Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Graphic adventure games"

The article highlights the features characterising the formation of the pre-school aged children’s writing skills with the help of gaming means. The problem of writing skills development (formation) becomes particularly relevant with regard to the transition to the twelve-year period of study at school, starting from the age of six. While training pre-schoolers in mastering written speech, very often a tendency to transfer school methods of teaching children writing is observed. Such a tendency hinders this process, makes children tired and does not attract their interest. The author emphasizes the need to use games as the effective means for preparing child’s hands for writing. Some methods facilitating the development of pre-schoolers’ writing skills which are based on the use of games and game exercises are described in the article. The games and exercises were grouped into several blocks depending on the kind of the child’s functions being trained during their fulfilment: the development of visual-motor coordination, the development of the figure perception against the background of others and constancy of perception, the development of children’s spatial concepts and the development of the motor component of the graphic skills. The fulfilment of exercises in a copybook, the writing of letter elements were woven into a fabulous story or adventure. A purposeful use of artistic and visual images contributed to the intensification of the pre-schoolers’ cognitive activity, increased interest in preparing the children’s hands for writing in classes and ensured a successful development of the children’s graphic skills based on the visual thinking inherent at their age. The author of the article convincingly substantiated the pedagogical conditions for the successful development of the pre-schoolers’ writing skills, such as: the provision of a positive emotional background in classes, the use of games as an effective means of learning and the implementation of the individual approach to children. A positive result of using games while teaching senior pre-schoolers to write is a significant reduction of the children’s overload and fatigue, which are constant companions in learning in accordance with the traditional methods, when the monotonous and boring writing of letter elements requires that the child should apply a lot of physical, mental and nerve effort. A complex pedagogical influence on the development of the senior pre-schoolers’ writing skills stipulated by the experimental methodology facilitated, made the process of training the children’s hands to write more productive and interesting. Keywords: writing skills, pre-school age, training the child’s hand to write.

<p><em>Online games are very fast growing lately. The longer, it becomes more fun, including the appearance, style of play, game graphics, image resolution, and so on. There is also a variety of player types such as war, adventure, strategy, fight and all types of online games which are surely interesting to play. The kind of technology development greatly impacts the development of the children's character. When technology is used positively, surely it will help us in our daily life and vice versa. Program (PKM), 1 title Village Partner Development Program (PPDM)<strong></strong></em></p>

Abstract. Volcanoes are a very common staple in mainstream video games. Particularly within the action–adventure genres, entire missions (e.g. Monster Hunter: Generation Ultimate, 2018) or even full storylines (e.g. Spyro: The Reignited Trilogy, 2018) can require players to traverse an active volcano. With modern advancements in video game capabilities and graphics, many of these volcanic regions contain a lot of detail. Most video games nowadays have gameplay times in excess of 50 h. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017), for example, brags a minimum of 60 h to complete. Therefore, players can spend a substantial amount of time immersed within the detailed graphics and unknowingly learn about volcanic traits while playing. If these details are factually accurate to what is observed in real-world volcanic systems, then video games can prove to be a powerful learning tool. However, inaccurate representations could instil a false understanding in thousands of players worldwide. Therefore, it is important to assess the accuracies of volcanology portrayed in mainstream video games and consider whether they can have an educational impact on the general public playing such games or whether these volcanic details are overlooked by players as they focus solely on the entertainment factor provided. We have therefore reviewed several popular commercial video games that contain volcanic aspects and evaluated how realistic said aspects are when compared to real-world examples. It was found that all the games reviewed had a combination of accurate and inaccurate volcanic features and each would vary from game to game. The visual aesthetics of these features are usually very realistic, including lava, ash fall and lahars. However, the inaccuracies or lack of representation of hazards that come with such features, such as ash-related breathing problems or severe burns from contact with molten lava, could have great negative impacts on a player's understanding of these deadly events. With further investigations assessing the direct impact on the general public, there is an opportunity to correctly assess how to incorporate the use of mainstream video games in educational systems and outreach.

Background Using commercial off-the-shelf video games rather than custom-made computer games could have several advantages for reducing stress and anxiety, including their low cost, advanced graphics, and the possibility to reach millions of individuals worldwide. However, it is important to emphasize that not all commercial video games are equal, and their effects strongly depend on specific characteristics of the games. Objective The aim of this systematic review was to describe the literature on the use of commercial off-the-shelf video games for diminishing stress and anxiety, examining the research outcomes along with critical variables related to computer game characteristics (ie, genre, platform, time of play). Methods A systematic search of the literature was performed following the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis) guidelines. The search databases were PsycINFO, Web of Science, Medline, IEEExplore, and the Cochrane Library. The search string was: [(“video game*”) OR (“computer game*”)] AND [(“stress”) OR (“anxiety”) OR (“relaxation”)] AND [(“study”) OR (“trial”) OR (“training”)]. Results A total of 28 studies met the inclusion criteria for the publication period 2006-2021. The findings demonstrate the benefit of commercial off-the-shelf video games for reducing stress in children, adults, and older adults. The majority of the retrieved studies recruited young adults, and fewer studies have involved children, middle-aged adults, and older adults. In addition to exergames and casual video games, other genres of commercial off-the-shelf games helped to reduce stress and anxiety. Conclusions Efficacy in reducing stress and anxiety has been demonstrated not only for exergames and casual video games but also for other genres such as action games, action-adventure games, and augmented reality games. Various gaming platforms, including consoles, PCs, smartphones, mobile consoles, and virtual reality systems, have been used with positive results. Finally, even single and short sessions of play had benefits in reducing stress and anxiety. Trial Registration International Platform of Registered Systematic Review and Meta-analysis Protocols INPLASY202130081; https://inplasy.com/?s=INPLASY202130081

We present and explore the fruitfulness of “first-person cinematographic videogames,” a game model we have devised for the promotion of cultural, environmental, and territorial heritage. To support and foster the development of these type of games, we have developed a Web-based user-friendly authoring environment, extensively presented in the article. While employing standard first-person point-and-click game mechanics, the game model's distinctive feature is that the game environment is not based on a digital reconstruction (3D model) of the real-world settings but on cinematographic techniques combining videos and photos of existing places, integrating videoclips of mostly practical effects to obtain the interactivity typical of the first-person point-and-click adventure games. Our goal with such a game model is to mobilise mechanisms of engendering affection for real-world places when they become settings of the game world, arousing in the player forms of affection, attachment, and desire to visit them.

Virtual Reality (VR) technology has advanced forward in everyday life where virtual fitness is possible through physically moving around in the real world. Exergame is a video game for exercise aimed at making exercise more fun. VR exergame applies these trends together for virtual fitness with immersive game play. The VR locomotion is traveling in VR, which is commonly used in adventure role-playing games (RPG). Virtual running can be applied as a locomotion technique for VR exergames. The design of virtual running in VR exergames should be considered as an exercise for fitness and also for enjoyment. This paper proposed two motion-based locomotion techniques: ArmSwing and Squat for virtual running, which are considered as aerobic and strength exercise. These two postures were used to study how physical exertion affected players while interacting in the test scene. Usability, motion sickness, and enjoyment were assessed to analyze the differences of each posture. The results showed that motion sickness and enjoyment of ArmSwing and Squat were not different, while usability was different where ArmSwing was rated higher than Squat. The results from the interviews suggest that most players preferred aerobic exercise (ArmSwing) more than strength exercise (Squat) for a long period of exercise. However, for a short period of exercise, players preferred strength exercise more than aerobic exercise. The adventure-based RPG for exercise needs a solution design appropriate for virtual running in VR, and our results can be a guideline for developers in order to handle motion-based locomotion for VR exergames.

A Review of: McKechnie, Lynne (E.F.). “ ‘Spiderman is not for Babies’ (Peter, 4 Years): The ‘Boys and Reading Problem’ from the Perspective of the Boys Themselves.” The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science 30.1/2 (2006): 57-67. Objective – This study looks at what constitutes legitimate reading material for boys and how this material is defined in light of assessed gender differences in reading, and is part of a larger, ongoing research project on the role of public libraries in the development of youth as readers. Design – Semi-structured, qualitative interviews and book inventories. Setting – The research originated from the MLIS 566 (Literature for Children and Young Adults) class at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. Subjects – Forty-three boys, ages four through twelve, were interviewed. Most of the boys lived in Ontario, although a few came from other Canadian provinces. Methods – Library school students who were registered in a Literature for Children and Young Adults class interviewed children and young adults about their reading and information practice as part of a “Book Ownership Case Study” assignment. The researcher also interviewed children and young adults, for a total of 137 case studies. For the purpose of this article, a data subset for the 43 boys included in the larger project was analyzed. The boys ranged in age from four to twelve years. The mean age was eight and the median age was nine. The theoretical perspective of reader response theory was used to situate the study. This theory has the relationship between the text and the reader as its focus, and it suggests that to understand the reading habits of boys, there needs to be recognition that the experts about their reading are the boys themselves. The interviews, which explored reading preferences and practices, were qualitative, semi-structured, and took thirty minutes to complete. In addition to the interview, each boy’s personal book and information material collection was inventoried. The researcher used a grounded theory approach to analyze the inventory and interview data to pull out themes related to the research questions. Grounded theory “uses a prescribed set of procedures for analyzing data and constructing a theoretical model” from the data (Leedy and Ormrod 154). Main Results – The collection inventories revealed that all 43 study participants had personal collections of reading materials. The collections ranged from eight volumes to 398 volumes. There was a mean volume total of 108 and a median of 98 books per boy. In addition to books, other materials were in the collections. Video recordings were owned by 36 (83.7%) of the boys, 28 (65.1%) of participants had computer software, 28 (65.1%) owned audio recordings, and 21 (48.8%) of the collections also included magazines. In the interview data analysis, a number of themes were revealed. All of the boys except one owned fiction. Some genres appeared frequently and were different than the ones found in the inventories taken of the girls in the larger study. Genres in the boys’ collections included fantasy, science fiction, sports stories, and humorous stories. The boys also discussed genres they did not enjoy: classic children’s fiction, such as The Adventures of Robin Hood, love stories, and “books about groups of girls” (61). All but five boys had series books such as Animorphs, Captain Underpants, Redwall, and Magic Treehouse in their collections. All study participants except for one owned non-fiction titles. When asked what their favourite book was, many of the boys chose a non-fiction title. Holdings included subjects such as “jokes, magic, sports, survival guides, crafts, science, dictionaries, maps, nature, and dinosaurs” (62). In addition to books, the boys reported owning and reading a wide range of other materials. Comics, manga, magazines, pop-up and other toy books, sticker books, colouring books, puzzle books, and catalogues were among the collection inventories. Only one boy read the newspaper. Another theme that emerged from the interview data was “gaming as story” (63). The boys who read video game manuals reported reading to learn about the game, and also reading to experience the game’s story. One boy’s enjoyment of the manual and the game came from the narrative found within. Various reading practices were explored in the interviews. Formats that featured non-linear reading were popular. Illustrations were important. Pragmatic reading, done to support other activities (e.g., Pokeman), was “both useful and pleasurable” (54). And finally, the issue of what counts as reading emerged from the data. Many boys discounted the reading that “they liked the best as not really being reading” (65). Some of the boys felt that reading novels constituted reading but that the reading of computer manuals or items such as science fair project books was “not really reading” (65). A distinction was made between real books and information books by the boys. Conclusions – The researcher explored what has been labelled as the “problem” of boys reading in this paper. She found that the 43 boys in this study are reading, but what they are reading has been undervalued by society and by the boys themselves. Collection inventories found a large number of non-fiction books, computer magazines, comic books, graphic novels, and role-playing game manuals—items not necessarily privileged by libraries, schools, or even by the boys themselves. The researcher suggests that “part of the ‘boys and reading problem’ then lies in what we count as reading” (66). By keeping what boys are actually reading in mind when it comes to collection development and library programming, children’s librarians can “play a central role in legitimizing the reading practices of boys” (66).

