Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2013

This article adopts the lens of queer theory to examine the terms of inclusion of non-heterosexual identities within recent mass market role-playing games. Focusing on Lionhead Studios’ Fable and BioWare’s Dragon Age series, I suggest how the intersection of queer theory’s resistance of presumptive categories for sexuality and theories of game design – notably the concept of affordances – may provide for a critique of the performative constraints through which gamers are able to ‘play queer’. While even-handed dynamics of relationship game play may espouse a liberal rhetoric of inclusion, I propose that a predominant logic of sameness – grounded in an even-handed ‘blindness’ to sexual difference – may also restrict the possibilities for queer identification.

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are a kind of narrative game that use the real world as a platform to allow players and characters to interact via multimedia forms, enabling participants to alter a game’s progression. Boundaries between what is real and what is fictional are disguised, as characters, controlled by game designers react to player input. Working collaboratively as digital detectives, players collate a fragmented narrative by deciphering codes and clues. Research found that the deliberate blurring of many defining game features creates a complex product. Moreover, the number of ARG implosions (failures) is high. An empirical study, involving content analysis, examined players’ views on Unforum, the primary ARG discussion board. This analysis extracted evaluation criteria for judging ARGs, a selection of which are outlined in this article. These criteria should help game creators, or puppetmasters (PMs) create and manage a quality ARG, thus producing greater numbers of successful games.

Virtual worlds have been successfully employed as tools for educational, simulation and training use. The ability for users to easily create their own content with simple editing tools has made the Second Life Grid® platform, and its free open source equivalent, OpenSimulator, very popular. While the Second Life Grid offers more features, stability and a larger user base, cost considerations and some lack of control have led some projects to consider development/deployment exclusively on an OpenSimulator grid. This poses the problem of how to transfer to such a grid any content that was developed and refined in the Second Life Grid, since the company behind Second Life ®, Linden Lab, does not offer an archival/restore facility for user-generated content. In this article, we analyse some third-party tools that can partially backup and restore some content and describe a mechanism to automatically capture all content in a whole region of the Second Life Grid and save it to a commonly used file format (Open Archive) that is universally used on OpenSimulator grids, and report on a prototype we developed to implement it with reasonable results, but also some serious limitations, which are further discussed.

This article explores the phenomenon of illicit modifications known as ‘infection lobbies’ that are created for the Call of Duty (CoD) franchise and deployed on the Xbox 360’s Xbox Live (XBL) gaming network. These modifications have the unique ability to ‘infect’ unmodified systems, altering the settings that control the CoD game space following contact within a multiplayer match, spreading the modification far beyond the reach and control of its instigators. Infection lobbies necessitate the use of hardware hacked Xbox 360 consoles, such as a ‘JTAG’ or ‘Reset Glitch Hack’ (RGH) console, the creation and utilization of which are in violation of access control technology circumvention clauses within the European Directive 2001/29/EC (2001) and the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998) (DMCA). Infection lobbies therefore violate the legal and contractual contexts of play, the rules of the game, and the emergent social contexts of play. As a result infection lobbies constitute illicit modifications, forbidden by law, rules or custom, yet despite this configuration a significant body of players are willing to engage with and utilize them, whether orchestrating and deploying them or by opportunistically utilizing the infected alterations that they contain. Through the conduct of interviews with and participant observation of both those that play within and those that deploy infection lobbies in Activision’s CoD franchise, this article explores not only the process of deployment but what it means to play against the infected, to play alongside the infected and to infect others. In doing so the illicit modification is seen to be interpreted by players in various ways: as egalitarian game-extension, as temporary inversion, as a method of antagonistic dominance, and as a tool for protecting the very core of the game through targeted vigilantism. Through these explorations, this article contributes to contemporary research in the contested space between producer and consumer, and the discourses of legitimization and victimization that surround play.

How groups create and sustain internal social order is a general topic of interest to researchers in game studies. In this field, most research has looked at social order processes during game play, while little attention has been directed at groups of players such as guilds in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) or clans in first-person shooters (FPS) in between game sessions. Groups are not dissolved between gaming sessions, nor are all rules implicit. This article explores the way groups of players create and sustain order within their groups between games as well as by using explicit norm declarations. Starting from the most common descriptions of rules in social and behavioural science literature this article analyses the public announcements in group forums of the rules, twenty guilds and ten clans playing either MMOGs or FPS games have published. Not surprisingly, both genre and player motivation play a large role in the selection and creation of rules for guilds and clans. One of the most common types of behaviour addressed in the guild/clan rules, ‘griefing’, needs a more sophisticated analysis than used in previous game research. Finally, a list of ‘game commandments’ that summarize the rule sets from both guilds and clans is presented. This article positions user-created rules as implicit rules made explicit and also indicates a need for a thorough investigation of how players make sense of their social sphere online.

WORDPLAY AND THE DISCOURSE OF VIDEO GAMES: ANALYZIN G WORDS, CHRISTOPHER A. PAUL (2012) New York: Routledge, 220 pp., ISBN: 978-0-415-89306-0, h/bk, $140.00 (USD), ISBN: 978-0-415-83499-5, p/bk, $39.95 (USD)

GAME WORLDS CONVERGE TO CELEBRATE VIRTUAL ARTISTRY: INSIGHTS FROM CO-FOUNDER RICKY GROVE OF THE MACHINIMA EXPO

MACHINIMA AS PERSONAL EXPLORATION: TWO EXPERIMENTAL FILMS FROM TUTSY NAVARATHNA AND PING-YAO CHEN