003, 2005 und 2007 durchgeführt hat (vgl. www.digra.org). Seit 2001 gibt es mit der «Game Studies» eine primär kulturwissenschaftlich ausgerichtete Online-Zeitschrift (vgl. gamestudies.org), und daneben sind zahlreiche Publikationen zu verzeichnen, die zur Strukturierung und Systematisierung des Forschungsfeldes beigetragen haben, etwa die transdisziplinär angelegten Sammel- und Tagungsbände von Wolf & Perron (2003); Fritz & Fehr (2003), Copier & Raessens (2003), Neitzel, Bopp & Nohr (2004), Raessens & Goldstein (2005), Kaminski & Lorber (2006), Vorderer & Bryant (2006), de Castell & Jenson (2007), Kafai et al. (2008), Quandt, Wimmer & Wolling (2008). Ausserdem liegen Monografien vor, die sich um Orientierung sowie empirische oder theoretische Klärungen bemühen (etwa Fromme, Meder & Vollmer 2000, Newman 2004, Juul 2005, Klimmt 2005, Mäyrä 2008, Pearce & Artemesia 2009). Diese wissenschaftlichen Entwicklungen und Arbeiten zeigen, dass die Phase der blossen Skandalisierung oder akademischen Ignorierung der Computerspiele zu Ende geht. Stattdessen kann von einer zunehmenden Normalisierung und Ausdifferenzierung der akademischen Auseinandersetzung mit diesen neuen Medien und ihren Verwendungsweisen ausgegangen werden, wie sie bei anderen, etablierteren Gegenstandsbereichen (etwa der Film- oder Fernsehforschung) schon länger selbstverständlich ist. Zur Normalisierung und Differenzierung der Debatte soll auch dieses Themenheft der Online-Zeitschrift «MedienPädagogik» auf www.medienpaed.com beitragen, das sich mit den digitalen Spielen und Spielkulturen aus einer primär medienpädagogischen Perspektive befasst und nach den Chancen und Potentialen für informelle wie auch formelle Lern- und Bildungsprozesse fragt. Die Beiträge fokussieren in diesem Spannungsfeld von Spielen und Lernen, von Unterhaltung und Bildung unterschiedliche Aspekte. Die Mehrzahl greift dabei aktuelle Diskussionen über Einsatzmöglichkeiten digitaler Spiele im Bereich des Lernens und der Ausbildung auf, die unter dem Label «Serious Games» oder auch «Game-based Learning» geführt werden (Petko; Bopp; Berger/Marbach; Lampert/Schwinge/Tolks; Malo/Neudorf/Wist; Pfannstiel/Sänger/Schmidt). Daneben widmen sich Beiträge der Frage, wie die Lern- und Bildungsrelevanz der medial-kulturellen Praxen, die sich weitgehend unabhängig von pädagogischer Intervention entfalten, untersucht und verstanden, aber auch pädagogisch unterstützt werden können (Fromme/Jörissen/Unger; Schrammel/Mitgutsch). In einem Beitrag geht es schliesslich darum, Computerspiele selbst zum Gegenstand der pädagogischen Reflexion machen (Biermann). Diese Verteilung spiegelt das Gewicht der Schwerpunkte innerhalb des aktuellen Diskurses über den Zusammenhang von Computerspielen und Lernen/Bildung durchaus angemessen wider. Dominik Petko fokussiert auf formelle Lern- und Bildungskontexte und behandelt die Frage, welche didaktischen Potenziale Computerspiele für den gezielten Einsatz in Schule und Ausbildung aufweisen. Ausgangspunkt ist die Überlegung, dass es für den schulischen Bereich nicht ausreicht, die allgemeinen Lernpotenziale der Spiele auszuweisen und die Muster des spielimmanenten Lernens nachzuzeichnen, wie dies in einigen Publikationen der letzten Jahre geschehe. Um einen Schritt weiterzukommen und zu erreichen, dass digitale Spiele tatsächlich vermehrt in den Unterricht integriert werden, komme es darauf an, den Lehrpersonen zu zeigen, dass der Einsatz solcher Spiele einerseits mit einem vertretbaren Aufwand möglich ist und andererseits zu einem erkenn- und begründbaren Mehrwert führt. Dazu sei im ersten Schritt eine genauere Analyse und Typisierung der Spiele und anschliessend eine Konkretisierung der didaktischen Strategien und Arrangements für die sinnvolle Einbettung in den Unterricht erforderlich. Der Beitrag vermittelt einen ersten systematischen Überblick über entsprechende mediendidaktische Ziele und Ansätze für den Einsatz von Computerspielen in Schule und Unterricht. Matthias Bopp geht aus von der Überlegung, dass Computerspiele die Spielenden generell mit Aufgaben und Herausforderungen konfrontieren, die nur im Rahmen von spielbezogenen Lernprozessen bewältigt werden können. Zudem unterstützen aktuelle Spiele die Spielenden in der Regel systematisch beim Erwerb der erforderlichen Kenntnisse und Fähigkeiten, weisen also ein (zumindest implizites) didaktisches Design auf. Wenn man in Rechnung stellt, dass Video- und Computerspiele für Kinder, Jugendliche und zunehmend auch Erwachsene trotz – oder gerade wegen – der hohen Anforderungen, die sie stellen, höchst faszinierend und motivierend sind, dann bietet es sich an, die Lehr-Lern-Designs digitaler Spiele genauer zu untersuchen, um ihre erfolgreichen Prinzipien auf Lernspiele zu übertragen. Der Beitrag konzentriert sich in diesem Kontext auf die Frage, welche Bedeutung zum einen Rahmengeschichten (Storytelling) und zum anderen parasoziale Interaktionen zwischen Spielenden und virtuellen Spielfiguren für die Spielmotivation haben und welche Rolle ihre gezielte Verwendung