In his recent re-evaluation of McLuhanite theories for the information age, Digital McLuhan, Paul Levinson makes what at first glance appears to be a curious statement: he says that on the Web "the common denominator ... is the written word, as it is and has been with all things having to do with computers -- and will likely continue to be until such time, if ever, that the spoken word replaces the written as the vehicle of computer commands" (38). This, however, seems to directly contradict what any Web user has been able to experience for several years now: Web content has increasingly come to rely on graphics, at first still, now also often animated, and continues to include more and more audiovisual elements of various kinds. We don't even have to look at the current (and, hopefully, passing) phase of interminable Shockwave splash pages, which users have to endure while they wait to be transferred to the 'real' content of a site: even on as print-focussed a page as the one you're currently reading, you'll see graphical buttons to the left and at the bottom, for example. Other sites far surpass this for graphical content: it is hard to imagine what the official Olympics site or that of EXPO 2000 would look like in text-only versions. The drive towards more and more graphics has long been, well, visible. Already in 1997 (at a time when 33.6k modems were considered fast) Marshall considered the Internet to have entered its "graphic stage, a transitional media form that has made surfing the net feel like flipping through a glossy magazine or the interlinkages of a multimedia game or encyclopedia CD-ROMs"; to him this stage "relies on a construction that is textual and graphically enhanced through software overlays ... and highlighted by sample images, sound bites and occasionally short, moving images" (51). This historicised view mirrors a distinction made around the same time by Lovink, who divided users into "IBM-PC-modernists" still running text-based interfaces, and those enjoying the "Apple-Windows 95-postmodernism" of their graphical user interfaces (Lovink and Winkler 15). In the age of GUIs, in fact, 'text' in itself does not really exist on screen any more: everything from textual to graphical information consists of individual pixels in the same way, which is precisely what makes Levinson's initial statement appear so anachronistic. The move from 'text' to 'graphics and text' could thus be seen as a sign of the overall shift from the industrial to the information age -- a view not without precedent, since the transition from modernist to postmodernist times is similarly contemporaneous with the rise of graphic design as a form of communication as well as art. Beyond such broad strokes, we can also identify some of the finer details presented by the current state of graphics on the Web, however. Marshall's 'graphic stage', after all, was a 'transitional' one, and by now it seems that we might have passed it already, entering into a new aesthetic paradigm which appears to have borrowed many of its approaches from the realm of computer games: the new Web vision is shiny, colourful, animated, and increasingly also accompanied by sound effects. This is no surprise since the mass acceptance of personal computers themselves was largely driven by their use as a source of entertainment. Gaming and computers are inseparably interconnected, and the development of home computers' graphical capabilities in particular has long been driven almost exclusively by players' needs for better, faster, more realistic graphics. Of course, the way we interact with computers also owes a significant debt to games. Engagement in a dialogue with the machine, in which the computer displays both our own actions and its responses, representing us and itself simultaneously on screen, is the predominant mode of computing, and such a mode of engagement (dissolving the barriers between human mind and machinic computation) can now also be found in our interaction with the Web. Here, too, individual knowledge blends with the information available on the network as we immerse ourselves in hypertextual connectivity. As Talbott writes, "clearly, a generation raised on Adventure and video games -- where every door conceals a treasure or a monster worth pursuing in frenetic style -- has its own way of appreciating the hypertext interface" (13); not only has the Web taken on the aesthetics of computer gaming, then, but using the Web itself exhibits aspects of participation in a global 'knowledge game'. Talbott means to criticise this when he writes that thus "the doctrines of endless Enlightenment and Progress become the compelling subtext of a universal video game few can resist playing" (196), but however we may choose to evaluate this game, the observation itself is sound. One possible reason for taking a critical view of this development is that computer and video games rarely present more than the appearance of participation; while players may have a feeling of control over features of the game, the game itself usually remains entirely unaffected and ready for a restart at any moment. Web users might similarly feel empowered by the wealth of information to which they have gained access online, without actually making use of that information to form new knowledge for themselves. This is a matter for the individual user, however; where they have a true interest in the information they seek, we can have every confidence that they will process it to their advantage, too. Beyond this, the skills of information seeking learnt from Web use might also have overall benefits for users, as a kind of 'mind-eye coordination' similar to the 'hand-eye coordination' benefits often attributed to the playing of action games. The ability to figure out unknown problems, the desire to understand and gain control of a situation, which they can learn from computer games, is likely to help them better understand the complexity and interconnectedness of anything they might learn: "it could ... well be true that the cross-linking inherent in hypertext encourages people to see the connections among different aspects of the world so that they will get less fragmented knowledge" (Nielsen 190). The increasingly graphical nature of Web content could appear to work against this, however: "extensions of traditional hyperTEXT systems to encompass hyperMEDIA introduces [sic] a new dimension. ... The picture that 'speaks a thousand words' may say a thousand different words to different viewers. Pictures or graphics lend themselves much more than does text to multiple interpretations", as McAleese claims (12-13) -- but perhaps this overrates significantly the ability of text to anchor down meaning to any one point. Rather, it is questionable whether text and images really are that different from one another -- viewed from a historical perspective, certainly, opinions are divided, it seems: "the medieval church feared the power of the visual image because of the way it appeared to licence the imagination and the consideration of alternatives. Obversely, contemporary cultural critics fear that the abandonment of the written word in favour of graphics is stifling critical and creative powers" (Moody 60) -- take, for example, the commonly held view that movies made from novels limit the reader's imagination to the particular portrayal of events chosen for the film. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that both text and images (especially when they are increasingly easy to manipulate by digital means, thus losing once and for all their claim to photographic 'realism') can 'say a thousand different words to different viewers' -- indeed, traditional photography has also been described as 'writing with light'. As Levinson notes, therefore, "once the photograph is converted to a digital format, it is as amenable to manipulation, as divorced from the reality it purports to represent, as the words which appear on the same screen. On that score, the Internet's co-option of photography -- the rendering of the formerly analogue image as its content -- is at least as profound as the Internet's promotion of written communication" (43), and this, then, may perhaps begin to provide a resolution to his overall preference for writing as the predominant Internet communication form, as quoted above: online writing now includes in almost equal measure 'print' text and graphical images, both of which are of course graphically rendered on screen by the computer anyway; they combine into a new form of writing not unlike ancient hieroglyphics. On the Web, writing has come full circle: from the iconographic representations of the earliest civilisations through their simplification and solidification into the various alphabets back to a new online iconography. This also demonstrates the strong Western bias of this technology, of course: had computers emerged from Chinese or Japanese culture, for example -- where alphabets in the literal sense don't exist -- chances are they would never have existed in a text-only form. Now that we have passed the alphabetic stage to re-enter an era of iconography, then, it remains to be seen how this change along with our overall "'immersion' in hypertext will affect the way that we mentally structure our world. Linear argumentation is more a consequence of alphabetic writing than of printed books and it remains to be seen if hypertext presentation will significantly erode this predominant convention for mentally ordering our world" (McKnight et al. 41). Perhaps the computer game experience (where a blending of text and graphics had begun some time before the Web) can provide some early pointers already, then. The game-like nature of information search and usage online might help to undermine some of the more heavily encrusted structures of information dissemination that are still dominant: "we are promised, on the information 'library' side, less of the dogmatic and more of the ludic, less of the canonical and more of the festive. Fewer arguments from authority, through more juxtaposition of authorities" (Debray 146). This is also supported by the fact that there usually exists no one central authority, no one central site, in any field of information covered by the Web, but that there rather is a multiplicity of sources and viewpoints with varying claims to 'authority' and 'objectivity'; rather than rely on authorities to determine what is accepted knowledge, Web users must, and do, distil their own knowledge from the information they find in their searches. Kumon and Aizu's notion that from the industrial-age "wealth game" we have now moved into the "wisdom game" (320) sums up this view. However, for all the ludic exuberance of this game, we should also be concerned that, as in any game, we are also likely to see winners and losers. Those unaware of the rules of the game, and people who are prevented from playing for personal or socioeconomic reasons (the increased use of graphics will make it much more difficult for certain disabled readers to use the Web, for example) must not be left out of it. In gaming terminology, perhaps the formation of teams including such disadvantaged people is the answer? References Debray, Régis. "The Book as Symbolic Object." The Future of the Book. Ed. Geoffrey Nunberg. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. 139-51. Kumon, Shumpei, and Izumi Aizu. "Co-Emulation: The Case for a Global Hypernetwork Society." Global Networks: Computers and International Communication. Ed. Linda M. Harasim. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1994. 311-26. Levinson, Paul. Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. London: Routledge, 1999. Lovink, Geert, and Hartmut Winkler. "The Computer: Medium or Calculating Machine." Convergence 3.2 (1997): 10-18. Marshall, P. David. "The Commodity and the Internet: Interactivity and the Generation of Audience Commodity." Media International Australia 83 (Feb. 1997): 51-62. McAleese, Ray. "Navigation and Browsing in Hypertext." Hypertext: Theory into Practice. Ed. Ray McAleese. Oxford: Intellect, 1993. 5- 38. McKnight, Cliff, Andrew Dillon, and John Richardson. Hypertext in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Moody, Nickianne. "Interacting with the Divine Comedy." Fractal Dreams: New Media in Social Context. Ed. Jon Dovey. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996. 59-77. Nielsen, Jakob. Hypertext and Hypermedia. Boston: Academic P, 1990. Talbott, Stephen L. The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst. Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly and Associates, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "The Knowledge Adventure: Game Aesthetics and Web Hieroglyphics." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/adventure.php>. Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "The Knowledge Adventure: Game Aesthetics and Web Hieroglyphics," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/adventure.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: AxeM/C: A Journal of Media and Culture l Bruns. (2000) The knowledge adventure: game aesthetics and Web hieroglyphics. 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/adventure.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction Explorations of the multimedia game format within cultural studies have been broadly approached from two perspectives: one -- the impact of technologies on user interaction particularly with regard to social implications, and the other -- human computer interactions within the framework of cybercultures. Another approach to understanding or speaking about games within cultural studies is to focus on the game experience as cultural practice -- as an activity or an event. In this article I wish to initiate an exploration of the aesthetics of player space as a distinctive element of the gameplay experience. In doing so I propose that an understanding of aesthetic spatial issues as an element of player interactivity and engagement is important for understanding the cultural practice of adventure gameplay. In approaching these questions, I am focussing on the single-player exploration adventure game in particular Myst and The Crystal Key. In describing these games as adventures I am drawing on Chris Crawford's The Art of Computer Game Design, which although a little dated, focusses on game design as a distinct activity. He brings together a theoretical approach with extensive experience as a game designer himself (Excalibur, Legionnaire, Gossip). Whilst at Atari he also worked with Brenda Laurel, a key theorist in the area of computer design and dramatic structure. Adventure games such as Myst and The Crystal Key might form a sub-genre in Chris Crawford's taxonomy of computer game design. Although they use the main conventions of the adventure game -- essentially a puzzle to be solved with characters within a story context -- the main focus and source of pleasure for the player is exploration, particularly the exploration of worlds or cosmologies. The main gameplay of both games is to travel through worlds solving clues, picking up objects, and interacting with other characters. In Myst the player has to solve the riddle of the world they have entered -- as the CD-ROM insert states "Now you're here, wherever here is, with no option but to explore." The goal, as the player must work out, is to release the father Atrus from prison by bringing magic pages of a book to different locations in the worlds. Hints are offered by broken-up, disrupted video clips shown throughout the game. In The Crystal Key, the player as test pilot has to save a civilisation by finding clues, picking up objects, mending ships and defeating an opponent. The questions foregrounded by a focus on the aesthetics of navigation are: What types of representational context are being set up? What choices have designers made about representational context? How are the players positioned within these spaces? What are the implications for the player's sense of orientation and navigation? Architectural Fabrication For the ancient Greeks, painting was divided into two categories: magalography (the painting of great things) and rhyparography (the painting of small things). Magalography covered mythological and historical scenes, which emphasised architectural settings, the human figure and grand landscapes. Rhyparography referred to still lifes and objects. In adventure games, particularly those that attempt to construct a cosmology such as Myst and The Crystal Key, magalography and rhyparography collide in a mix of architectural monumentality and obsessive detailing of objects. For the ancient Greeks, painting was divided into two categories: magalography (the painting of great things) and rhyparography (the painting of small things). Magalography covered mythological and historical scenes, which emphasised architectural settings, the human figure and grand landscapes. Rhyparography referred to still lifes and objects. In adventure games, particularly those that attempt to construct a cosmology such as Myst and The Crystal Key, magalography and rhyparography collide in a mix of architectural monumentality and obsessive detailing of objects. The creation of a digital architecture in adventure games mimics the Pompeii wall paintings with their interplay of extruded and painted features. In visualising the space of a cosmology, the environment starts to be coded like the urban or built environment with underlying geometry and textured surface or dressing. In The Making