Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2021

The main aim of this article is to explore how posthuman values and premises can change the approach to video game research, in terms of reframing the relation between game and player as a meaning-making process. The idea of the bio-object, which originated in Tadeusz Kantor’s avant-garde theatre, is introduced and reread in the context of the critical posthumanism and new materialism of Karen Barad, especially her concept of intra-action. By meshing together Kantor’s and Barad’s ideas, a framework is developed for conceptualizing the bond between the player and the video game object, pointing out how their constant rivalry is not only resolved in meaning-generative tension, but also intra-actively shapes their ontic borders. The game and the player become equal in this new unity, and the video game object stops being perceived as a secondary to the player and can be analysed as the equal partner in this relation.

This article examines how games set in the past reflect contemporary social and political events without overtly communicating messages. Using a simplified version of Astrid Ensslin’s methodological toolkit, the author studies four critically acclaimed retrospective mystery games produced in France within the 1986–91 period. The research results allow one to externalize a trend marked by ambiguous meanings called la mode rétro, namely a nostalgic re-creation of the past and a simultaneous coming-to-terms with France’s history. The author contextualizes the games examined here in terms of their references to a problematic past – the nation’s wartime stance towards Nazi Germany, and colonialism – and contemporaneous events such as the emergence of the National Front in France. The titles examined here demonstrate how discursively ambiguous computer games are as cultural texts.

The connection between player and avatar is central to digital gaming, with identification assumed to be core to this connection. Often, scholarship engages single dimensions of identification, yet emerging perspectives reveal that identification is polythetic (PID) – comprising at least six sufficient (but not necessary) mechanisms. The current study investigates the intersections of polythetic identification mechanisms and two different approaches to player–avatar sociality (as a marker of differentiation): general types of player–avatar relationships (PARs) and discrete dimensions of player–avatar interaction (PAX). Secondary analysis of an existing dataset of gamers revealed two main findings: (1) players reported overall diminished identification when they engaged in non-social relations with their avatar, and (2) increased liking and perspective-taking were most likely with human-like social relations, which require differentiation from rather than identification as the avatar. These findings are interpreted to suggest that player–avatar identification and differentiation are conceptually independent relational phenomena that are experientially convergent – some relational orientations and dynamics are associated with distinct combinations of identification mechanisms.

This article focuses on the design and preliminary experimentation of a tabletop game called Kitchen Table, created to encourage more empathy towards people with severe anaphylactic food allergies. To measure the effectiveness of this game, the study ‘Use of persuasive games to promote empathy for persons with food allergies’ was conducted at the University of Waterloo in collaboration with the Games Institute and Department of Geography and Environmental Management's Genetics, Environment and Therapies: Food Allergy Clinical Tolerance Studies (GET-FACTS) project. This study involved volunteers completing a Likert scale-based pre-playtest questionnaire, playing the game, and then completing a post-playtest questionnaire identical to the original. Their pre-playtest and post-playtest responses were compared to measure the degree to which attitudes changed as a result of playing the game. In the end, the game was demonstrated to encourage more empathy towards people with severe anaphylaxis through the production of emergent narrative from the interaction between the players, the game mechanics and the participatory community experience.

Popular horror video game titles such as Outlast, Dead Space, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent are well-known for their effectiveness at evoking negative affects of terror and anxiety. The various camera tricks, control schemes, and visual cues these games deploy to confuse players and limit their sense of control and personal mastery. This article examines how Frictional Games’s Amnesia: The Dark Descent pairs confined spatial layouts with an intentionally vague user interface design to disorient players and heighten the likelihood that they will walk into one of the game’s threatening monsters. This article deploys Marxist and Affect theory conceptualizations of proximity and space to analyse how the game’s use of corners frighten players by narrowing their available field of view. The resulting analysis examines the negative feelings and subjective experiences players are likely to feel when they are unable to properly see the virtual diegetic world with absolute clarity.

Review of: Dans la peau des gamers: Anthropologie d’une guilde de World of Warcraft (Inside the Gamers: Anthropology of a Guild of World of Warcraft), Olivier Servais (2020)

Paris: Karthala, 344 pp.,

ISBN 978-2-81112-630-8, p/bk, €25.00