beim Design von Lernspielen zur Steigerung oder Aufrechterhaltung der Lernmotivation spielen kann. Daraus werden Empfehlungen für die Gestaltung motivierender Lernspiele abgeleitet und abschliessend an Hand zweier Beispiele veranschaulicht. Johannes Fromme, Benjamin Jörissen und Alexander Unger plädieren dafür, die Bildungspotenziale von Computerspielen – und der neuen, computerbasierten Medien überhaupt – nicht nur in ihrer Verwendung bzw. Verwendbarkeit als didaktische und motivationssteigernde Hilfsmittel für die Vermittlung dieser oder jener Lehrinhalte zu sehen, sondern die Perspektive in verschiedenen Hinsichten zu erweitern. Eine prinzipielle Erweiterung bestehe darin, bei der Frage nach Bildungspotenzialen in der Tradition der humanistischen Bildungstheorie nicht primär den Wissenserwerb, sondern die Steigerung von Reflexivität im Selbst- und Weltverhältnis in den Blick zu nehmen und somit zu fragen, in welcher Weise der Umgang mit Medien hierzu beitragen kann. Und weil Bildung in dieser Tradition grundsätzlich als Selbstbildung verstanden werde, liege es nahe, neben der formellen, institutionalisierten Bildung dem Bereich der informellen Bildung eine entsprechende Beachtung zu schenken. Der Artikel fragt daher nach dem Beitrag, den Computerspiele – und vor allem community-basierte Praxen – für eine Flexibilisierung von Selbst- und Weltsichten sowie für den Aufbau von Orientierungswissen leisten können, und diskutiert abschliessend, inwiefern solche informellen Bildungspotenziale pädagogisch aufgegriffen und unterstützt werden können. Florian Berger und Alexander Marbach gehen davon aus, dass es angesichts der Popularität und hohen Motivationskraft der Computerspiele zwar nahe liege, ihre pädagogische Verwertbarkeit zu prüfen, dass für den pädagogischen Einsatz der digitalen Spiele aber bisher weder theoretisch fundierte Konzepte noch eine hinreichende Forschung existiere. Insbesondere würden Fragen der technischen Machbarkeit zu wenig beachtet, wobei die Schwierigkeit darin bestehe, dass der jeweilige «State of the Art» für Lernspiele als Massstab schon wegen der begrenzten (finanziellen) Ressourcen ausscheide, andererseits aber ein Mindeststandard erreicht werden müsse, um die notwendige Akzeptanz beim Anwender zu finden. Vor diesem Hintergrund geht der Beitrag zunächst der Frage nach, was die technische, die kulturelle und die pädagogische Qualität eines digitalen Spiels ausmacht, um dann – aus einer primär ingenieurwissenschaftlichen Perspektive – zu diskutieren, wie bei der Gestaltung von Lernspielen eine gute Balance erreicht werden kann. Ralf Biermann betrachtet Computerspiele in seinem Beitrag nicht aus mediendidaktischer, sondern aus medienpädagogischer Perspektive und stellt ein Konzept vor, mit dem die digitalen Spiele selbst zum Gegenstand einer lernorientierten Auseinandersetzung werden. Die leitende Idee ist es, Wege aufzuzeigen und zu erproben, wie Computerspiele in den Bereich der aktiven, projektorientierten Medienarbeit eingebunden werden können, die sich dieser neuen Medien – im Unterschied zu Radio, Presse oder Film – bisher kaum angenommen hat. Das Konzept des Video Game Essays knüpft an der Film- und Videoarbeit an, erweitert es aber um einige neue Elemente, die mit den technischen Besonderheiten der Spiele zu tun haben. Der Ansatz kann als innovative Form der Medienanalyse angesehen werden, bleibt aber bei der Analyse nicht stehen, sondern eröffnet auch weitergehende Handlungs- und Lernpotenziale. Als Einsatzgebiete des Video Game Essays werden die ausserschulische Medienarbeit, die Schul- und die Hochschulausbildung genauer betrachtet. Claudia Lampert, Christiane Schwinge und Daniel Tolks zeichnen in ihrem Beitrag die bisherigen Entwicklungen im Bereich der Serious Games nach, die von anderen Ansätzen des mediengestützten Lernens wie E-Learning, Edutainment und Game-Based Learning abgegrenzt werden, und arbeiten den aktuellen Diskussions- und Forschungsstand auf. Die Potenziale und Grenzen werden am Beispiel zweier Spiele aus dem Gesundheitsbereich (Games for Health) detaillierter diskutiert, für die auch erste empirische Befunde vorliegen. Serious Games gewinnen zwar – nach Ansicht der Autoren/innen vor allem aus Marketinggründen – zunehmend an Bedeutung, allerdings bestehe noch ein erheblicher Forschungs- und Evaluationsbedarf. Sabrina Schrammel und Konstantin Mitgutsch kritisieren, dass im medienpädagogischen Diskurs über Computerspiele der Umstand vernachlässigt werde, dass Spielen eine kulturell geprägte, aktive Auseinandersetzung mit einem Spielgegenstand sei. Ihnen geht es im vorliegenden Beitrag daher darum, die spezifische medial- kulturelle Praktik des Computerspielens zu erfassen bzw. dafür einen geeigneten methodischen und theoretischen Zugang zu entwickeln und vorzustellen. Das Spielen von Computerspielen wird in Anlehnung an den internationalen Diskurs als Transformation und Produktion kultureller Erfahrungen interpretiert, auch um aus den Engführungen der im deutschsprachigen Raum noch dominierenden Mediennutzungs- und