of Myst (packaged with the CD-ROM) Chuck Carter, the artist on Myst, outlines the process of creating Myst Island through painting the terrain in grey scale then extruding the features and adding textural render -- a methodology that lends itself to a hybrid of architectural and painted geometry. Examples of external architecture and of internal room design can be viewed online. In the spatial organisation of the murals of Pompeii and later Rome, orthogonals converged towards several vertical axes showing multiple points of view simultaneously. During the high Renaissance, notions of perspective developed into a more formal system known as the construzione legittima or legitimate construction. This assumed a singular position of the on-looker standing in the same place as that occupied by the artist when the painting was constructed. In Myst there is an exaggeration of the underlying structuring technique of the construzione legittima with its emphasis on geometry and mathematics. The player looks down at a slight angle onto the screen from a fixed vantage point and is signified as being within the cosmological expanse, either in off-screen space or as the cursor. Within the cosmology, the island as built environment appears as though viewed through an enlarging lens, creating the precision and coldness of a Piero della Francesca painting. Myst mixes flat and three-dimensional forms of imagery on the same screen -- the flat, sketchy portrayal of the trees of Myst Island exists side-by-side with the monumental architectural buildings and landscape design structures created in Macromodel. This image shows the flat, almost expressionistic trees of Myst Island juxtaposed with a fountain rendered in high detail. This recalls the work of Giotto in the Arena chapel. In Joachim's Dream, objects and buildings have depth, but trees, plants and sky -- the space in-between objects -- is flat. Myst Island conjures up the realm of a magic, realist space with obsolete artefacts, classic architectural styles (the Albert Hall as the domed launch pad, the British Museum as the library, the vernacular cottage in the wood), mechanical wonders, miniature ships, fountains, wells, macabre torture instruments, ziggurat-like towers, symbols and odd numerological codes. Adam Mates describes it as "that beautiful piece of brain-deadening sticky-sweet eye-candy" but more than mere eye-candy or graphic verisimilitude, it is the mix of cultural ingredients and signs that makes Myst an intriguing place to play. The buildings in The Crystal Key, an exploratory adventure game in a similar genre to Myst, celebrate the machine aesthetic and modernism with Buckminster Fuller style geodesic structures, the bombe shape, exposed ducting, glass and steel, interiors with movable room partitions and abstract expressionist decorations. An image of one of these modernist structures is available online. The Crystal Key uses QuickTime VR panoramas to construct the exterior and interior spaces. Different from the sharp detail of Myst's structures, the focus changes from sharp in wide shot to soft focus in close up, with hot-spot objects rendered in trompe l'oeil detail. The Tactility of Objects "The aim of trompe l'oeil -- using the term in its widest sense and applying it to both painting and objects -- is primarily to puzzle and to mystify" (Battersby 19). In the 15th century, Brunelleschi invented a screen with central apparatus in order to obtain exact perspective -- the monocular vision of the camera obscura. During the 17th century, there was a renewed interest in optics by the Dutch artists of the Rembrandt school (inspired by instruments developed for Dutch seafaring ventures), in particular Vermeer, Hoogstraten, de Hooch and Dou. Gerard Dou's painting of a woman chopping onions shows this. These artists were experimenting with interior perspective and trompe l'oeil in order to depict the minutia of the middle-class, domestic interior. Within these luminous interiors, with their receding tiles and domestic furniture, is an elevation of the significance of rhyparography. In the Girl Chopping Onions of 1646 by Gerard Dou the small things are emphasised -- the group of onions, candlestick holder, dead fowl, metal pitcher, and bird cage. Trompe l'oeil as an illusionist strategy is taken up in the worlds of Myst, The Crystal Key and others in the adventure game genre. Traditionally, the fascination of trompe l'oeil rests upon the tension between the actual painting and the scam; the physical structures and the faux painted structures call for the viewer to step closer to wave at a fly or test if the glass had actually broken in the frame. Mirian Milman describes trompe l'oeil painting in the following manner: "the repertory of trompe-l'oeil painting is made up of obsessive elements, it represents a reality immobilised by nails, held in the grip of death, corroded by time, glimpsed through half-open doors or curtains, containing messages that are sometimes unreadable, allusions that are often misunderstood, and a disorder of seemingly familiar and yet remote objects" (105). Her description could be a scene from Myst with in its suggestion of theatricality, rich texture and illusionistic play of riddle or puzzle. In the trompe l'oeil painterly device known as cartellino, niches and recesses in the wall are represented with projecting elements and mock bas-relief. This architectural trickery is simulated in the digital imaging of extruded and painting elements to give depth to an interior or an object. Other techniques common to trompe l'oeil -- doors, shadowy depths and staircases, half opened cupboard, and paintings often with drapes and curtains to suggest a layering of planes -- are used throughout Myst as transition points. In the trompe l'oeil paintings, these transition points were often framed with curtains or drapes that appeared to be from the spectator space -- creating a painting of a painting effect. Myst is rich in this suggestion of worlds within worlds through the framing gesture afforded by windows, doors, picture frames, bookcases and fireplaces. Views from a window -- a distant landscape or a domestic view, a common device for trompe l'oeil -- are used in Myst to represent passageways and transitions onto different levels. Vertical space is critical for extending navigation beyond the horizontal through the terraced landscape -- the tower, antechamber, dungeon, cellars and lifts of the fictional world. Screen shots show the use of the curve, light diffusion and terracing to invite the player. In The Crystal Key vertical space is limited to the extent of the QTVR tilt making navigation more of a horizontal experience. Out-Stilling the Still Dutch and Flemish miniatures of the 17th century give the impression of being viewed from above and through a focussing lens. As Mastai notes: "trompe l'oeil, therefore is not merely a certain kind of still life painting, it should in fact 'out-still' the stillest of still lifes" (156). The intricate detailing of objects rendered in higher resolution than the background elements creates a type of hyper-reality that is used in Myst to emphasise the physicality and actuality of objects. This ultimately enlarges the sense of space between objects and codes them as elements of significance within the gameplay. The obsessive, almost fetishistic, detailed displays of material artefacts recall the curiosity cabinets of Fabritius and Hoogstraten. The mechanical world of Myst replicates the Dutch 17th century fascination with the optical devices of the telescope, the convex mirror and the prism, by coding them as key signifiers/icons in the frame. In his peepshow of 1660, Hoogstraten plays with an enigma and optical illusion of a Dutch domestic interior seen as though through the wrong end of a telescope. Using the anamorphic effect, the image only makes sense from one vantage point -- an effect which has a contemporary counterpart in the digital morphing widely used in adventure games. The use of crumbled or folded paper standing out from the plane surface of the canvas was a recurring motif of the Vanitas trompe l'oeil paintings. The highly detailed representation and organisation of objects in the Vanitas pictures contained the narrative or symbology of a religious or moral tale. (As in this example by Hoogstraten.) In the cosmology of Myst and The Crystal Key, paper contains the narrative of the back-story lovingly represented in scrolls, books and curled paper messages. The entry into Myst is through the pages of an open book, and throughout the game, books occupy a privileged position as holders of stories and secrets that are used to unlock the puzzles of the game. Myst can be read as a Dantesque, labyrinthine journey with its rich tapestry of images, its multi-level historical associations and battle of good and evil. Indeed the developers, brothers Robyn and Rand Miller, had a fertile background to draw on, from a childhood spent travelling to Bible churches with their nondenominational preacher father. The Diorama as System Event The diorama (story in the round) or mechanical exhibit invented by Daguerre in the 19th century created a mini-cosmology with player anticipation, action and narrative. It functioned as a mini-theatre (with the spectator forming the fourth wall), offering a peek into mini-episodes from foreign worlds of experience. The Musée Mechanique in San Francisco has dioramas of the Chinese opium den, party on the captain's boat, French execution scenes and ghostly graveyard episodes amongst its many offerings, including a still showing an upper class dancing party called A Message from the Sea. These function in tandem with other forbidden pleasures of the late 19th century -- public displays of the dead, waxwork museums and kinetescope flip cards with their voyeuristic "What the Butler Saw", and "What the Maid Did on Her Day Off" tropes. Myst, along with The 7th Guest, Doom and Tomb Raider show a similar taste for verisimilitude and the macabre. However, the pre-rendered scenes of Myst and The Crystal Key allow for more diorama like elaborate and embellished details compared to the emphasis on speed in the real-time-rendered graphics of the shoot-'em-ups. In the gameplay of adventure games, animated moments function as rewards or responsive system events: allowing the player to navigate through the seemingly solid wall; enabling curtains to be swung back, passageways to appear, doors to open, bookcases to disappear. These short sequences resemble the techniques used in mechanical dioramas where a coin placed in the slot enables a curtain or doorway to open revealing a miniature narrative or tableau -- the closure of the narrative resulting in the doorway shutting or the curtain being pulled over again. These repeating cycles of contemplation-action-closure offer the player one of the rewards of the puzzle solution. The sense of verisimilitude and immersion in these scenes is underscored by the addition of sound effects (doors slamming, lifts creaking, room atmosphere) and music. Geographic Locomotion Static imagery is the standard backdrop of the navigable space of the cosmology game landscape. Myst used a virtual camera around a virtual set to create a sequence of still camera shots for each point of view. The use of the still image lends itself to a sense of the tableauesque -- the moment frozen in time. These tableauesque moments tend towards the clean and anaesthetic, lacking any evidence of the player's visceral presence or of other human habitation. The player's navigation from one tableau screen to the next takes the form of a 'cyber-leap' or visual jump cut. These jumps -- forward, backwards, up, down, west, east -- follow on from the geographic orientation of the early text-based adventure games. In their graphic form, they reveal a new framing angle or point of view on the scene whilst ignoring the rules of classical continuity editing. Games such as The Crystal Key show the player's movement through space (from one QTVR node to another) by employing a disorientating fast zoom, as though from the perspective of a supercharged wheelchair. Rather than reconciling the player to the state of movement, this technique tends to draw attention to the technologies of the programming apparatus. The Crystal Key sets up a meticulous screen language similar to filmic dramatic conventions then breaks its own conventions by allowing the player to jump out of the crashed spaceship through the still intact window. The landscape in adventure games is always partial, cropped and fragmented. The player has to try and map the geographical relationship of the environment in order to understand where they are and how to proceed (or go back). Examples include selecting the number of marker switches on the island to receive Atrus's message and the orientation of Myst's tower in the library map to obtain key clues. A screenshot shows the arrival point in Myst from the dock. In comprehending the landscape, which has no centre, the player has to create a mental map of the environment by sorting significant connecting elements into chunks of spatial elements similar to a Guy Debord Situationist map. Playing the Flaneur The player in Myst can afford to saunter through the landscape, meandering at a more leisurely pace that would be possible in a competitive shoot-'em-up, behaving as a type of flaneur. The image of the flaneur as described by Baudelaire motions towards fin de siècle decadence, the image of the socially marginal, the dispossessed aristocrat wandering the urban landscape ready for adventure and unusual exploits. This develops into the idea of the artist as observer meandering through city spaces and using the power of memory in evoking what is observed for translation into paintings, writing or poetry. In Myst, the player as flaneur, rather than creating paintings or writing, is scanning the landscape for clues, witnessing objects, possible hints and pick-ups. The numbers in the keypad in the antechamber, the notes from Atrus, the handles on the island marker, the tower in the forest and the miniature ship in the fountain all form part of a mnemomic trompe l'oeil. A screenshot shows the path to the library with one of the island markers and the note from Atrus. In the world of Myst, the player has no avatar presence and wanders around a seemingly unpeopled landscape -- strolling as a tourist venturing into the unknown -- creating and storing a mental map of objects and places. In places these become items for collection -- cultural icons with an emphasised materiality. In The Crystal Key iconography they appear at the bottom of the screen pulsing with relevance when active. A screenshot shows a view to a distant forest with the "pick-ups" at the bottom of the screen. This process of accumulation and synthesis suggests a Surrealist version of Joseph Cornell's strolls around Manhattan -- collecting, shifting and organising objects into significance. In his 1982 taxonomy of game design, Chris Crawford argues that without competition these worlds are not really games at all. That was before the existence of the Myst adventure sub-genre where the pleasures of the flaneur are a particular aspect of the gameplay pleasures outside of the rules of win/loose, combat and dominance. By turning the landscape itself into a pathway of significance signs and symbols, Myst, The Crystal Key and other games in the sub-genre offer different types of pleasures from combat or sport -- the pleasures of the stroll -- the player as observer and cultural explorer. References Battersby, M. Trompe L'Oeil: The Eye Deceived. New York: St. Martin's, 1974. Crawford, C. The Art of Computer Game Design. Original publication 1982, book out of print. 15 Oct. 2000 <http://members.nbci.com/kalid/art/art.php>. Darley Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London: Routledge, 2000. Lunenfeld, P. Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P 1999. Mates, A. Effective Illusory Worlds: A Comparative Analysis of Interfaces in Contemporary Interactive Fiction. 1998. 15 Oct. 2000 <http://www.wwa.com/~mathes/stuff/writings>. Mastai, M. L. d'Orange. Illusion in Art, Trompe L'Oeil: A History of Pictorial Illusion. New York: Abaris, 1975. Miller, Robyn and Rand. "The Making of Myst." Myst. Cyan and Broderbund, 1993. Milman, M. Trompe-L'Oeil: The Illusion of Reality. New York: Skira Rizzoli, 1982. Murray, J. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Wertheim, M. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Cyberspace from Dante to the Internet. Sydney: Doubleday, 1999. Game References 7th Guest. Trilobyte, Inc., distributed by Virgin Games, 1993. Doom. Id Software, 1992. Excalibur. Chris Crawford, 1982. Myst. Cyan and Broderbund, 1993. Tomb Raider. Core Design and Eidos Interactive, 1996. The Crystal Key. Dreamcatcher Interactive, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Bernadette Flynn. "Towards an Aesthetics of Navigation -- Spatial Organisation in the Cosmology of the Adventure Game." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/navigation.php>. Chicago style: Bernadette Flynn, "Towards an Aesthetics of Navigation -- Spatial Organisation in the Cosmology of the Adventure Game," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/navigation.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Bernadette Flynn. (2000) Towards an aesthetics of navigation -- spatial organisation in the cosmology of the adventure game. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/navigation.php> ([your date of access]).

