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- Volume 10, Issue 3, 2018
Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds - Volume 10, Issue 3, 2018
Volume 10, Issue 3, 2018
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Automation of play: Theorizing self-playing games and post-human ludic agents
By Sonia FizekAbstractThis article offers a critical reflection on automation of play and its significance for the theoretical enquiries into digital games and play. Automation has become an ever more noticeable phenomenon in the domain of video games, expressed by self-playing game worlds, self-acting characters, and non-human agents traversing multiplayer spaces. On the following pages, the author explores various instances of automated non-human play and proposes a post-human theoretical lens, which may help to create a new framework for the understanding of video games, renegotiate the current theories of interaction prevalent in game studies, and rethink the relationship between human players and digital games.
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Let’s not play: Interpassivity as resistance in ‘Let’s Play’ videos
By Alex GekkerAbstractThis article examines contemporary practices of ‘idling’ (playing ‘idle games’) and ‘let’s playing’ (watching ‘Let’s Play’ [LP] videos of performed gameplay) as forms of power and resistance in the attention economy. Through the prism of interpassivity, a theory developed by Robert Pfaller and Slavoj Žižek, it establishes idling as relegating certain enjoyment from gameplay to the machine, while reproducing the anxieties associated with digital work as a whole. LPs, on the other hand, position the viewer as a critical analyst rather than a hands-on player. This vicarious experience of delegating play to others can allow avoidance and disengagement, which in turn may allow for a critical examination of the system as whole. As I will argue in this article, such interpassive practices can thus be seen as forms of resistance enabling users to step outside the controlling mechanism of digital media and the associated cybernetic feedback loops.
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‘People are robots, too’: Expert gaming as autoplay
Authors: Nicholas Taylor and Jessica ElamAbstractThis article theorizes gaming expertise as a form of automated play (autoplay) by considering automation as a production of an arrangement of bodies and forces that solicits speed and accuracy in the processing of sensory, perceptual and cognitive events. Autoplay is not a property specific to technical machines, but to assemblages of machinic and organic bodies. In putting forward this notion of expertise as autoplay, we are not privileging either human bodies or technical components. Instead, resisting this dichotomy, we analyse the relations that constitute this assemblage, and the historical trajectories that shape and capture it – namely, the military–entertainment complex’s pursuit of seamless communicative circuits for threat detection and response. After operationalizing this framework through a look at expert players in League of Legends, this article concludes by drawing out some implications of what it means for particular subjects to play with(in) automation.
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Autonomous eMotorsports racing games: Emerging practices as speculative fictions
By Walt ScacchiAbstractMotorsports games and simulated automobile racing occupy a dynamic genre of computer games for entertaining play, critical game studies and ‘auto-play’. This article utilizes the lens of speculative design to present six scenarios that seek to motivate the design of autonomous eMotorsports games and play experiences through alternative design fictions. These fictions serve to help identify and tease out how different socio-technical configurations emerging around autonomous vehicles, motorsports games, sim racing user interfaces and user experiences, embrace or exclude different stakeholders. These stakeholders can shape how autonomous eMotorsports games, game play and game viewing will emerge and prosper. These fictions also serve as a narrative web of possible socio-technical configurations open to critical review through: (1) transhumanist spectacle and spectating; (2) technofeminist and gendered framings of these configurations; and (3) whether digital artefacts configured to realize autonomous eMotorsports games have politics.
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Book Review
More LessAbstractKriegsspiel, Hexes and the Nonkinetic: Tripping the CRT fantastic – Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming, Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (eds) (2016)
Cambridge: The MIT Press, 806 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-26203-399-2, h/bk, $50.00
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