Medienwirkungsforschung herauszugelangen. Für die pädagogische Auseinandersetzung wird daraus abgeleitet, dass nicht die didaktische Nützlichkeit, sondern die bildungstheoretische Bedeutung von Computerspielen zu fokussieren sei. Den bisher vorherrschenden teleologischen Lernkonzepten wird hier ein genealogischer Ansatz gegenübergestellt, bei dem die Erfahrungen und Lernprozesse im Zuge der Spielhandlungen selbst thematisiert werden. An einem Beispiel wird abschliessend verdeutlicht, wie das theoretisch-methodische Vorgehen einer hierauf ausgerichteten Analyse ausgestaltet und wie bei einer solchen Analyse die medial-kulturelle Praktik des Computerspielens pädagogisch rekonstruiert werden kann. Steffen Malo, Maik Neudorf und Thorben Wist ordnen ihren Beitrag in den Kontext des Game-based Training (GBT) ein und berichten über das Projekt Alphabit, bei dem es darum geht, computerbasierte Lern- bzw. Trainingsspiele als ergänzendes methodisches Mittel für Alphabetisierungs- bzw. Grundbildungsprogramme einzusetzen. Vorgestellt werden die im Projekt entwickelten konzeptionellen Überlegungen zu den Rahmenbedingungen, zur Auswahl der Inhalte, zu unterstützenden instruktionalen Hilfen, zu den Entwicklungsprozessen und zu methodischen Aspekten des spielerischen Lernens in virtuellen Umgebungen. Ausserdem werden erste Ansätze für die Umsetzung präsentiert und offene Forschungsfragen aufgezeigt. Auch Jochen Pfannstiel, Volker Sänger und Claudia Schmitz berichten über ein Projekt, das für die Bildungspraxis konzipiert wurde und auch bereits erprobt wird. Hier geht es um Game- based Learning im Hochschulbereich, genauer: um ein Lernspiel, das ergänzend zu einer Pflichtvorlesung in der Informatik eingesetzt wird, um Studierende dazu zu motivieren, sich während des Studiums intensiver und vertiefend mit der Vorlesungsthematik zu befassen. Ziel ist also ein verbessertes und vor allem nachhaltigeres Verständnis der Vorlesungsinhalte durch spielerische Mittel zu erreichen. Der Beitrag beschreibt das dazu entwickelte Lernspiel und berichtet über die bisherigen Erfahrungen und erste Evaluationsergebnisse. * Eine Ausnahme erscheint allerdings erwähnenswert: In der ersten Hälfte der 1980er Jahre gab es in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland eine Debatte (und einige Forschungsarbeiten) zum Videospiel in Spielhallen mit dem Ergebnis, dass 1985 ein geändertes Jugendschutzgesetz in Kraft trat, das den Zugang zu Glücks- und Videospielautomaten in der Öffentlichkeit neu regulierte und unter 18-Jährigen nicht mehr gestattete. Diese Regelung ist – anders als die 2003 obligatorisch gewordenen Altersfreigaben der USK für Computerspiele auf Datenträgern – unabhängig vom Inhalt der Spiele, und sie ist bis heute in Kraft. Literatur Copier, Marinka/Raessens, Joost (Eds.) (2003): Level Up. Digital Games Research Conference, 4–6 November 2003, Utrecht University, Conference Proceedings. De Castell, Suzanne/Jenson, Jennifer (Eds.) (2007): Worlds in Play. International Perspectives on Digital Games Research. New York et al.: Peter Lang. Fritz, Jürgen/Fehr, Wolfgang (Hrsg.) (2003): Computerspiele. Virtuelle Spiel- und Lernwelten. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. Fromme, Johannes, Meder, Norbert; Vollmer, Nikolaus (2000). Computerspiele in der Kinderkultur. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Juul, Jesper (2005). Half-real. Video games between real rules and fictional worlds. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Kafai, Yasmin B./Heeter, Carrie/Denner, Jill/Sun, Jennifer Y. (Eds.) (2008): Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat. New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming. Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press. Kaminski, Winfred/Lorber, Martin (Hrsg.) (2006): Clash of Realities. Computerspiele und soziale Wirklichkeit. München: Kopäd. Klimmt, Christoph (2005): Computerspielen als Handlung. Dimensionen und Determinanten des Erlebens interaktiver Unterhaltungssoftware. Köln: Herbert von Halem. Mäyrä, Frans (2008): An Introduction to Game Studies. Games in Culture. Los Angeleos u.a.: SAGE. Neitzel, Britta/Bopp, Matthias/Nohr, Rolf F. (Hrsg.) (2004): «See? I’m real …» Multidisziplinäre Zugänge zum Computerspiel am Beispiel von ‹Silent Hill›. Münster: Lit. Newman, James (2003): Videogames. London/New York: Routledge. Pearce, Celia/Artemesia (2009): Communities of Play. Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press. Quandt, Thorsten/Wimmer, Jeffrey/Wolling, Jens (Hrsg.) (2008): Die Computerspieler. Studien zur Nutzung von Computergames. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Raessens, Joost; Goldstein, Jeffrey (2005) (Ed). Handbook of Computer Game Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Vorderer, Peter; Bryant, Jennings (2006) (Ed). Playing Video Games. Motives, Responses, and Consequences. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Wolf, Mark J./Perron, Bernard (Eds.) (2003): The Video Game Theory Reader. New York/London: Routledge.