Podcast fiction storytelling is an underdeveloped area of new media studies. There is a wealth of texts available suitable for exploration. The example of The Adventure Zone in particular presents a strong argument that the medium possesses its own singular strengths for storytelling. The Adventure Zone is a fictional, audio-only, serialised podcast in which a narrative of both considerable length and depth is constructed through the playing of tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons. It is hosted by the McElroy brothers, Griffin, Justin, and Travis, along with their father, Clint. The Adventure Zone demonstrates the unique qualities and noteworthy potential the podcast medium possesses. The McElroy family collaborates utilising comedy improv practices, which are strengthened by the game’s mechanics and rules. The line between characters and players – along with the line between textual and metatextual, canonical and non-canonical, diegetic and non-diegetic data – is significantly blurred through instances such as self-reflexivity and popular culture references. The fourth wall is inapplicable to The Adventure Zone. It is necessary to re-imagine it instead as a permeable curtain separating the players from the characters. The listeners are provided with a clear view of not only the story of The Adventure Zone, but the construction of its creation. There are few mediums in which the audience can so effectively and candidly witness the storytelling process. Comparisons drawn from the original text – The Adventure Zone podcast – to its ongoing adaptations – The Adventure Zone graphic novels – illustrates this fact further. The collaborative, improvisational, metafictional qualities of the dynamic audio-only medium of podcasts are absent from static visual mediums.

Game is one of the entertainment that is fun and interesting way to spend leisure time or relieve boredom at the time of waiting, a variety of games or game has been created and produced many free or paid. Starting from a brain teaser game theme, sports, to adventure. An android based games can provide entertainment for players. The purpose of this study was to design and build a game that can be played in your spare time and eliminate boredom when waiting. The method used in designing and building this game is the method of "Multimedia Development". Stages in the process of this study is Phase Concept , Design , Material Collection and Testing. By using the Unity Game Engine programming language and Android SDK, will produce an android game titled "Application-Based Android Game Win Start" to increase knowledge in making games with the theme of brain teasers and applying the lessons of artificial intelligence (Playing Game) with a greedy algorithm, uses 2D graphics and is designed for a single player

Computer and video games are one of the primary uses of personal computer technologies, and yet despite an increasing interest in cultural practices that are organised around computer and information technologies cultural studies has paid very little attention to this phenomenon. In the War of Desire and Technology Allucquére Roseanne Stone comments "that there seems no question that a significant proportion of young people will spend a significant and increasing proportion of their waking hours playing computer-based games in one form or another, and so far the implications of this trend have yet to be fully addressed in academic forums" (26). This Christmas will undoubtedly follow the trend of the last few years, with video game consoles and software being the biggest toy sellers. In the lead-up to this Christmas Nintendo shipped 5,000,000 units of the much-anticipated Shigeru Miyamoto-designed game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The Zelda series of adventure games made its first appearance in 1987 on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) with The Legend of Zelda (which sold 6.5 million units worldwide). It is increasingly evident that whether it is in games arcades, on console systems such as the Nintendo 64, or on personal computers, the playing of computer games is a crucial component of the popular cultural terrain. In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the fifth installment in the series, the player controls a young boy, Link, through his adventures in the 3D-rendered fantasy world of Hyrule. By defeating various monsters, solving puzzles, and discovering magical items the player progresses through the game with the aim of saving Hyrule and rescuing Princess Zelda by defeating the evil Ganondorf. Yup, once you get past all of the 3D polygon graphics enabled by the Nintendo 64 platform this game is your basic rescue-the-princess quest with all of the troubling gender implications that this raises. Cultural theorists such as Stone and Dan Fleming raise the concern that this rapidly expanding industry that is an increasingly significant component of many young people's cultural lives is limited to the problems associated with a narrowly defined masculine identity. Stone asks should things like computer games, which are so terrifically absorbing and which take up so much waking time -- so much precious, irreplaceable waking time -- be expected to possess a modicum of invention, to be able to stretch players' imaginations and skills beyond the ability to hit targets and dodge obstacles? (163-64) Fleming observes that "this remarkable technology could support a much richer play space and with it a position less rigidly tied to a simplistically projected male identity" (57). But the narrative content of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time does not come even close to explaining what it is about playing the game that hooks the gamer into this 30-50 hour experience, and keeps us coming back for more -- just one more session until I finish that Dungeon. Fleming makes the important point that an analysis of the symbolic content of games tells us very little about what it is actually like to play them. He takes the step of shifting our attention from the meanings of cultural objects to their status as events (11-16). The criticism that computer and video game content is dominated by a constraining masculine identity is important, but is no more than a starting point. Is this all that can be said about games such as Zelda? I would argue that the activity of playing computer games cannot simply be approached through a textual analysis of the symbolic content of games. If we tentatively accept that gaming is not simply a content, but an activity, then, how can we analyse or describe this activity? Does cultural studies provide us with the tools necessary to describe it as a cultural experience? How is this experience organised, and what ramifications does it have for cultural studies' understanding of contemporary cultural technologies? An initial avenue of inquiry is provided by the term gameplay. Gameplay is a term that constantly emerges in my discussions with both gamers and game designers. It is a quite ephemeral and at moments incoherent concept that is used to describe the experience of a player's visceral immersion in and interactive engagement with a particular game's environment. It is an aspect of computer gaming that resists or at least would seem to be excessive to representation or symbolising. The very ephemeral and rather vague ways in which it is used have made it tempting to reject any serious analysis of it as an incoherence which may well function to simply side-step or avoid criticism of games' very obvious problem with representations of gender. However, as a player of computer games I recognise the experience that gamers are attempting to describe with the term gameplay and find it difficult to reject it out of hand simply because my theoretical vocabulary as a cultural analyst has difficulties in accommodating it. Where is the problem -- with the cultural experience or the theoretical vocabulary? In many of my discussions with gamers the term gameplay functions as something of a shared horizon or assumed knowledge. If I ask what gameplay is or does I will often receive a response such as the following: "Gameplay is what makes a game fun. It is the fun factor". If I then query what elements or features in particular make a game fun the response will invariably be, "well good gameplay is what is important. Graphics and stuff can be good, but often are just eye-candy". The discussion will generally end with a comment such as "you've played [Game X], you know what I mean, it has great gameplay". This term seems to function as something of a marker for how the cultural experience of gameplay exceeds our symbolic vocabulary. It opens out onto the event status of playing. (But I think exchanges such as the above are also about the event of a research relation.) In email discussions Cameron Brown, a lead game designer employed by Auran (a Brisbane, Australia based game software company -- Auran and Activision co-developed the real-time strategy game Dark Reign) described gameplay in the following terms: I was made 'lead tester' for 'Radical Rex', a SNES [Super Nintendo Entertainment System] platformer.... It got to the point where I could finish the game (10 levels plus bonus 8 levels) in 27 minutes -- about 40 minutes if I held the controller upside down. I could literally play the first level with my eyes closed, using only muscle memory! Anyway, Mario Kart: sometimes, playing it, I lost all sense of everything except the game. My hands moved without conscious intervention on my part.... I believe the MK 'trance state' short circuits this delay not requiring the brain to be aware of something before the hands have responded." The term gameplay appears throughout gamers' discussions of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on newsgroups (rec.games.video.nintendo) and fan WWW sites, for example Nintendojo. The Next-Generation review of Zelda describes a gaming experience "beyond the superficialities of graphics, sound, and controls (which are all excellent) ... that sucks the player into a mystical world that has never been seen or felt before". Eric Enrico Mattei, a reviewer on Nintendojo, asserts that the quality of gameplay in Zelda is such "that you are COMPLETELY IMMERSED in Zelda's world". Writing in anticipation of Zelda's release Mikey Veroni comments that "ease of control is important in Zelda 64 (not to mention any game) because only then can the player feel like Link is acting and responding exactly to the player's actions. Perfect gameplay is so simple yet terribly crucial at the same time". Miyamoto, the designer of Zelda, said in a recent interview that in creating game environments such as Zelda he is concerned with "how players feel when they are touching the controller, so that is the way I'm always making the video game. I'm always thinking of the player's feelings". These various ways of talking about and describing the experience of playing computer and video games are not exactly new or mysterious. They draw on well-established conventions and metaphors for understanding the human interface with technology or equipment in general. When I asked Cameron about his use of the phrase "muscle memory", for example, he responded that it came from a guitar player magazine and was used in the context of explaining exercises to teach your fingers how to play a scale. Other sources for this technological sublime relation include science fiction texts such as William Gibson's descriptions of the experience of jacking into the matrix of cyberspace in Neuromancer. Dan Fleming's careful distinction between the symbolic content of games and the experience of playing them would seem to apply to the above descriptions of gameplay. He asserts that playing a game like Nintendo's platform adventure Mario Brothers is an intriguing experience that involves "the replacement of the gameworld's thematics by its geometry, which is where the fully engaged action really is" (191). Fleming sums up by commenting that "at their best computer games simply operate elsewhere for much of the time" (193). Although I have reservations about the tendency to position gameplay and representation in an almost strict opposition the foregrounding of this elsewhere of playability is useful in that it suggests the status of computer gaming as an event rather than a text or content to be interpreted. In his recent essay, "The Being of Culture, Beyond Representation", Alec McHoul argues, against representationalist understandings of cultural objects, for an approach that takes into account the movements and dynamics of "event-ness or eventality" (2). This shift away from a representational framework towards what McHoul calls "eventalistic experiencing" is where I head in my engagement with gameplay. This spectral dynamic of computer gaming calls us to change our modes of engaging with research objects. The issues of control and controllers appear in many of the gamers' discussions of playing Zelda. Fleming refers to this experience: "the player feels the responsiveness of the controller, the forward momentum, the onset of a relaxed energy, a feeling of competence" (192). Entering into the world of the game is also a skill or competence; it involves the ability to effectively use the game control system or interface to navigate through the play environment. This game control would seem to function within the terms of a traditional controlling masculine subjectivity. It appears to be about enjoying a sense of ease, empowerment and control in a technologically mediated environment. Relations between the human and the technological are from the outset caught up in fantasies of control. But the event of playing, the elsewhere of gameplay, exceeds the limits of our stories about an autonomous self in control of and using technology. When we play games like Zelda we are being positioned in those regions of cultural experience that involve a transformation in the mode of our relation to technological equipment. Our assumptions regarding the relation and separation between the human and the technological -- and perhaps also the gender implications of these relations -- are increasingly transformed, subverted, and questioned. Computer gaming is at least in part about the enjoyment gamers derive from the blurring and confusion of the boundaries between the technological and the self: techno-enjoyment. This element of enjoyment exceeds both the symbolic and the corporeal. But it should not be understood as some kind of more real or immediate bodily experience posited outside of and in opposition to the representational. It invokes another materiality of the technological object that is other than a reduction to technics or the human. It is a spectral interspace: the relation between the human and nonhuman. This relation with technology is not simply or only at the level of representation, nor at the materiality of the technological object or the bodily experience and sensations of the gamer. Gaming opens onto this domain of materialised techno-enjoyment. And in this region of cultural experience it is no longer clearly decidable who or what is in control. This experience of gameplay radically undermines notions of equipmentality grounded in a controlling human subject. Cultural Studies academics -- and I include myself in this group -- should be cautious about rushing to reduce the experience of gameplay to a problem or issue of representation. This is not to argue that representational effects are not operative in the practices of computer gaming. It is to argue the careful consideration of other important effects and processes. References Fleming, Dan. Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. Gamecenter.com. "An Interview with Shigeru Miyamoto." 1998. 10 Dec. 1998 <http://www.gamecenter.com/News/Item/0,3,0-2305,00.html?st.gc.ttn.si.gn>. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Game cartridge. Nintendo. 1998. McHoul, Alec. "The Being of Culture, Beyond Representation." 1998. 15 Oct. 1998 <http://kali.murdoch.edu.au/~mchoul/being.php>. Mattei, Eric Enrico. "Review of Zelda 64." 1998. 12 Dec. 1998 <http://www.nintendojo.com/reviews/staff/zeldaem.htm>. Next Generation. "Review of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time." 24 Nov. 1998. 13 Dec. 1998 <http://www.next-generation.com/jsmid/reviews/437.php>. Stone, Allucquére Roseanne. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1995. Veroni, Mikey. "Legendary." 1998. 10 Dec. 1998 <http://www.nintendojo.com/specials/zelda2/index.htm>. Zelda-related WWW sites -- Nintendojo -- Zelda Central -- Zelda 64 Central -- Zelda 64 Headquarters -- Zelda Headquarters -- Zelda's Shrine -- Hyrule: The Land of Zelda Citation reference for this article MLA style: John Banks. "Controlling Gameplay." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/game.php>. Chicago style: John Banks, "Controlling Gameplay," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 5 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/game.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: John Banks. (1998) Controlling gameplay. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/game.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionI stumble to my feet breathing heavily and, over the roar of a tank, a nearby soldier yells right into my face: “We’re surrounded! We have to hold this line!” I follow him, moving past burning debris and wounded men being helped walk back in the opposite direction. Shells explode around me, a whistle sounds, and then the Hun attack; shadowy figures that I fire upon as they approach through the battlefield fog and smoke. I shoot some. I take cover behind walls as others fire back. I reload the weapon. I am hit by incoming fire, and a red damage indicator appears onscreen, so I move to a better cover position. As I am hit again and again, the image becomes blurry and appears as if in slow-motion, the sound also becoming muffled. As an enemy wielding a flame-thrower appears and blasts me with thick fire, my avatar gasps and collapses. The screen fades to black.So far, so very normal in the World War One themed first-person shooter Battlefield 1 (Electronic Arts 2016). But then the game does something unanticipated. I expect to reappear—or respawn—in the same scenario to play better, to stay in the fight longer. Instead, the camera view switches to an external position, craning upwards cinematically from my character’s dying body. Text superimposed over the view indicates the minimalist epitaph: “Harvey Nottoway 1889-1918.” The camera view then races backwards, high over the battlefield and finally settles into position behind a mounted machine-gun further back from the frontline as the enemy advances closer. Immediately I commence shooting, mowing down German troops as they enter our trenches. Soon I am hit and knocked away from the machine-gun. Picking up a shotgun I start shooting the enemy at close-quarters, until I am once again overrun and my character collapses. Now the onscreen text states I was playing as “Dean Stevenson 1899-1918.”I have attempted this prologue to the Battlefield 1 campaign a number of times. No matter how skilfully I play, or how effectively I simply run away and hide from the combat, this pattern continues: the structure of the game forces the player’s avatar to be repeatedly killed in order for the narrative to progress. Over a series of player deaths, respawning as an entirely new character each time, the combat grows in ferocity and the music also becomes increasingly frenetic. The fighting turns to hand-to-hand combat, or shovel-to-head combat to be more precise, and eventually an artillery barrage wipes everybody out (Figure 1). At this point, the prologue is complete and the gamer may continue in a variety of single-player episodes in different theatres of WW1, each of which is structured according to the normal rules of combat games: when your avatar is killed, you respawn at the most recent checkpoint for a follow-up attempt.What are we to make of this alternative narrative structure deployed by the opening episode of Battlefield 1? In contrast to the normal video-game affordances of re-playability until completion, this narrative necessitation of death is in some ways motivated by the onscreen text that introduces the prologue: “What follows is frontline combat. You are not expected to survive.” Certainly it is true that the rest of the game (either single-player or in its online multiplayer deathmatch mode) follows the predictable pattern of dying, replaying, completing. And also we would not expect Battlefield 1 to be motivated primarily by a kind of historical fidelity given that an earlier instalment in the series, Battlefield 1942 (2002) was described by one reviewer as:a comic book version of WWII. The fact that any player can casually hop into a tank, drive around, hop out and pick off an enemy soldier with a sniper rifle, hop into a plane, parachute out, and then call in artillery fire (within the span of a few minutes) should tell you a lot about the game. (Osborne)However what is happening in this will-to-die structure of the game’s prologue represents an alternative and affectively unsettling game experience both in its ludological structure as well as its affective impact. Defamiliarization and Humanization Drawing upon a phenomenology of game-play, whereby the scholar examines the game “as played” (see Atkins and Kryzwinska; Keogh; Wilson) to consider how the text reveals itself to the player, I argue that the introductory single-player episode of Battlefield 1 functions to create a defamiliarizing effect on the player. Defamiliarization, the Russian Formalist term for the effect created by art when some unusual aspect of a text challenges accepted perceptions and/or representations (Schklovski; Thompson), is a remarkably common effect created by the techniques used in combat cinema and video-games. This is unsurprising. After all, warfare is one of the very examples Schklovski uses as something that audiences have developed habituated responses to and which artworks must defamiliarize. The effect may be created by many techniques in a text, and in certain cases a work may defamiliarize even its own form. For instance, recent work on the violence in Saving Private Ryan shows that during the lengthy Omaha Beach sequence, the most vivid instances of violence—including the famous shot of a soldier picking up his dismembered arm—occur well after the audience has potentially become inured to the onslaught of the earlier frequent, but less graphic, carnage (Bender Film Style and WW2). To make these moments stand out with equivalent horrific impact against the background of the Normandy beach bloodbath Spielberg also treats them with a stuttered frame effect and accompanying audio distortion, motivated (to use a related Formalist term) by the character’s apparent concussion and temporary disorientation. Effectively a sequence of point of view shots then, this moment in Private Ryan has become a model for many other war texts, and indeed the player’s death in the opening sequence of Battlefield 1 is portrayed using a very similar (though not identical) audio-visual treatment (Figure 2).Although the Formalists never played videogames, recent scholarship has approached the medium from a similar perspective. For example, Brendan Keogh has focused on the challenges to traditional videogame pleasure generated by the 2012 dystopian shooter Spec Ops: The Line. Keogh notes that the game developers intended to create displeasure and “[forcing] the player to consider what is obscured in the pixilation of war” by, for instance, having them kill fellow American troops in order for the game narrative to continue (Keogh 9). In addition, the game openly taunts the player’s expectations of entertainment based, uncritical run-and-gun gameplay with onscreen text during level loading periods such as “Do you feel like a hero yet?” (8).These kinds of challenges to the expectations of entertainment in combat shooters are found also in one sequence from the 2009 game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in which the player—as an undercover operative—is forced to participate in a terrorist attack in which civilians are killed (Figure 3). While playing that level, titled “No Russian,” Timothy Welsh argues: “The player may shoot the unarmed civilians or not; the level still creeps slowly forward regardless” (Welsh 409). In Welsh’s analysis, this level emerges as an unusual attempt by a popular video game to “humanize” the non-playing characters that are ordinarily gunned down without any critical and self-reflective thought by the player in most shooter games. The player is forced into a scenario in which they must make a highly difficult ethical choice, but the game will show civilians being killed either way.In contrast to the usual criticisms of violent video games—eg., that they may be held responsible for school shootings, increased adolescent aggression and so on —the “No Russian” sequence drew dramatic complaints of being a “terrorist simulator” (Welsh 389). But for Welsh this ethical choice facing the player, to shoot or not to shoot civilians, raises the game to a textual experience offering self-inspection. As in the fictional theme park of Westworld (HBO 2016), it does not really matter to the digital victim if a player kills them, but it should—and does—matter to the player. There are no external consequences to killing a computer game character composed only of pixels, or killing/raping a robot in the Westworld theme park, however there are internal consequences: it makes you a killer, or a rapist (see Harris and Bloom).Thus, from the perspective of defamiliarization, the game can be regarded as creating the effect that Matthew Payne has labelled “critical displeasure.” Writing about the way this is created by Spec Ops, Payne argues that:the result is a game that wields its affective distance as a critique of the necessary illusion that all military shooters trade in, but one that so few acknowledge. In particular, the game’s brutal mise-en-scène, its intertextual references to other war media, and its real and imagined opportunities for player choice, create a discordant feeling that lays bare the ease with which most video war games indulge in their power fantasies. (Payne 270)There is then, a minor tradition of alternative military-themed video game works that attempt to invite or enable the player to conduct a kind of ethical self-examination around their engagement with interactive representations of war via particular incursions of realism. The critical displeasure invoked by texts such as Spec Ops and the “No Russian” level of Call of Duty is particularly interesting in light of another military game that was ultimately cancelled by the publisher after it received public criticism. Titled Six Days in Fallujah, the game was developed with the participation of Marines who had fought in that real life battle and aimed to depict the events as they unfolded in 2004 during the campaign in Iraq. As Justin Rashid argues:the controversy that arose around Six Days in Fallujah was, of course, a result of the view that commercial video games can only ever be pure entertainment; games do not have the authority or credibility to be part of a serious debate. (Rashid 17)On this basis, perhaps a criterial attribute of an acceptable alternative military game is that there is enough familiarity to evoke some critical distance, but not too much familiarity that the player must think about legitimately real-life consequences and impact. After all, Call of Duty was a successful release, even amid the controversy of “No Russian.” This makes sense as the level does not really challenge the overall enjoyment of the game. The novelty of the level, on the one hand, is that it is merely one part of the general narrative and cannot be regarded as representative of the whole game experience. On the other hand, because none of the events and scenarios have a clear indexical relationship to real-world terrorist attacks (at least prior to the Brussels attack in 2016) it is easy to play the ethical choice of shooting or not shooting civilians as a mental exercise rather than a reflection on something that really happened. This is the same lesson learned by the developers of the 2010 game Medal of Honor who ultimately changed the name of the enemy soldiers from “The Taliban” to “OPFOR” (standing in for a generic “Opposing Forces”) after facing pressure from the US and UK Military who claimed that the multiplayer capacities of the game enabled players to play as the Taliban (see Rashid). Conclusion: Affective Friction in Battlefield 1In important ways then, these game experiences are precursors to Battlefield 1’s single player prologue. However, the latter does not attempt a wholesale deconstruction of the genre—as does Spec Ops—or represent an attempt to humanise (or perhaps re-humanise) the non-playable victim characters as Welsh suggests “No Russian” attempts to do. Battlefield 1’s opening structure of death-and-respawn-as-different-character can be read as humanizing the player’s avatar. But most importantly, I take Battlefield’s initially unusual gameplay as an aesthetic attempt to set a particular tone to the game. Motivated by the general cultural attitude of deferential respect for the Great War, Battlefield 1 takes an almost austere stance toward the violence depicted, paradoxically even as this impact is muted in the later gameplay structured according to normal multiplayer deathmatch rules of run-and-gun killing. The futility implied by the player’s constant dying is clearly motivated by an attempt at realism as one of the cultural memories of World War One is the sheer likelihood of being killed, whether as a frontline soldier or a citizen of a country engaged in combat (see Kramer). For Battlefield 1, the repeated dying is really part of the text’s aesthetic engagement. For this reason I prefer the term affective friction rather than critical displeasure. The austere tone of the game is indicated early, just prior to the prologue gameplay with onscreen text that reads:Battlefield 1 is based on events that unfolded over 100 years agoMore than 60 million soldiers fought in “The War to End All Wars”It ended nothing.Yet it changed the world forever. At a simple level, the player’s experience of being killed in order for the next part of the narrative to progress evokes this sense of futility. There have been real responses indicating this, for instance one reviewer argues that the structure is “a powerful treatment” (Howley). But there is potential for increased engagement with the game itself as the structure breaks the replay-cycle of usual games. For instance, another reviewer responds to the overall single-player campaign by suggesting “It is not something you can sit down and play through and not experience on a higher level than just clicking a mouse and tapping a keyboard” (Simpson). This affective friction amplifies, and draws attention to, the other advances in violent stylistics presented in the game. For instance, although the standard onscreen visual distortions are used to show character damage and the direction from which the attack came, the game does use slow-motion to draw out the character’s death. In addition, the game features incidental battlefield details of shell-shock, such as soldiers simply holding the head in their hands, frozen as the battle rages around them (Figure 4). The presence of flame-thrower troops, and subsequently the depictions of characters running as they burn to death are also significant developments in violent aesthetics from earlier games. These elements of violence are constitutive of the affective friction. We may marvel at the technical achievement of such real-time rendering of dynamic fire and the artistic care given to animate deaths and shell-shock depictions. But simultaneously, these “violent delights”—to borrow from Westworld’s citation of Shakespeare—are innovations upon the depictions of earlier games, even contemporary, combat games. Indeed, one critic has almost ashamedly noted: “For a game about one of the most horrific wars in human history, it sure is pretty” (Kain).These violent depictions show a continuation in the tradition of increased detail which has been linked to a model of “reported realism” as a means of understanding audience’s claims of realism in combat films and modern videogames as a result primarily of their hypersaturated audio-visual texture (Bender "Blood Splats"). Here, saturation refers not to the specific technical quality of colour saturation but to the densely layered audio-visual structure often found in contemporary films and videogames. For example, thick mixing of soundtracks, details of gore, and nuanced movements (particularly of dying characters) all contribute to a hypersaturated aesthetic which tends to prompt audiences to make claims of realism for a combat text regardless of whether or not these viewers/players have any real world referent for comparison. Of course, there are likely to be players who will simply blast through any shooter game, giving no regard to the critical displeasure offered by Spec Ops narrative choices or the ethical dilemma of “No Russian.” There are also likely to be players who bypass the single-player campaign altogether and only bother with the multiplayer deathmatch experience, which functions in the same way as it does in other shooter games, including the previous Battlefield games. But perhaps the value of this game’s attempt at alternative storytelling, with its emphasis on tone and affect, is that even the “kill-em-all” player may experience a momentary impact from the violence depicted. This is particularly important given that, to borrow from Stephanie Fisher’s argument in regard to WW2 games, many young people encounter the history of warfare through such popular videogames (Fisher). In the centenary period of World War One, especially in Australia amid the present Anzac commemorative moment, the opportunity for young audiences to engage with the significance of the events. As a side-note, the later part of the single-player campaign even has a Gallipoli sequence, though the narrative of this component is designed as an action-hero adventure. Indeed, this is one example of how the alternative dying-to-continue structure of the prologue creates an affective friction against the normal gameplay and narratives that feature in the rest of the text. The ambivalent ways in which this unsettling opening scenario impacts on the remainder of the game-play, including for instance its depiction of PTSD, is illustrated by some industry reviewers. As one reviewer argues, the game does generate the feeling that “war isn’t fun — except when it is” (Plante). From this view, the cognitive challenge created by the will to die in the prologue creates an affective friction with the normalised entertainment inherent in the game’s multiplayer run-and-gun components that dominate the rest of Battlefield 1’s experience. Therefore, although Battlefield 1 ultimately proves to be an entertainment-oriented combat shooter, it is significant that the developers of this major commercial production decided to include an experimental structure to the prologue as a way of generating tone and affect in a fresh way. ReferencesAtkins, Barry, and Tanya Kryzwinska. "Introduction: Videogame, Player, Text." Videogame, Player, Text. Eds. Atkins, Barry and Tanya Kryzwinska. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.Bender, Stuart Marshall. "Blood Splats and Bodily Collapse: Reported Realism and the Perception of Violence in Combat Films and Videogames." Projections 8.2 (2014): 1-25.Bender, Stuart Marshall. Film Style and the World War II Combat Film. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.Fisher, Stephanie. "The Best Possible Story? Learning about WWII from FPS Video Games." Guns, Grenades, and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games. Eds. Gerald A. Voorhees, Josh Call and Katie Whitlock. New York: Continuum, 2012. 299-318.Harris, Sam, and Paul Bloom. "Waking Up with Sam Harris #56 – Abusing Dolores." Sam Harris 12 Dec. 2016. Howley, Daniel. "Review: Beautiful Battlefield 1 Gives the War to End All Wars Its Due Respect." Yahoo! 2016. Kain, Erik. "'Battlefield 1' Is Stunningly Beautiful on PC." Forbes 2016.Keogh, Brendan. Spec Ops: The Line's Conventional Subversion of the Military Shooter. Paper presented at DiGRA 2013: Defragging Game Studies.Kramer, Alan. Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. UK: Oxford University Press, 2007. Osborne, Scott. "Battlefield 1942 Review." Gamesport 2002. Payne, Matthew Thomas. "War Bytes: The Critique of Militainment in Spec Ops: The Line." Critical Studies in Media Communication 31.4 (2014): 265-82. Plante, Chris. "Battlefield 1 Is Excellent Because the Series Has Stopped Trying to Be Call of Duty." The Verge 2016. Rashid, Justin. Terrorism in Video Games and the Storytelling War against Extremism. Paper presented at Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities, 9-12 Jan. 2011.Schklovski, Viktor. "Sterne's Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary." Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. 25-60.Simpson, Campbell. "Battlefield 1 Isn't a Game: It's a History Lesson." Kotaku 2016. Thompson, Kristin. Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988. Welsh, Timothy. "Face to Face: Humanizing the Digital Display in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2." Guns, Grenade, and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games. Eds. Gerald A. Voorhees, Josh. Call, and Katie Whitlock. New York: Continuum, 2012. 389-414. Wilson, Jason Anthony. "Gameplay and the Aesthetics of Intimacy." PhD diss. Brisbane: Griffith University, 2007.

What is game who got game Where's the game In life Behind the game Behind the game I got game She got game We got game They got game He got game -- He Got Game by Public Enemy(From the soundtrack to the 1998 Spike Lee film He Got Game) There is an interesting pattern that develops when a relatively new object of study is broached by cultural studies academics. A reflex response is to defend the reasons why you are giving time to studying these apparently innocuous pastimes. Defenses of television studies twenty-five years ago could have resembled the way that the new forms of games are now being investigated: a preamble of justification -- like an incredibly deep inhalation that has to precede a long-winded exhalation -- would be necessary before launching into the dance of critical analysis. Thankfully our authors have learned and progressed from their forebears at least in this issue (but probably not in every version of game material that you will see flowing outwards in the next few years) and our articles get to the heart of the game, conceptually, analytically and critically. What we're telling you is that this is a remarkable issue that, along with the online re-play conference of 1999, launches the study of games in the contemporary moment of new media game forms and their call and response to previous patterns of play and pastimes. The articles here represent cutting-edge thinking about games and we have, as your humble issue editors, collected those postures and positions in one place. The term pastime to describe playing games has become a bit antiquated, but we'd like to regenerate it here. Our various authors have obviously devoted an incredible number of hours to understanding the games that they describe: contemporary computer games, as much as learning the intricacies of a particular sport, often require an investment of time over weeks and months to achieve sometimes only limited mastery. A pastime has usually been relegated to rainy Saturday afternoons when children (or adults) couldn't work out what do with themselves and were trapped within the confines of the home. To pass the time the old standard board games would appear: from the Victorian Snakes and Ladders to the spirit of proprietorial capitalism of Monopoly; from the war dimensions of Risk and Chess to the mildly headache-producing Scrabble. Passing time could be seen as a description of what childhood has often been about: a transitional reality whose value is always questionable and debatable by others because it is seen as the foundation for the rest of life. Indeed, one element of the moral panic about contemporary computer games is a matter of adults trying to determine whether these games are valuable for their children's future employability in the information economy or a massive waste of time that can never be recovered (Marshall). The pastime, instead of being of peripheral importance has now moved centre-stage in contemporary life through the ubiquity of electronic games and the fact that these games no longer are clearly the province of adolescents but a major cultural reality for a very large population from the ages 5 to 50. The concept of game has similarly migrated, so that most of the authors who have written for this issue have dealt with video and computer games primarily and not with sport or board games or even television game shows, although we have our new and intriguing representative articles from some of these other domains. Several of our authors have been intrigued by how video and computer games have now become metaphors for contemporary life. Certainly recent films have used the game as the new way to deal with the fears and powers of general technological change. In "Flip Horizontal: Gaming as Redemption" José dos Santos Cabral Filho relies on Roger Callois's categories to debate the role of the game in the formation of identity in contemporary culture's continuous debate about the power of technology to determine, and the freedom that technology apparently endows to its users. "The Fortean Continuity of eXistenZ within a Virtual Environment" by Adam Dodd revisits the work of philosopher of the paranormal, Charles Fort, and explores the connections between his ontology of continuity and the movement of signs within a postmodern, virtual, networked environment, analysing Cronenberg's 'game' film eXistenZ and relationships between the body, media, truth and representation. In "Game" Rebecca Farley ponders the concepts of 'game' and 'play' and how these intersect with the values of the society in which games are produced and played, and argues for game theories that recognise the essential element central to all gaming experiences: the player. "The Knowledge Adventure: Game Aesthetics and Web Hieroglyphics" by Axel Bruns looks at the shifting aesthetic relationship between words and images in new media as exemplified by the Internet, as a focus for an examination of the influences computer gaming has brought to the Internet, and to computing in general. Our tapestry on the game weaves from this larger conceptual pattern into analytical reflection about the aesthetics and narratives in particular games. In "Odyssey Renewed: Towards a New Aesthetics of Video-Gaming", Jason Wilson identifies the limitations of critical approaches that focus mainly on the screen and on-screen events; he calls for an expanded aesthetics of gaming that recognises the possibilities for "hybrid, cyborg players to narrate performance, play and self" and then analyses how players access this in a variety of games. In "Towards an Aesthetics of Navigation -- Spatial Organisation in the Cosmology of the Adventure Game", Bernadette Flynn takes us on a guided tour through the virtual worlds of the exploration/adventure games Myst and The Crystal Key via the historic, visual structures of art, architecture and cinema, and examines how these past forms and influences are used to establish representational context, and position, and work to orient and narrate players through the ludic space. In "Computer Games and Narrative Progression", Mark Finn examines the varying degrees of success with which theories from existing media have been applied to computer games, and analyses a variety of console games, specifically using the concepts of narrative progression and subject positioning, showing how these are both enforced by the game and negotiated in the complex relationship between game and player. Computer games are highly diverse in terms of game genre, technology, interactivity and the positioning of the player -- physically, narratively, subjectively and ideologically. While certain analyses may be applied to games in general, some of the best work gets into the particularities of gameplay, success, pleasure and expertise. The two following articles each provide an in-depth analysis of a particular game -- how it is structured, how players interact with the game, and the ideological assumptions that are inherent in the game software. "The Fabric of Virtual Reality -- Courage, Rewards and Death in an Adventure MUD" by Daniel Pargman takes us inside the world of the online adventure MUD (Multi-User Domain) in his analysis of the text-based SvenskMUD, which has been running in Sweden for the last nine years. In "Settler Stories: Representational Ideologies in Computer Strategy Gaming" Nick Caldwell examines a real-time strategy (RTS) game, The Settlers, demonstrating how ideological assumptions about culture and production may be actualised in a virtual environment. Our final two articles deal with the fascinating intersection between games and media: how games are used to create media content, and how this repositioning as media spectacle influences and indeed dictates many aspects of the game. In "Technology and Sport" Greg Levine discusses the impact of media broadcast of sporting matches on televised sport through an analysis of Australian Rules football and looks at the broader effects of technological innovation on sport. Carol Morgan examines another meeting of game and media in "Capitalistic Ideology as an 'Interpersonal Game': The Case of Survivor", an analysis of this year's highly popular game show Survivor and the economic and social ideals that are implicit in, and perpetuated by that particular game. Oh, and then there is our final, final submission that you should not miss -- like an extra game level that you haven't discovered yet: this contribution comes from a person who actually failed in his attempt to capture what he wanted to say through an article for submission to the 'game' issue. Jesper Juul, along with 3D graphics by Mads Rydahl, has created a game instead that is designed for your pleasure and for those who have waded through the articles of game theory. It's called "Game Liberation" and its composed of four levels where you as game theorist have to blast away to destroy each theory that tries to colonise games and claim they have worked out their cultural significance. So cool down with a pleasant round of Space Invader-style shoot-em-up after a hard day of facing the faux-titans of media and cultural studies. Experience the zen-zone pleasure of games firsthand without leaving your comfort zone of intellectual gymnastics. We have tried to capture here some of the surface and depth of game culture -- if we can be so bold as to propose a new area of cultural study that is consolidating as a clear and interesting domain of popular culture and intellectual inquiry. As our articles demonstrate game culture does not fit comfortably into past forms of media analysis although there are insights about games that can be teased outwards from their relationship to visual/textual media forms. We invite your comments so that the analytical/critical process initiated by this issue can continue and encourage you to extrapolate outwards through your interventions and contribution on the Media-Culture list associated with M/C. Our authors are thirsty for discussion and debate. Although the issue is not quite like an adventure game, we invite you to point and click and investigate its various threads of game culture. P. David Marshall & Sue Morris -- 'Game' Issue Editors References Marshall, P. David. "Technophobia: Videogames, Computer Hacks and Cybernetics." Media International Australia 85 (1997): 70-8. Citation reference for this article MLA style: P. David Marshall, Sue Morris. "Editorial: 'Game'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/edit.php>. Chicago style: P. David Marshall, Sue Morris, "Editorial: 'Game'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: P. David Marshall, Sue Morris. (2000) Editorial: 'game'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

