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When I'm Sixty-Four: Beatles Rock Band and the Commodification of Nostalgia
The paper examines the game as a documentary game and as a transmediated Beatles brand. The author notes that in 2009 Advertising Age declared the game one of America's hottest brands.
- The author reports that Advertising Age declared Beatles Rock Band one of America's hottest brands only a few months after its release.
- The basic game offers 45 Beatles tracks, and extra songs, including complete Sgt. Pepper's, Abbey Road, and Rubber Soul albums, are sold online.
- The author found that in-game representations of the Beatles are kept mostly clean-shaven, and none depicts a scruffy circa 1969 version of the band.
Well Played: A Journal on Video Games, Value and Meaning, Vol. 2, No. 1
This is Volume 2, Number 1 (2012) of Well Played, a reviewed journal of in-depth close readings of video games published by ETC Press.
- The authors argue that Chopper versus Chopper's competitive balance comes from ludic dissimilarity: the two players receive very different perspectives and resources rather than equivalent ones.
- Skyrim's opening tutorial takes about ten minutes for an experienced Elder Scrolls player, with more time for newcomers, and the player never loses control to a cut-scene or dialog tree after the initial dragon attack.
- In Skyrim, skills improve through use, so a smith becomes better by practicing smithing rather than by killing monsters.
Cultural Test for British Video Games: Consultation
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) published a consultation paper in October 2012 on a proposed cultural test to identify culturally British video games eligible for a new corporation tax relief from April 2013, subject to European Commission State Aid approval.
- The proposed test awards a maximum of 30 points, and a game qualifies with 16 or more points. Cultural content can yield 16 of those points on its own.
- Section A requires a minimum of 6 points from the cultural content criteria. The paper proposes this minimum as a requirement.
- Cultural practitioners are scored on UK or EEA nationals or residents across key roles (including manager, lead programmer, lead artist, scriptwriter and lead designer) and crew, each worth one point.
Well Played: A Special Issue on the Theme of Romance in Games
This special issue of Well Played (volume 1, number 4, 2012, published by ETC Press) edited by Jane Pinckard collects essays on romance in games.
- In McDonald's survey of 525 participants, 82.3% of respondents said they sometimes, often or always play a character of a different gender in single-player RPGs.
- The author reports that 72.8% of respondents romance a different gender NPC than they would in real life, indicating that most players experiment with NPC romance options.
- 65% of survey respondents rated NPC romance as either a somewhat important or very important component of their RPG experience.
The Quadrilingual Vocabulary of French Rap
Skye Paine, of the State University of New York at Brockport, analyzes the vocabulary of French rap in a 2012 Kinephanos article.
- Non-standard vocabulary makes up only a small share of the lyrics, about 4% of all words in the corpus.
- Standard French negation with 'ne' appears in 33% of negations across the corpus.
- The author classifies 77% of American slang in the corpus as ornamental, meaning used for effect without a poetic, emotional or communicative function.
Le plurilinguisme dans les cultures populaires: L'étude du langage mixte du rap montréalais
Authors Bronwen Low and Mela Sarkar of McGill University examine multilingualism in popular culture through the case of multilingual hip-hop in Montréal, published in Kinephanos.
- The authors' corpus covers about forty songs released between 1999 and 2009, supplemented by interviews with rappers and young informants.
- The authors argue that multilingual rap in Montréal is a locally specific style that draws on the city's multiethnic resources.
- The authors propose the term "Québéquicité", which they describe as a theoretical tool for understanding how multilingual rap challenges linguistic power structures in Québec.
Entendre une langue, en lire une autre au cinéma
Michel Chion, of Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3, examines the conventions governing dubbing and subtitling of multilingual films, published in the Kinephanos journal (Vol. 3, No. 1, July 2012).
- Chion argues that subtitling a film's several languages in one uniform way makes the audience stop noticing which language is spoken, even in films presented as realistic.
- Chion states that until around the 1950s, American films dubbed into French used inserts of letters and telegrams filmed in several languages, so the viewer read the same language they heard.
- Chion reports that in Hitchcock's Suspicion, the German-dubbed version shows a telegram written in German.
Neither Playing nor Gaming: Pottering in Games
Lundgren and Björk, of Chalmers University of Technology and Göteborg University, examine pottering, a placid but focused activity of arranging, rearranging and taking care of things, as it occurs in five games: Zoo Tycoon, The Sims 3, Minecraft, Europa Universalis 3 and FarmVille.
- The authors identified six gameplay design patterns central to supporting pottering across the five games studied.
- Pottering is characterised as lacking a focus on winning or completing the game, distinguishing it from playing most games.
- The five games were analysed with between 25 and over 200 hours of gameplay time per game by the researchers.
Homo Ludicus: The Ubiquity of Play and Its Roles in Present Society
Peppino Ortoleva of the Università di Torino examines the spread of play across contemporary society in a peer-reviewed 2012 journal issue, drawing on examples from casual games, social networking, theme parks, surfing, gambling, cult cinema, funerals and military technology.
- Angry Birds, created by a small Finnish company, was downloaded over 500 million times worldwide in a little over five years.
- The video game industry is described as the fastest growing sector within the cultural industry, growing 9% every year, with 2011 revenues of $56 million that are exceeded only by the film industry.
- In Italy in 2011, total gambling expenditure was over €85 billion, of which over €15 billion, a little under 20%, went to online gambling, according to a Libera study cited by the author.
Well Played: A Journal on Video Games, Value and Meaning, Vol. 1 No. 3
This is Volume 1, Number 3 (2012) of Well Played, a reviewed journal from ETC Press at Carnegie Mellon University, containing close readings of video games and essays on their value and meaning.
- Egenfeldt-Nielsen reports that playtesting Europa Universalis II took well over 3 weeks of full playing time, and the author had still not mastered it.
- Eytan notes that Tim Schafer's Double Fine Kickstarter raised almost three and a half million dollars against a stated need of 300,000 dollars for the game.
- Ecenbarger states that World of Warcraft is recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most popular Massive Online Multiplayer game and holds the record for most subscribers of any online game.
Forecasting the Experience of Future Entertainment Technology: Interactive Storytelling and Media Enjoyment
The article by Christoph Klimmt, Christian Roth, Ivar Vermeulen, Peter Vorderer and Franziska Susanne Roth, published in Games and Culture in 2012, is a prospective study of Interactive Storytelling (IS), an envisioned future entertainment technology that integrates advanced visualization, natural speech processing and…
- The authors' theoretical analysis proposed five experiential dimensions for IS: curiosity, suspense, aesthetic pleasantness, self-enhancement and flow.
- Experts did not mention self-enhancement, which had been theorized beforehand; they instead raised effectance, the salience of users' own impact on the story.
- Most experts found it very difficult to connect their view to a specified psychological construal of what users will experience in an IS medium.
My Friend Scarlet: Interactive Tragedy in The Path
Malcolm Ryan and Brigid Costello, of the University of New South Wales, present a close reading of The Path, an independent digital game by Tale of Tales (Michaël Samyn and Aureia Harvey), published in Games and Culture in 2012.
- The authors argue that The Path subverts the antagonistic ludic contract by moving the player from a relationship of antagonism toward one of exploration.
- The authors argue that the player's responsibility for the tragic outcome is what makes the game's tragedy effective, since the player chooses to allow the Wolf encounter.
- The game's results screen declares the obedient ending a failure and the disobedient ending a success, which the authors cite as prompting players to question what success and failure mean.
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