This essay performs a narratological reading of 2014 video games Valiant Hearts and Super Trench Attack and the ways through which they memorialize the Great War. By close-reading the narrative techniques of these games, I argue that through their storytelling elements they memorialize the Great War by countering the narrative trope of the adynaton, often employed to manage the traumatic articulation of war narratives. Bathetic, pathetic, and chronotopic representations contribute to the affective economy on which these video games rely to memorialize the war, and hint at what posthumanist memorialization could mean for the remembrance of Great War.

The text concerns a very complex and multifaceted phenomenon of the creation of heroes and heroines in various media messages that take the form of a story. The need to analyze this problem results from the author’s personal experience in building storytelling in advertising, on radio platforms, in the press and in the case of fictional publications. This phenomenon is related not only to the fundamental issues for creating effective communication in the media space (cinematography, literature) but also to pre-viously unknown, innovative forms of building stories (e.g. in podcasting, video games, or applications dedicated to virtual assistants and assistants).

This article explores issues associated with immersive storytelling in order to examine how the field of World Building can constitute a theoretical framework for practice in the context of VR-based and Full Dome artistic projects. With respect to immersion, the intent will be to interpret the concept of storytelling in relation with the recent formulation of the concept of extended reality (XR). The very concept of World Building is transauthor and transmedia by nature. The transauthor dimension of World Building resides in the idea of subcreation, i.e., designing environments and interaction rules that help create a storytelling basis for generating multiple stories. Once the universe has been conceived, stories written by different authors take shape through transmedia processes across multiple distribution media (film, video games, web, etc.). The question then arises: How can the World Building approach shape the construction of immersive experiences? The article sets out to answer this question, and in doing so, to contribute to the research on environmental storytelling.