Online life is embedded within the complexes, organisations, power ratios, and conceptualisations of offline life. The ambiguities of the interaction between online and offline - the testing and questioning, asking and affirming of their match - make a vital part of their current phenomenology. One factor which seems to exert resistance - some form of implacability - however unexpectedly, is that of gender. Other categories, such as politics and nationality, seem to have similar, but more direct, effects. Online folklore is quite specific, and the folklore can be academic as analysts are affected by the same forces and experiences as other people. Firstly, it is claimed that gender is unimportant online - that you are free to be yourself, or whomsoever you choose. Mark Poster, who is not alone, claims: "one may experience directly the opposite gender by assuming it and enacting it in conversations" (1997: 223), which seems to confuse a temporary imagining with a long term imposed. Secondly, however, there are the repeated tales that online life is full of cross-gender impersonation and that, as a result, it is full of potential betrayal and disillusionment. Kolko writes: The stories of online cross-dressing that abound… often culminate in narratives of betrayal. In this accumulated body of scholarship, participants talk of how their notions of the world and their selves and others has been destabilized, rocked beyond recognition, until they are left feeling adrift, at sea, that they 'cannot trust anyone,' that 'everything online can be a lie,' that 'no one tells who they really are.' (1997: np). These stories seem a little contradictory. If gender is unimportant online, then how come it is such a source of anxiety? Often the anxiety seems concealed under a discourse of futurity, in which attention is given to what life online might become - with contradictions deleted - rather than giving attention to what actually happens or has happened. This move maintains the theory that the Internet is free of the effects of offline life, perhaps in compensation for increasing restrictions and insecurities in offline life. It also keeps the Internet in the realm of science fiction, where it is without history, and is cutting edge by default. People generally seem sure they can detect the gender of others (Suler 1996). A person might use a lot of emoticons and be female (Witmer & Katzman 1998: 6, 9), they might flame and be male (Baym 1995: 158, Herring 1994), they might not know American pantyhose sizes and be male (irrespective of if they come from a country which uses different sizings - most of the rest of the world - or are a woman who does not wear pantyhose). People read books by academics describing how the sexes use language differently in order to detect these differences - while, at the same time, others read them in order to fake better (Wright 2000). If people select gender neutral pronouns in a MOO, then others will not assume they do not have a gender, they will generally attempt to work it out (Kendall 1996: 217), and some research suggests that if a person refuses to reveal their offline gender then they will be dropped from interactions (O'Brien 1999: 90). Most of these ways of determining 'real gender', use offline gender clichés to make that detection, or to manufacture that production. Thus McRae, after arguing in favour of absolute gender freedom, remarks that if someone plays a woman and wants to "attract partners as 'female' [they] must craft a description within the realm of what is considered attractive" (1996: 250). They are likely to exaggerate conventions of gender (as with plastic surgery). As Kendall writes: "choosing one gender or another does nothing to change the expectations attached to particular gender identifications" (1996: 217). In fact, as people online can ignore the gender of those contradicting their expectations of gender, then those expectations may grow stronger. Categories of gender might strengthen rather than weaken. A performance which follows rules and conventions in order to convey a message, which to some extent any successful performance must, may not challenge the accepted conceptual order at all. As not all the rules and conventions of performance may be conscious or understood by performers, their performance may unintentionally harden those conventions. This is especially so as in Western online social practice, whatever the complexity of our theory, gender seems to be treated as an 'essential' and equated with an offline body. Further, gender impersonation appears to happen in specific circumstances, namely on IRC, or MOOs, or in games. It rarely if ever happens on Mailing Lists, where anonymity is rarer (names are often given in addresses, and email often signed with a gendered name), and people try to manifest real authentic identities, rather than play with possible identities. An experimental mailing list I was involved in, in which members, previously known to each other from another list, were anonymous and their gender not specified, was short lived. It did not become a site of play with, or 'beyond', gender. As well, people seem only disturbed when males are thought to be impersonating females - which indicates a degree of gender specificity itself. I have never seen a list of ways to detect whether a male avatar was female, while the opposite is common. This is not just anxiety from heterosexual males seeking sex partners but, in a famous case, occurred when women found that a supposedly female confidant was male (Van Gelder 1996, Stone 1995: 69-81). So why does this happen? Answers to such questions must be provisional, but it is probably connected with the role of women, in offline life, in maintaining and marking intimacy and support. We might over-quickly say that, offline (outside of male homosexual groups in which gender may function differently), an intimate relationship usually includes one woman. Emotional or support bonding is female. Male bonding has become almost suspect, particularly if it involves intimacy. We also live in a society with a common discourse about the decline of support through kinship, a rise in single person households, increased insecurity in work, and decline in state support for people in times of stress, at the very time that kinship no longer is able to give support (Castells 1997: 97). The Western generative atom of kinship, intimacy and support, approaches being the heterosexual pair bond. Wuthnow claimed in 1994 that, faced with these kinds of insecurities, 40% of American adults became members of small groups meeting regularly to provide support for members (1994: 45-50). There is no reason to assume the percentage has declined. Internet groups can be seen to function similarly; they are means by which people make contacts, provide help, discuss problems or interests, and sometimes get work - fibreculture being a case in point. There is often, in such groups, a fairly active 'off-group' life of correspondence and contact between particular members. Structurally, life which is off a mailing list, or in a private MOO room, approaches the structure of the dyadic, private and intimate pair bond, which should contain at least one woman. Finding out that a person you have been intimate with was not female, almost automatically changes the relationship from the realm of intimate and private into a public betrayal. Our private role and its vulnerabilities has broken into the public male domain and symbolically been exposed rather than shared. Gender functions as a way in which people interpret the actions of others. As Ten Have argues (2000), categorisation is one of the ways in which people decide what kinds of messages others are emitting, whether they have much in common and whether they can be trusted. The importance of particular categories can frequently be ascertained by how often they are requested - and gender is one of the most requested when unknown and when people are seeking support or intimacy. Because authenticity, or trying to find the truth of others, is important in Western thought about relationships, this truth becomes anchored in the 'real' body and the customs surrounding it. 'Truth' is confirmed the more private the information, and the more it is received offline. As a result, and because of models of intimacy, 'real gender' then becomes important and is central to current online life. It may also point to other ways in which the tension between the online and offline manifest, or in which an apparently abstract flow meets resistance. Works Cited Baym, Nancy (1995) "The Emergence of Community in Computer-Mediated Communication", in Steven G. Jones ed. Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, Sage, Thousand Oaks. Castells, Manual (1997) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Volume 2: the Power of Identity, Blackwell, 1997. Cherny, Lynn & Weise, Elizabeth R. ed. (1996) Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, Seal Press, Seattle. Herring, Susan (1994) "Gender Differences in Computer-Mediated Communication: Bringing Familiar Baggage to the New Frontier", Keynote talk at panel entitled Making the Net*Work*: Is there a Z39.50 in gender communication?, American Library Association annual convention, Miami, June 27, 1994. <http://cpsr.org/cpsr/gender/herring.txt> Kendall, Lori (1996) "MUDder? I Hardly Know 'Er! Adventures of a feminist MUDder" in Cherny & Weise, 1996. Kolko, Beth (1997) "Discursive Citizenship: The Body Politic in Cyberspace", paper presented at the Creative Collaboration in Virtual Communities Conference, Sydney, Australia, February 1997. <http://www.arch.su.edu.au/kcdc/conferences/VC97/papers/kolko.php> McRae, Shannon (1996) "Coming Apart at the Seams: Sex, Text and the Virtual Body" in Cherny & Weise. O'Brien, Jodi (1999) "Gender (Re)production in Online Interaction", in M.A. Smith, & P. Kollock, eds. Communities in Cyberspace, Routledge, London. Poster, Mark (1997) "Cyberdemocracy", in David Holmes ed. Virtual Politics: Identity & Community in Cyberspace, Sage Publications, London. Stone, A. R. (1995) The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, MIT Press. Suler, John (1996) "Do Boys Just Wanna Have Fun? Male Gender-Switching in Cyberspace (and how to detect it)". <http://www.rider.edu/users/suler/psycyber/genderswap.php> ten Have, Paul (2000) " 'hi, a/s/l please?': identification/categorisation in computer mediated communication" A paper/mosaic presented at the 'Sociaal-Wetenschappelijke Studiedagen 2000', Session ICT & Huiselijk Leven. Van Gelder, Lindsay (1996) "The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover", in Rob Kling ed Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices, 2nd Edition, Academic Press, San Diego. Witmar, D.F. & Katzman, S.L. “Smile When You Say That: Graphic Accents as Gender Markers” in Fay Sudweeks et al eds. Network & Netplay: Virtual Groups on the Internet, AAAI Press, MenloPark. Wright, Kathryn (2000) "Gender Bending in Games" <http://www.womengamers.com/articles/gender.php> Wuthnow, Robert (1994) Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and America's New Quest for Community, Free Press, NY. Links http://cpsr.org/cpsr/gender/herring.txt http://www.arch.su.edu.au/kcdc/conferences/VC97/papers/kolko.html http://www.rider.edu/users/suler/psycyber/genderswap.html http://www.womengamers.com/articles/gender.html%3e Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Marshall, Jonathan. "Resistances of Gender" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/06-resistances.php>. APA Style Marshall, J. (2003, Aug 26). Resistances of Gender. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/06-resistances.php>

Transmedia storytelling, as defined by Henry Jenkins in 2006 in his book Convergence Culture, highlights a production strategy that aims to augment the narration of a cultural work by scattering it across several media platforms—digital or non-digital. The term is certainly quite recent, but the practices are not new and allow us to understand the evolution of the cultural industries and the creation of a new media ecosystem. As Matthew Freeman states, transmedia storytelling always relies on industrial changes, the narration adapting itself to new media synergies and novelties to create engaging and coherent storyworlds.Producers of American TV shows, showrunners, and networks are more and more eager to develop narrative universes on other media platforms in order to target new audiences and to give food for thought to fans, as well as reward them for their intellectual and emotional investment. Ancillary content and tie-ins sometimes take the form of novelisations or comic books, highlighting the fact that strategies of transmedia storytelling can be deployed on non-digital platforms and still enhance the narrative aspects of the show. For example, Twin Peaks (1990) developed The Diary of Laura Palmer (1990), a journal written by the character Laura Palmer who gave insights on her life and details about her relationships with other characters before she was murdered at the beginning of the series. How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014) published The BroCode (2008), first seen on episode “The Goat” (season 3 episode 17), and The Playbook (2012), first seen in an episode entitled “The Playbook” (season 5 episode 8). They are bibles written by character Barney Stinson that contain rules or advice for picking up women. For instance, The BroCode contains 150 articles, a glossary of terms, a definition of “a bro,” history of the code, amendments, violations, and approved punishments, all invented by Barney; some of these components were talked about on the show, while others were original additions for the book.Another way to create transmedia storytelling around TV shows is by developing comic books. This article will explore this specific media form in relation to transmedia strategies and will try to underline how comic books can make a narrative richer by focusing on parts of the plot, characters, times, or locations. First, I will focus on the importance of seriality from a historical perspective, because seriality appears to be one of the main principles of transmedia storytelling. Yet, is this narrative continuity always coherent and always canon when it comes to the publication of comic books? I will then propose a typology of the narratives comic books exploit to augment the storytelling of a show. I will give examples to illustrate how comic books can enrich the narrative universe of a given show and how characters can smoothly move from one platform to the other.A Transmedia World: Television and Comic Books Hand in HandSeriality is one of the main pillars of transmedia storytelling, and, according to Jenkins, “it is about breaking things down into chapters which are satisfying on their own terms, but which motivate us to come back for more” (“Transmedia”). These characteristics are already present in the way TV series are written, produced, and broadcast, and in the way comic books are created. They rely on episodes for TV shows and on issues for comic books that usually end with suspense and a suspension in the narrative continuity, commonly known as a cliff-hanger. For comic books, this narrative continuity took root in the early comic strips of the 18th and 19th century (Maigret and Stefanelli), which played a huge part in what we now know as comic books. As Pagello explains:The extensive practice of narrative serialisation played a major role in this context: the creative process, the industrial production and distribution, the editorial practices and, finally, the experience of comics readers all underwent dramatic changes when comics started to develop an identity distinguished from satirical cartoons, illustrated books and the various forms of children’s picture stories.According to Derek Johnson, these evolutions, in terms of production and reception, are closely linked to the widespread use of the franchise model in media industries. Johnson explains thatcomic books, video games, and other markets once considered ancillary now play increasingly significant and recentered roles in the production and consumption of everyday film and television properties such as Heroes, Transformers, and the re-envisioned Star Trek in ways that only very few innovators (such as George Lucas and his carefully elaborated and expanded Star Wars empire) had previously conceived in the twentieth century.The creation of transmedia strategies that capitalize on narrative continuity and seriality call for some synergies between media and for a “gatekeeper” of the stories who will ensure that all is coherent in the storyworld. Thus, “in 2006, the management of Heroes, for example, became a job for a professional ‘Transmedia Team’ charged with implementing creative coordination across television, comics, and the Internet” (Johnson).Another principle of transmedia storytelling, closely linked to seriality and the essence of the definition, is the creation of a narrative universe, that is “world-building,” in which plots and characters develop, and which will lay the foundations for the story. These foundations will be written in what is called a Bible, a document containing all the narrative elements in order to ensure coherence. In the notion of world-building, a matrix of possibilities is deployed, since stories can potentially become threads to weave, and re-weave. This rhizomatic world can be extended to infinity in a canonical way (by the official production) and in a non-canonical one (by the creations of fans). For Mark Wolf, these narrative worlds work like dynamic entities, and are transformative, transmedial, and transauthorial, which are similar to the notions and possibilities of transmedia storytelling, and media and cultural convergence. Stories that cannot be contained within the “real” of a single medium will be expended and developed on another or several other ones, creating a rich storyworlds. Comic books can be one of these tie-in media.New Term, Old Creations: An Historical OverviewMatthew Freeman wrote in his latest book Historicising Transmedia Storytelling that these transmedia practices do have a past and existed long before the introduction of the term due to new technologies, production strategies, and