Online gaming culture and research skills and game structures.

1. Online gaming culture 2

2. GAME THEORY

3. Espen Aarseth
Ergodic Action - Cybertext
Labyrinths and Mazes
Players active agents
Game object

4. LUDOLOGY - NARRATOLOGY
Narratologists argue that games are expressive due to their underlying narrative structures, and
thus games can be interpreted like literary texts. On the other hand, Ludologists assert that a
game's rules and mechanics alone express the game's meaning, and deny that games can be
analyzed via literary methods.
The ludological position is that games should be understood on their own terms.
Ludologists have proposed that the study of games should concern the analysis of
the abstract and formal systems they describe. In other words, the focus of game
studies should be on the rules of a game, not on the representational elements
which are only incidental.

5. CULTURAL CONTEXT

6. The Rain Room Barbican Mike Nelson
The New economy - Experiential
Escape Rooms - Secret Cinema - promenade theatre
Immersion
World building
liminal
Mcgonical - Reality is Broken, people
are moving to the virtual, because they
see greater satisfaction than in their so
called real lives, we have to make life
more like games.

7. Secret cinema

8. Janine Harrington -
3 x 3 (formerly ABACUS/ Car Park)
Huizinga magic
circle a bounded
space set apart from
normal life. Inside the
magic circle, different
rules apply, and it is a
space where we can
experience things not
normally sanctioned or
allowed in regular
space or life.
Liminal - Boundaries

9. Research Skills

10. REFLECTIVE
Task - First person - write about the experience of playing a game, a moment that
was important to you.
Empathy - what does it feel like…

11. Swap and read each others

12. GAME DESIGN PRINCIPLES

13. Rules Transference
How do you make the participants aware of the actions they need to take

14. MECHANICS
SCICART - a "mechanic", something that connects players' actions with the purpose of the game and its main challenges. But the meaning of
the term is not always clear.
Bjork - PATTERNS -

15. Affordance
An affordance is what a user can do with an object based on the user’s capabilities.
As such, an affordance is not a “property” of an object (like a physical object or a User Interface).
Instead, an affordance is defined in the relation between the user and the object: A door affords
opening if you can reach the handle. For a toddler, the door does not afford opening if she cannot
reach the handle.
An affordance is, in essence, an action possibility in the relation between user and an object.

16. PAPER ROCK SCISSORS PAtterns
Description: This pattern is based on the children's game with the same name. It means
that players try to outwit each other by guessing what the other ones will do, and by
tricking other players to take a wrong guess on one's own action. The original game is
very simple; after a count to three both players make one out of three gestures, depicting
rock, paper or scissors. Rock beats scissors, scissors beat paper and paper beats rock.
That there is no winning strategy is the essence of the pattern: players have to somehow
figure out what choice is the best at each moment.
This game pattern is well-known with the game design community (sometimes called
“triangularity”, see Crawford) and is a mnemonic name for the logical concept of non-
transitivity (basically, even if A beats B and B beats C, A doesn’t beat C).
Examples: Quake (relation between weapons and monsters), Drakborgen, SimWar,
protogame to show non-transitivity (Dynamics for Designers, Will Wright, GDC 2003)
Consequences: Paper-Rock-Scissors patterns can either be implemented so it choices
have immediate consequences (as in the game that gave the pattern its name) or long-
term effects. In both cases it promotes Tension, either until the moment when the choices
are revealed or until the success of the chosen strategies is evident. A paper-rock-scissor
pattern introduces Randomness unless players can either gain knowledge about the other
players current activities or keep record over other players behavior, as otherwise a player
has no way of foreseeing what tactics is advantageous. If the game supports knowledge
collection, the correct use of the strategies allows for Game Mastery.
Using the Pattern: Games with immediate consequences of choices related to Paper-
Rock-Scissor usually have these kinds of choices often in the game to allow people to
keep records over other player behavior. Quick Games using the pattern, such as the game
which lent its name to the pattern, usually are played repeatedly so some form of Meta
Game can be used to allow players to gain knowledge of their opponents’ strategies

17. SIGN LANGUAGE DUEL
Make it/play it

18. RESEARCH SKILLS

19. SEMIOTICS
The study of signs
Denotation - Connotation
Ferdinand De Saussure
signifier and the signified
Deconstruct

20. Evolution of Esports

21. Arcade era: high-score competitions.
Early history (1972–1989)
Attendees of the 1981 Space Invaders Championship attempt to set the highest score.
The earliest known video game competition took place on October 19, 1972, at Stanford University
for the game Spacewar, where students were invited to an "Intergalactic spacewar olympics"
whose grand prize was a year's subscription for Rolling Stone. The Space Invaders Championship
held by Atari in 1980 was the earliest large scale video game competition, attracting more than
10,000 participants across the United States, establishing competitive gaming as a mainstream
hobby.
In the summer of 1981, Walter Day founded a high score record keeping organization called Twin
Galaxies. The organization went on to help promote video games and publicize its records through
publications such as the Guinness Book of World Records, and in 1983 it created the U.S. National
Video Game Team. The team was involved in competitions, such as running the Video Game
Masters Tournament for Guinness World Records and sponsoring the North American Video Game
Challenge tournament.
During the 1970s and 1980s, electronic sports players and tournaments begun being featured in
popular newspapers and magazines including Life and Time. One of the most well known classic
arcade game players is Billy Mitchell, for his listing as holding the records for high scores in six
games including Pac-Man and Donkey Kong in the 1985 issue of the Guinness Book of World
Records. Televised eSports events aired during this period included the American show Starcade
which ran between 1982 and 1984 airing a total of 133 episodes, on which contestants would
attempt to beat each other's high scores on an arcade game. A video game tournament was
included as part of TV show That's Incredible!, and tournaments were also featured as part of the
plot of various films, including 1982's Tron.