Video games are powerful narrative media that continue to evolve. Romance games in Japan, which began as text-based adventure games and are today known as bishōjo games and otome games, form a powerful textual corpus for literary and media studies. They adopt conventional literary narrative strategies and explore new narrative forms formulated by an interface with computer-generated texts and audiovisual fetishism, thereby challenging the assumptions about the modern textual values of storytelling. The article first examines differences between visual novels that feature female characters for a male audience and romance adventure games that feature male characters for a female audience. Through the comparison, the article investigates how notions of romantic love and relationship have transformed from the modern identity politics based on freedom and the autonomous self to the decentered model of mediation and interaction in the contemporary era.

Video games are works of written code that portray worlds and characters in action and facilitate an aesthetic and interpretive experience. Beyond this similarity to literary works, some video games deploy various design strategies that blend gameplay and literary elements to explicitly foreground a hybrid literary/ludic experience. We identify three such strategies: engaging with literary structures, forms, and techniques; deploying text in an aesthetic rather than a functional way; and intertextuality. This article aims to analyze how these design strategies are deployed in What Remains of Edith Finch to support a hybrid readerly/playerly experience. We argue that this type of design is particularly suited for walking simulators (or walking sims) because they support interpretive play through slowness, ambiguity, narrative, and aesthetic aspirations. Understanding walking sims as literary games can shift the emphasis from their lack of “traditional” gameplay complexity and focus instead on the opportunities that they afford for hybrid storytelling and for weaving literature and gameplay in innovative and playful ways.

There has long been interest in both the tonic and phasic release of scent across a wide range of entertainment settings. While the presentation of semantically congruent scent has often been used in order to enhance people’s immersion in a particular context, other generally less successful attempts have involved the pulsed presentation of a range of scents tied to specific events/scenes. Scents have even been released in the context of the casino to encourage the guests to linger for longer (and spend more), at least according to the results of one controversial study. In this narrative review, I want to take a closer look at the use of scent in a range of both physical and digital environments, highlighting the successes (as in the case of scented theme park rides) and frequent failures (as, seemingly, in the context of scent-enabled video games). While digitally inducing meaningful olfactory sensations is likely to remain a pipe dream for the foreseeable future, the digital control of scent release/delivery provides some limited opportunities to enhance the multisensory experience of entertainment. That said, it remains uncertain whether the general public will necessarily perceive the benefit, and hence be willing to pay for the privilege.

A growing number of urban practitioners and scholars are interested in using digital storytelling to strengthen neighborhood connections to shared culture and build a coherent sense of place. This article contributes to this discussion by investigating how ‘urban furniture’ can sustain social capacity for digital placemaking. While traditional ‘urban furniture’ in public space is purely physical, digital-physical hybrids are emerging, from benches that tell stories to bus stops that play videos. This extended case follows the travels of an Afrofuturist piece of urban furniture: a community-hacked payphone called Sankofa Red. Our analysis triangulates findings across three installations to show how placemaking can be sustained as a social process: as part of a successful makeover of a community plaza, featured in a neighborhood history game, and in an art exhibition on race and ethnicity. We identify promising practices to adapt urban furniture and retain design collectives beyond a single placemaking installation. As a way for cities to build capacity, we propose that rotating one kind urban furniture (e.g., payphones) across neighborhoods can build the social capacity for placemaking around a shared technical foundation, while still prioritizing local needs and culture.

