Final Fantasy XII
Game
Documents about Final Fantasy XII
Whitepaper4 pages
Portraying Unfavorable Sociocultural Circumstances Through the Videoludic Picaresque
This paper examines how contemporary video games use the rogue figure and the picaresque framework to portray unfavorable sociocultural circumstances, arguing that the videoludic picaresque continues a centuries-old literary tradition of depicting marginalized lives in oppressive societies.
- The paper argues that the videoludic picaresque continues a centuries-old tradition: picaresque fiction, from sixteenth-century Spain onward, served as an early form of intersectional storytelling addressing class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality.
- The author proposes that urban density, visible economic disparity, and institutional corruption, prominent in early modern picaresque novels, closely parallel present-day conditions, which is a key reason for the rogue's renewed popularity in games.
- The rogue protagonist is framed as a vehicle for exploring how identities are treated within oppressive systems, with games shaped by their historical moment in the same way early literature was.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper8 pages
Temporal Frames: A Unifying Framework for the Analysis of Game Temporality
"Temporal Frames" proposes a formal analytical tool for studying how time operates in games, grounded in a relationist view in which temporal properties arise from relationships among events rather than from time as an independent container.
- Games rarely operate within a single temporal frame; the authors identify four recurring frames (real-world time, gameworld time, coordination time, and fictive time) that often coexist or succeed one another, and meaningful analysis depends on identifying each and how they interact.
- The paper critiques the familiar real-time versus turn-based binary as obscuring distinct temporal phenomena produced by frame interactions, and reconceives both as interactions between frames rather than fixed categories.
- Sequential and embedded arrangements of temporal frames generate temporal anomalies such as temporal bubbles, warping, and non-uniform temporality, illustrated with cases from Final Fantasy XII, Animal Crossing, Civilization, and Grand Theft Auto III.
DiGRAJan 2007
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