Mateusz Felczak

This study investigates the work of content creators in relation to developers and fans, focusing on digital platforms in a case study of the video game Path of Exile which functions in the game as a service (GaaS) model. The analysis was based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a diverse group of aspiring content creators and on the assessment of data extracted from distribution, streaming, and social digital platforms. The institutionalized labor of content creators, which is subjugated to the live service model curated by the developers, could be characterized by the notions of transactional play, aspirational boredom, and gaming the markets. These three elements stand for the commodification of play time, substituting actual play with broadcasted footage, and actively shaping the in-game economy, respectively. The study acknowledges the rising importance of content creators as contributors to the financial well-being of a game employing the GaaS model, while raising awareness of the cultural, economic, ethical and health issues associated with it.

The study is an analysis of data gathering and data processing practices pertaining major PC digital distribution and streaming platforms, that is Valve’s Steam and Amazon’s Twitch.tv. Selected case studies from diff erent than Western perspectives on gaming culture and the use of technology were introduced to assess the globalized state of the industry. The study consists of three parts: first, it deals with the notion of digital spatiality. Second, it scrutinizes the persuasiveness of the multi-layer visual interfaces. Third, it moves into spaces beyond gameplay and addresses the double nature of modern dataveillance techniques which mediate between the visible and non-visible elements of the analyzed gaming service platforms. The methodological scaff olding of the work is based on digital surveillance studies and software studies approaches rooted in the visual aspect of the GUIs (graphical user interfaces).

The Object and the Code: Analyzing Video Games through Software Studies and Speculative Realism

The article deals with the analysis of the ludic and mechanical aspects of the video games using Levi Bryant’s notion of onticology. It expands the Bryant’s idea that the being is composed entirely of machines or processes, and treats a video game as a collective of objects that communicate with each other through various codes. The main focus of this approach is to analyze the instances in which the said objects present a certain type of self-alienation, independency and agency that allow for a continuous reconfiguration of the states in which a video game object can be found. The various scripts and their role in altering the communication patterns within the game mechanics are investigated in the context of bots, regarded as both automatic prothesis of the human agents and autonomous interpreters of the games’ implicit rules. Cases of speedruns, glitches and particular uses of the basic C++ language syntax are also considered as the examples of events in which the hidden properties of the objects form a collective process of a video game. On such grounds, this paper discusses the possible removal of distinct ontological domains of subject and object in the context of object-oriented philosophy, taking into account the fluid hierarchy of beings and their mutual inaccessibility.
 

Agency and Indentity in the Exploration Games

The article focuses on the connection between player’s agency and his identity in the exploration computer games. The aim of the article is to trace down the influence of various tools and interaction mechanics on ways in which players mark their presence in the game and convey their identities. The analysed titles include pure exploration games, like Proteus (Ed Key, David Kanaga, 2013) and MirrorMoon EP (Santa Ragione, 2013), as well as some titles which employ only selected mechanics of exploration games, such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda, 2011). Three main points of interest are examined in the article: 1) interfaces and mechanics in relation to player’s agency 2) tools that enable players to build their own narratives and shape the avatars 3) agency in the context of game goals and tasks assigned to a player by the game itself. The theoretical context of the article is linked to the Giorgio Agamben’s theory of dispositif.

 

System, Technology and Vernacular Innovations. Piotr Sitarski, Maria B. Garda, Krzysztof Jajko, Nowe media w PRL, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, Łódź 2020, ss. 250.

This review concerns New Media Behind the Iron Curtain: Cultural History of Video, Microcomputers and Satellite Television in Communist Poland (original title: New Media in Polish People’s Republic), a book co-authored by Piotr Sitarski, Maria B. Garda, and Krzysztof Jajko. The publication offers a unique insight into vernacular usages of new technology (videocassette recorders, microcomputers and satellite TV) during the last decades of the Communist rule in Poland. Making the diffusion of innovations theory its basic approach to the subject, the book grounds its claims using rich data including interviews, photographs and documents from the analyzed era. New Media presents a comprehensive, case study-focused approach to the analysis of political, economic and social contexts concerning the dissemination, appropriation and application of technological innovations by individual users.