The aim of the article is to present two concepts — the supersystem of entertainment (super-system of transmedia intertextuality) and the transmission of storytelling — in the context of the re-search problem on various examples in pop culture. The first term was introduced by Marsha Kinder in the work Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the second was by Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide. The analysis of the above terms uses knowledge in the field of archi-tecture of information (knowledge sharing and classification), internet technologies (search engine algorithms) and literature and popular culture (cultural universum). In addition, the most important mechanisms (causes and effects) of processes — cultural, media, social, economic — take place in contemporary culture.

Video games have become important but understudied narrative media, which link into as well as perpetuate popular forms of cultural memory. They evoke and mediate space (or the illusion thereof) in unique ways, literally putting into play Doreen Massey’s theory of space as being produced through a multiplicity of trajectories. I examine how Assassins Creed: Syndicate and The Order 1886 (both 2015) configure a neo-Victorian London as a simulated, spatio-temporal imaginary in which urban texture becomes a readable storytelling device in and of itself, and interrogate how their neo-Victorian heterotopias are mediated through a spatial experience. Both games conjure up imaginaries of steampunk London as a counter-site sourced from and commenting on the Victorian city of memory. Through retro-speculation, they re-calibrate neo-Victorian London as a playground offering alternative forms of agency and adventure or as cyberpunk-infused hyper-city. In so doing, they invite the player to re-evaluate, through their spatial experience in such a heterotopic steampunk London, shared imaginaries of ‘the city’ and ‘the Victorian’.

Based on the application of methods of theoretical analysis, synthesis and generalization, the author determined, substantiated and characterized psychological and pedagogical conditions (teachers' comprehension of the meaning of the emotional intelligence concept, its significance in educational activities, reflection of own emotional state of teachers and students; introduction of methods of the emotional intelligence development in the educational process of educational institution; creation of the educational environment of educational institution favorable to the emotional intelligence development) and methods of the emotional intelligence development of primary school students (games and exercises for the emotional intelligence development; implementation of innovative technologies in the educational process: storytelling, scribing, psycho-gymnastics, art therapy, viewing cartoons and videos, reading stories and fairy-tales with further discussion).

Rick and Morty, one of the most popular presently-airing American TV series, is deeply rooted in popular culture. Each episode is full of allusions and references to other cultural texts, accentuating the show’s own status as a pop cultural text. This article analyzes the third episode of the fourth season of Rick and Morty, “One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty,” using Stefan Schubert’s concept of narrative instability. The episode mocks twist films by introducing a ridiculous number of twists, eventually making the viewer immune to the element of surprise usually brought on by what Schubert understands as unstable moments. In doing so, the episode also emphasizes the overuse of that narrative device in recent decades in films, TV series and video games. “One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty” deconstructs twist films while sticking to the rules of the sub-genre and remaining entertaining in its own right. Instability can pose quite a problem for the showrunners, who usually have to adjust to the norms of serialized storytelling. By using Schubert’s theory of narrative instability to discuss a singular episode of a series, I hope to demonstrate the extent to which this quality has permeated modern storytelling. The episode highlights the effects of over-reliance on narrative instability as a tool, as even the most elaborate form is not enough to make up for the lack of essence. This is exactly what Rick criticizes in the episode, when he states: “stealing stuff is about the stuff, not the stealing.”

Cancer is a chronic illness that could suffer every people included children. Because of cancer treatment for more than 2 years, some students should postpone their school. Through ‘sekolah-ku’ program, YKAKI Jogja freely gives facility for children getting cancer treatment to continue their study in the hospital and in the shelter home. Children living in YKAKI Jogja were often visited by foreign volunteers and got English literature book donation. They interested in learning English but they felt difficult to use English because English is not their first language. However, the children with cancer have limitation in Learning English caused by: 1) side effect of chemotherapy, 2) less self-confident, 3) less support from their family. The research aimed at finding out the proper learning method to teach English for children with cancer in YKAKI Jogja. The research methods used direct observation and interview in order to gain the research data. In the English class, the researcher used bilingual communication with students and created comfort situation in the ward. Some learning methods were applied during learning English such as playing games, watching English videos, and storytelling. The result of this research showed that the children was more motivated to study English when the researcher combined two of three learning methods in the English class than used one method in that class.