22. The Attraction of a High Score
Virtuosity and Visibility - Scoreboards.
Deci Self Motivation Theory - External rewards - Autotelic.
WHY COMPETITION? What is competition - beat the game - beat others - beat other scores - beat the game
fastest - beat the game hardest. WHAT IS BEST TO WATCH - Games move from participatory and active to
specattorial
Co-operative games - new game movement. - reality is broken, Halo - all work together

23. Home console era: dawn of speed-running.
·
Is speedrunning just players trying to beat the game as quickly as possible?
Not quite! Speedrunning is a generalized term for a way to play a game that involves
intentionally trying to go as fast as you can, however there are several different categories
with different rulesets within speedrunning. The most commonly known category is to beat
the game by any means necessary — “Any %” as it’s known in the community — which
usually includes purposely causing glitches that save time.
Some involve speedrunning only particular segments of a game.
Others impose certain restrictions, such as glitchless runs that force
players to play the game as developers intended as quickly as
possible, or 100% runs that force you to collect every item and do
every quest. There are also speedrun races, where world-record-
chasing is eschewed in favor of just beating your opponent
according to a particular set of criteria. Another type of speedrun is
tool-assisted speedruns, or TAS. These involve speedrunners
tinkering with a macro program to have the computer complete the
game with absolute perfect button inputs and quickly as possible.

24. PC era: the competitive LAN party.
·
For the niche gaming community of PC gamers, there is nothing as unique as the LAN party. Groups of people, sometimes
hundreds, meet to play a multiplayer game in person over a Local Area Network. They abandon the anonymity of the Internet
to compete face-to-face. These meetups have changed a lot over the years.
For some PC players at these huge tournament events, they aren’t showing off the power of the PC they have built, but the
uniqueness or creativity. These modders want to show they have the smallest PC that will run a given game (like a NUC or a
minitower), or the most colorful machine (with lights or graffiti), or the most invisible machine (inside a box on the wall), or
the geekiest computer (done up as a prop from their favorite game, show, or film). They compete in these events with not
only their hands, but with their discerning eye and particular taste.

25. Online era: competition for all.
Esports goes online (1990–1999)
In the 1990s, many games benefited from increasing internet connectivity,
especially PC games. For example, the 1988 game Netrek was an Internet game
for up to 16 players, written almost entirely in cross-platform open source software.
Netrek was the third Internet game, the first Internet team game, the first Internet
game to use metaservers to locate open game servers, and the first to have
persistent user information. In 1993 it was credited by Wired Magazine as "the first
online sports game".
Large eSports tournaments in the 1990s include the 1990 Nintendo World
Championships, which toured across the United States, and held its finals at
Universal Studios Hollywood in California. Nintendo held a 2nd World
Championships in 1994 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System called the
Nintendo PowerFest '94. There were 132 finalists that played in the finals in San
Diego, CA. Mike Iarossi took home 1st prize. Blockbuster Video also ran their own
World Game Championships in the early 1990s, co-hosted by GamePro magazine.
Citizens from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Chile
were eligible to compete. Games from the 1994 championships included NBA Jam
and Virtua Racing.
Television shows featuring eSports during this period included the British shows
GamesMaster and Bad Influence! the Australian gameshow A*mazing, which
would show two children competing in various Nintendo games in order to win
points.

26. Esports
The most common video game genres associated with esports are multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), first-person shooter (FPS),
fighting, card, battle royale and real-time strategy (RTS) games. Popular esport franchises include League of Legends, Dota, Counter-Strike,
Valorant, Overwatch, Street Fighter, Super Smash Bros. and StarCraft, among many others. Tournaments such as the League of Legends
World Championship, Dota 2's International, the fighting game-specific Evolution Championship Series (EVO) and Intel Extreme Masters are
among the most popular in esports. Many other competitions use a series of league play with sponsored teams, such as the Overwatch
League. Although the legitimacy of esports as a true sporting competition remains in question, they have been featured alongside traditional
sports in some multinational events in Asia, with the International Olympic Committee also having discussed their inclusion into future
Olympic events.
By the late 2010s, it was estimated that the total audience of esports would grow to 454 million viewers, with revenue increasing to more than
US$1 billion, with China accounting for 35% of the global esports revenue in 2020.[4][5] The increasing availability of online streaming media
platforms, particularly YouTube and Twitch, have become central to the growth and promotion of esports competitions.[3] Despite viewership
being approximately 85% male and 15% female, with a majority of viewers between the ages of 18 and 34, female gamers have also played
professionally.[6][7][8] The popularity and recognition of esports first took place in Asia, seeing significant growth in China and South Korea,
with the latter having licensed professional players since 2000. Despite its large video game industry, esports in Japan is relatively
underdeveloped, with this being largely attributed to its broad anti-gambling laws which prohibit paid professional gaming tournaments.[9][10]
Outside of Asia, esports are also popular in Europe and the Americas, with both regional and international events

27. Presentation
Should Egames be an olympic sport

28. Rise of global tournaments (2000 onwards)

29. BACK UP
Prepare and start a presentation in pairs about one game you agree on or one
game between you that you think is an amazing game.
Persuasive writing and presentation
Structure - language features
Emotive language - rhetorical questions.

30. GAMES IN THE WORLD

31. Task make a
computer
game
In the real
world -
maybe-

32. Flanagan Giant joystick games process or object

33. Folklorism - modern folk -