Réflexions sur les jeux avec sucre en poudre, poivre en grain… et un peu de vitriol.
Historians often conduct their work in two phases: studying the documents to retrace the facts, and then organizing these facts and events into a narrative. Since many of us have a direct, lived experience with video games, sometimes our lived experiences do not accord with the grand historical narrative. We
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This issue of Kinephanos seeks to address game promotion and representation at the point of sale and wider advertising contexts. Its papers discuss the intersection of promotion with many different perspectives, from audience expectations and game experience to the history of games, globalization and feminism, to film aesthetics, authenticity and gamification.
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Most other accounts declare the Super NES the undisputed victor of the “16-bit console wars” of 1989–1995. In this book, Dominic Arsenault reminds us that although the SNES was a strong platform filled with high-quality games, it was also the product of a short-sighted corporate vision focused on maintaining Nintendo’s
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This paper re-frames virtual interactive characters as “subjective interfaces” with the purpose of highlighting original affordances for interactive storytelling through conversation. This notion is theoretically unpacked in the perspectives of narratology, interaction design and game design. Existing and imagined scenarios are presented in which subjective interfaces are elevated as core
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This paper lays out a unified framework of the ergodic animage, the rule-based and interaction-driven part of visual representation in video games. It is the end product of a three-year research project conducted by the INTEGRAE team, and is divided into three parts. Part 1 contextualizes the research on graphics
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In this essay, we shall try to step back from a blinding cinema-centric approach in order to examine the impact such a framing has caused, to question its limitations, and to reflect on the interpretive communities that have relied on film (communities we are part of, due to our film
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This chapter chronicles the history of Canada’s video game industry, across its main regional clusters (Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto; Québec City, Ottawa-Gatineau, London and Edmonton). The dynamics of inter-provincial competition, fueled by tax credits and proximity to United States hubs, is discussed, as well as the growth and transformations throughout the
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“Back in the day”, as we might say, Espen Aarseth warned game studies researchers against “theoretical imperialism” (1997, p.16), that is, the blind copy-pasting of theories from another field onto games, as if they were a kind of literature, or a kind of cinema. To rework the old spatial metaphor
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