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate how a small business is able to continually use entrepreneurial financial sources (i.e. crowdfunding) within and after a successful transformation from an entrepreneur. It additionally investigates how a market incumbent is able to successfully join the market of entrepreneurial financial resources.Design/methodology/approachTherefore, a comparative case study using qualitative and quantitative data as well as triangulation technique is conducted within the international board game (or tabletop) market at the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. The US company CMON, which has developed from an entrepreneur to a small business and beyond, is compared with the German incumbent Pegasus. Based on an analysis of a set of key performance indicators suggested in the literature, qualitative and quantitative variables are deductively derived to measure their impact on the financial goal achievement, thereby showing their impact on the goal achievement. During the analysis, additional variables are identified inductively.FindingsAs a result, several qualitative components are found to be crucial, including oral storytelling and computer animated videos/images, a perfect multilingual product language, prototyped components, an active community and a depth and regularity in campaign updates. In quantitative terms, important components include having more product images than longer project descriptions, more optional buys than different but fixed project rewards, a big social network (on Twitter and Facebook), and the number of updates.Research limitations/implicationsBased upon the data and findings, this study invites for more research, especially in conducting a larger scale quantitative analysis using the developed framework to compare more cases within a branch, cases across branches and cases with different background stories.Practical implicationsBut to successfully run a crowdfunding campaign, entrepreneurs and incumbents can use the provided measures as a first design- and decision-roadmap, as well as copying the new business strategy of continually practicing crowdfunding for new products.Originality/valueDespite its limits, this paper offers the first in-depth qualitative and quantitative crowdfunding case study showing on the one hand a new business strategy about crowdfunding as well as providing a structured measure to compare crowdfunding project performance.

The University of Naples Federico II (Italy) offers a nine-month formative training program aimed at software development for the Apple technology ecosystem to ~400 learners per year and utilises the Challenge Based Learning (CBL) methodology as a framework for learning. As a collaborative and self-guided, inquiry-based learning method, it focuses on learners’ intrinsic motivation while working on real world problems organised in projects (Challenges in CBL) with an experiential and progressive approach to apply acquired knowledge in real world scenarios, ideate solution concepts and build innovative digital products. To overcome limitations of spiral curriculum or elaboration theory, the authors applied narrative theory to design the program’s educational experience for the academic year 2019/2020 as a cohesive journey within a communal learning environment with a coherent and connected structure of narratively driven learning Challenges. The authors present concepts to develop their approach further towards an emergent narrative experience design system to manage the educational journey as it develops, rather than scripting it. This paper evolves the authors’ Narrative Experience Design Canvas to model educational experience design that encourages unscripted, emergent narratives for experiential education with the goal of fostering learners’ engagement, agency and creativity. Derived in part by models developed for digital interactive storytelling or educational video games, it categorises the components for designing an educational experience that allows the learning progression to be driven by learners as co-authors and describes mechanisms that allow unscripted narratives to emerge based on intrinsic motivation. Additionally, the authors present considerations for synchronous and asynchronous learning to evolve their framework for application in blended or remote learning scenarios. Drawing upon findings for remote learning and experiential e-learning - ee-learning - presented by scholars as well as implications identified during the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting switch to remote learning within the program at University of Naples Federico II in 2020, it is shown how combining narrative elements with experiential e-learning principles can result in increased engagement, motivation and sense of community in learners. Using the example of an individual learning unit - a Challenge - considerations from overall course design down to day-to-day learning activities within the course are presented. For the future, the authors indicate action points to develop this model into an Emergent Narrative System for designing narratively driven and experiential software development education programs and indicate areas of further research on learning activity design for blended or remote learning experiences.

Affective materiality is a tool for exploring how engaging with textual structures shapes the affective experience of a story. The experience of video games is distinctive because their modes of engagement can lead to players feeling responsible for the decisions they make within the diegetic space of the game and its contextual storyworld. Night in the Woods and Undertale both use the perception of responsibility found in video game modes of engagement as an active storytelling tool, but apply it in different ways. Despite the differences in their contextual application, both games use affective materiality to encourage players to reflect on the consequences of their decisions in multiple arenas: within the context of the game, their engagement with other games and their engagement with the wider world. In doing so, both games apply storytelling techniques that distinguish playing video games from the experience of other media forms and encourage an empathetic engagement with fictional storyworlds.