reception tactics. Comic books were often an option to enrich storylines and further develop the characters. For example, L. Frank Baum created a storyworld around The Wizard of Oz made of mock newspapers, conferences, billboards, novels, musicals, and comic strips in order to “appeal to a migratory audience” (Jenkins, “I Have”) and to deepen the characters, introduce new ones, and discover the land of Oz as if it were a real location. The author used techniques of advertising to promote and above all to expand his storyworld. As newspaper comic strips were quite popular at the time, Baum created several tie-in extensions in the newspapers and in a novel format. As Jason Scott underlines, “serial narratology enhances the possibilities of advertising and exploitation through the established market for the second and subsequent instalment” (14). The series of comic strips entitled Queer Visitor from the Marvellous Land of Oz (1904-1905) picked up, in terms of narration, just after the end of the book, offering a new temporality and life for the characters. As Freeman notes, this choice follows an economic logic:The era’s newspaper comic strips and their institutional tendency to prioritize recurring characters as successful advertising mechanisms (as witnessed in the cross-media dispersion of Buster Brown) had in fact influenced Baum to return to the series’ more familiar faces of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman (2371).Here, the beloved characters are moving from one medium to the next, giving new insights on their life after the end of the book, and enhancing their stories beyond its pages.A Typology of Comic Books and Tie-in Extensions of TV SeriesBefore diving into a tentative typology, I want to look at the definition of canon in a transmedia storyworld. There is a strong debate in academic discussions around the issues of canonicity, and here I understand canonicity as the production of official texts around a given cultural content. That is because of precisely what is qualified as an official text or an official extension, and what is not. In the book I co-edited with Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz (Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa), we respond by coining the term “transtexts,” which includes officially produced texts and fantexts in the same narrative universe. The dichotomy between both kinds of texts is thus diminished. Nonetheless, in production and transmedia strategies, canonicity is hard to evaluate because “few television series have attempted to create transmedia extensions that offer such a (high level of) canonic integration, with interwoven story events that must be consumed across media for full comprehension” (Mittell 298). He follows by proposing a typology of two possible transmedia extensions based on a canon perspective versus a non-canon one: “what is extensions” extend the storyworld canonically and in a coherent way, whereas “what if extensions” “pose(s) hypothetical possibilities rather than canonical certainties, inviting viewers to imagine alternate stories and approaches to storytelling that are distinctly not to be treated as potential canon” (Mittell 298). Mark Wolf refers to the term growth to qualify canonical materials which are going to expand a given storyworld and which nourish the stories. As argued by Gabriel et al., “Wolf’s definition of ‘growth’ makes it clear that, for him, a transmedial product can only be considered to contribute to a world’s growth if it adds new ‘canonical’ material, i.e. material that presents new pieces of information that are “true” for the fictional world” (Gabriel et al. 169). This notion of “truth” to the diegesis can be opposed in this context to the notion of alternate stories and alternate versions of the characters.My attempted typology lays its foundation upon this opposition between what is seen as an official extension and what is seen as an unofficial extension, but offers alternate perspectives to expand the storyworld using new characters, locations, or universes. The first category will look at canonical extensions and how they can deepen characters’ development and temporalities. The second category will deal with “canon divergent” (to use fans’ language) extensions and how they can offer new entries into the stories by creating new characters or presenting new locations.Canonical Extensions: CharactersTie-in extensions in the form of comic books help to deepen the characters, especially supporting characters, by delving into their motivations and psychology, or by giving them backstories and origin stories. According to Paolo Bertetti, “the transmedia character is a fictional hero whose adventures are told on several media platforms, each providing details about the character's life” (2344). Actually, motivated characters are the quintessential element of the narration of the classic Hollywood era, which was then reused in the narration of TV series, which were then penned into comic books. In her definition of transmedia superstructures, Marsha Kinder based her analysis on how characters moved from one medium to the next, making them the centre of the narrative universe and the element audiences would follow.For example, Fringe (2008), in a deal with DC comics, extended its stories and its characters in comic books, which were an integral part of the storyworld, and which included canon materials by offering Easter Eggs to fans and rewarding them for their investment in the narrative universe. Each issue of the second series dealt with a major or recurring character from the show, deepening them by giving them backgrounds. That way, audiences can discover the backstories of Agent Broyles, Nina Sharp, the CEO of Massive Dynamic, or even Gene, Walter’s cow, all of which are featured in the series but not well developed.Written by actor Tim Rozon (who plays Doc Holliday on the show) and author Beau Smith, Wynonna Earp Season Zero (2017) focuses on the past of main character Wynonna Earp when she was an outlaw and before she comes back to her hometown, Purgatory. The past comes to life on the pages, while it was only hinted at in the show. It is a good introduction to the main character before the show, since Wynonna comes back to Purgatory by bus at the beginning of the very first episode and there are no flashback episode relating her story earlier. Because the two authors of this comic book are part of the creative crew of the show, an actor and a writer, they ensure a sense of coherence in the extensions they write.In collaboration with Dynamite Entertainment, an American comic book company, NBC Universal launched a series of comic book issues entitled Origins (2008) as an ancillary text to Battlestar Galactica (2004). “Origin stories” are a specific genre related to superhero franchises. M.J. Clarke underlines that,the use of Origins Stories is influenced by the economic structure of the comic book industry, which continues to produce stories over years and decades. ... By remaining faithful to the Origins (which are frequently modified in their consistency), readers can discover a story without having to navigate in more than 400 numbers of commix. (54)The goal of these comic books is to create a "past" for the human characters that appeared in the series. The collection of comic books thus focuses on five main characters in 11 issues, spread out over a year: William Adama, Zarek, Gaius Baltar, Kara "Starbuck” Thrace, and Karl "Helo" Agathon. These issues are collected in an eponymous Omnibus. Likewise, Orphan Black (2011) also offered backstories for its “clone club” without disrupting the pace of the show. The stories, tied to the events of the series, focus on the opportunity to better understand the emotions, thoughts, and feelings that exemplify the characters of the show.It is interesting to note that the authors of these comic book extensions were in close contact with Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, showrunners of the Battlestar Galactica series, which guaranteed coherence and canonicity to the newly created material. In a personal interview, Robert Napton, writer of Origins, explained the creative process:so every week we would watch episodes and make sure our stories matched as closely as possible to what the television series was doing …we tried to make it feel like it was very much part of the series, so they were untold adventures and we tried to fit it into the continuity of the series as much as possible.Brandon Jerwa, writer for Battlestar Galactica comic book series Season Zero and Ghosts (2009), confirmed that, “It is my understanding that the comics were passed through Mr. Moore’s office, and they were certainly vetted by Syfy and Universal.” Jerwa also added an interesting input on perception of canonicity versus non-canonicity by fans who can be picky about the ancillary contents and added materials that extend a storyworld:Most comic tie-ins have a hard time being considered a legitimate part of the canon, and that is simply beyond the control of the creative team. I worked very hard to make sure that I was writing material that adhered to the continuity of the show as closely as humanly possible. I don’t believe in writing a licensed property in such a way as to put forward ‘my vision’ of the universe; I believe very firmly that it is my responsibility to serve the source material above all else.Canonical Extensions: TemporalitiesComic books as a licensed product can expand the temporalities of the show and tell stories before the beginning of the series and after it ended, as well as fill time voids and ellipses. For example, now in its 11th season in comic books, Joss Whedon managed to keep Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) alive and to attract new fans without alienating its original fanbase. Blogger and web entrepreneur Keith McDuffee felt that reading Buffy as a comic book after seeing it on television for seven years was strange, but the new format was a good sign because: “the medium lets creativity go completely wild without budget worries.” The comic books focus on the famous characters and created a life for them after the end of the show, making them jump from the screen onto the pages. Sometimes, the comic books told original stories that might seem out-of-character, like the issue in which Buffy sleeps with a woman. That kind of storyline wasn’t explored in the TV show, and comics offer one way to go deeper into the characters’ backgrounds and psychology. Sometimes, the tie-ins do not strictly follow the continuity and become non-canon regarding the stories of the TV shows. For example, DC/Wildstorm presented comic book issues around The X-Files (1993-) that were set in continuity of the show but failed to refer to main plot events (for example, Scully’s pregnancy). “Rather than offering ‘additive comprehension’ to a pre-existing television and film narrative, Spotnitz chose to write licensed comics on their own terms” (Pillai 112).DC is familiar with offering new adventures for its superhero characters in the form of comic books (which are first published online), going back to the basics. Of course, in this case, the relationship between the comic book medium and the television medium is more intricate, as the TV series are based on comic book characters whose stories are then extended again in comic books, which are created specifically to extend the TV shows’ storyworlds. The creation of the comic book series The Flash Season Zero (2015) set the stories between the episodes of the first season of The Flash and focus on the struggles of Barry Allen as he juggles between his job as a CSI, his love for Iris West, his childhood sweetheart, and his new identity as a vigilante with superpowers. This allows viewers to better understand a part of Barry Allen’s life that was not well developed in the show, adding temporal layers to the stories. The Adventures of Supergirl vol. 1 (2016) also depict the battles of the girl of steel between episodes, as well as her life with her sister, Alex (who is also a new addition in the comic book), and her co-workers at the DEO. For Arrow,the digital tie-ins offer producers [opportunities] to explore side stories they are unable to cover on screen. In the case of Season 2.5, the 22-chapter comic enabled the producers to fill in the blanks in between the seasons, thus offering more opportunities to explore the dynamics of fan-favorite characters such as Felicity and Diggle. (Bourdaa and Chin 183)These DC comic books are examples of giving life to a TV show beyond the TV screen, enhancing the timeframe of the stories and providing new content. The characters pass through the screen to live new adventures in comic books. In some cases, the involvement of the series' actor and writer in comic book scripting confirms the desire for consistency in the extensions of the series, whatever the medium used and whatever the objectives.Canon Divergent Extensions or the Real PossibilitiesFinally, comic books can deploy stories that will display a new point of view on the canon: a “multiplicity” (Jenkins, “La Licorne”) or a “what-if story” (Mittell), which will explore new possibilities and new characters.The second series of Orphan Black comic book tie-ins entitled Helsinki (2016) dealt with clones in the capital of Finland. The readers discover the lives of other clones, how they deal with the discovery of their “condition,” and that they have a caretaker. The comics are written by John Fawcett, who is also a showrunner for the series. The narrative universe is stretched into new possibilities, seen with new eyes, and shown from the perspective of new clones. The introduction of new characters gives opportunities to tell new stories and diverge from the canonical content, especially in terms of the characters’ development and depth.Battlestar Galactica, after the show ended, partnered once again with Dynamite Entertainment, to publish a new set of comic books entitled BSG: Ghosts (2009), which tells the story of new characters surviving the Cylon genocide. Writer Brandon Jerwa asks in BSG: Ghosts: "And if a squadron of secret agents had also survived Cylon Attack?" For him, comic books are a good opportunity to relaunch the narrative universe by introducing new characters in a well-known storyworld.The comic books will definitely have to evolve in order to survive because at some point we will end up exhausting the interest of the readers on the narrative continuity. Projects like Ghosts are definitely a good way to test public reaction to new ideas in a familiar environment. (Jerwa)Conclusion: From One Medium to the Next, From Narrative Extensions to MarketingThis article offers an overview of how comic books are used as tie-in products to extend TV series’ narrative universe. The ambition was not to give an exhaustive panorama but to propose a typology with some examples. I showed that characters’ development, temporalities, and new points of view are narrative angles exploited in comic books to give depth to a storyworld. Of course, this raises issues of labour, authorship, and canon content, which are already discussed elsewhere (see, for example: Clarke, Pillai, Scott). Yet, comic books are an integral part of transmedia storytelling and capitalise on notions of seriality, offering readers new stories, continuity, depth, and character motivations in order to enrich storylines and make them live beyond the screen. However, Robert Napton, in our interview, underlines an interesting opposition between licensing and marketing: “Frankly, comic books are considered licensing and marketing, not official canon. The only TV comic that is canon is Buffy Season 8 and 9 because Joss Whedon says they are, but that is not the normal situation.” He clearly draws a line between what he considers to be a licensed product, in this article what I describe as canonical content, and a marketing product, which could be understood in this article as a canon divergent tie-in. The debate here is clearly on, since understandings of transmedia vary between the perspectives of production companies, which are trying to gain profit by providing new content, the perspectives of fans, who know the storyworlds and the characters extensively and could be very possessive of them, and the perspectives of extension authors, who “have very strict story guidelines” (Jerwa) and have to make their stories fit within the narrative universe as it is told onscreen.ReferencesBertetti, Paolo. “Towards a Typology of Transmedia Characters.” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014): 2344-2361.Boni, Marta. World Building: Transmedia, Fans, Industries. 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