What is the relationship between the player and the avatar of a video game? In this article, I aim to show that Jon Robson and Aaron Meskin’s apparently promising, Waltonian analysis of that relationship—namely, that it consists in the player imagining herself as the avatar—fails to accommodate and explain four central data about video-game storytelling that any such analysis ought to accommodate and explain. These data are, briefly: (1) Many of an avatar’s actions are inexplicable if we appeal only to the avatar’s beliefs, desires, and knowledge. (2) Video games may have many different kinds and numbers of avatars. (3) Video-game narratives often proceed by the player exploring multiple disjunctive, mutually exclusive possibilities. (4) Video-game narratives sometimes centrally depend on epistemic differences between the player and avatar.After evaluating Robson and Meskin’s view, I offer my own positive analysis of player interactivity that provides a motivated and unified explanation of these four data: the player of a video game plays the role of a metaphysically foundational fictional entity that actualizes possible fictional events. I call this entity ‘the fictional player’.Keywords: avatars, narrative, video games, storytelling, fiction, narrative explanation, ontology, fictional grounding, art, aesthetics, possible worlds, Walton.

Due to the growing popularity of video games, gaming itself has become a shared experience among media audiences worldwide. The phenomenon of avatar-based games has led to the emergence of new storytelling practices. The paper proposes a typology of tropes in these avatar-based narratives focusing on non-game case studies. Suggested tropes are also confronted with the latest research on avatars in the area of game studies and current knowledge of the issues concerning the player-avatar relationship. Some of the most popular misconceptions regarding the gameplay experience and its representation in non-game media are exposed as a result of this analysis. The research confirms that popular culture perceives gaming experience as closely related to the player identity, as the latter inspires new genres of non-game narratives.

Video games have long held a spotty history in their narratives regarding women. Most research has examined large budget games and identified issues of simplification, oversexualization, and a general lack of agency among female characters. The present study explores the gaming niche of “indie”—or independent game developer—video games in their representations of women in particular with Never Alone, Gone Home, and Her Story. These games were released around the time frame of the GamerGate controversy—a controversy which drew attention to the treatment of women in gaming culture—and hence, the games are used to reflect on a potential shift in games culture following the controversy. This article argues that these game narratives emphasized multilayered female characterizations, female-to-female interactions, and internal dramas as a way to potentially reach female gamers and present an alternative, humanizing narrative on women.

The technology used to create early video games allowed only for simple graphic displays. However, gamers vividly experienced an immersion in a fictional world through an interpretation based on detailed cover art, familiar elements of storytelling, and the gamer’s own memories of similar landscapes, much as one interprets a poem.

This two-video series explores how the scoring to the video game Portal 2, published by Valve Corporation, not only helps tell the game’s story, but also comments on the game developers’ philosophy of puzzle design. The first video explores how the game’s title theme 9999999, including its texture, voice leadings, and chord qualities, musically enacts dual aspects of the character of the game’s central antagonist GlaDOS: once human, her personality was uploaded into a computer mainframe where she has become a sociopathic, homicidal artificial intelligence who takes delight in subjecting humans to hazardous scientific experimentation. The second video demonstrates that 9999999 serves as the theme for a set of double variations in the game’s middle act. Since Valve’s philosophy of player training centers on iterative puzzle-design that systematically increase in complexity, and the musical accompaniments for these puzzles feature coordinated developments in musical complexity, the scoring here lets us parse the puzzle design into a kind of set of gameplay theme-and-variations.

This two-video series explores how the scoring to the video game Portal 2, published by Valve Corporation, not only helps tell the game’s story, but also comments on the game developers’ philosophy of puzzle design. The first video explores how the game’s title theme 9999999, including its texture, voice leadings, and chord qualities, musically enacts dual aspects of the character of the game’s central antagonist GlaDOS: once human, her personality was uploaded into a computer mainframe where she has become a sociopathic, homicidal artificial intelligence who takes delight in subjecting humans to hazardous scientific experimentation. The second video demonstrates that 9999999 serves as the theme for a set of double variations in the game’s middle act. Since Valve’s philosophy of player training centers on iterative puzzle-design that systematically increase in complexity, and the musical accompaniments for these puzzles feature coordinated developments in musical complexity, the scoring here lets us parse the puzzle design into a kind of set of gameplay theme-and-variations.