Game Studies

CDiGRA Conference 2023

On the 25th of November 2023, the Chinese Digital Games Research Association
(CDiGRA) conference took place in at the Nanjing Forestry University.

Featuring stellar papers and keynotes with participants from games academia,
journalism, and industry in attendance, CDiGRA 2023 was an enormous success in
bringing together passionate Chinese game researchers to form a solid network
of scholarship and interest.

A full breakdown of the event can be found here.

And discussion of the event in Chinese is accessible here.

Special thanks to the conference organising committee: Yigang Liu, Hugh Davies, Gejun Huang, to the presenters, the Chinese DiGRA board, and the College of Art and Design, Nanjing Forestry University for making this event happen.

Current Perspectives in Game Studies seminar

Public Seminar: Current Perspectives in Game Studies 16 December 2016, 10:00am – 4.30pm CMC Screening Room 1 (6/F)

Over the past few decades, computer game studies has emerged from the niches of academia into the mainstream of the study of media and culture and today its scope encompasses a number of interdisciplinary perspectives. This seminar brings to together a snapshot of six contemporary viewpoints in game studies, ranging from game hermeneutics to game ontology, and from game cultures to games and cognition.

Keynote Speaker:

“Is Game Studies a good Idea? —Don’t try this at home!”
Espen Aarseth
Head of Research Center for Computer Game Studies, IT University of Copenhagen

Espen Aarseth is the Head of Research at the Center for Computer Games where he has worked on the aesthetics of computer games since its founding in 2003. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Game Studies, the oldest peer reviewed journal in the field of game studies. His current research concerns ideological, narrative, semiotic and ontological aspects of games and game communication, as well as topics such as game addiction, games and meaning, and also digital literature culture and aesthetics. Aarseth is the Principal Researcher of the ERC Advanced project Making Sense of Games.

Speakers:

”Spatial Politics of Digital Game Distribution”
Peichi Chung
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Peichi Chung is an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include game industry studies, cultural policy and popular cinema in East and Southeast Asia. She has published journal articles and book chapters that compare game industry dynamics in Asia. Her current project looks into the mapping of digital distribution network for independent game developres in East Asia.

“Emotion, Medium-Specificity, and Videogame Evaluation”
Jonathan Frome
Lignan University

Jonathan Frome is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Lingnan University. He has published in journals such as Projections: A Journal for Movies and Mind, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Film Studies: An International Review, as well as in several anthologies. His research interests include video game studies, film theory, aesthetics, and emotion.

“ICE+DOG=HUSKY: On Knowledge and Discovery in Computer Games”
Olli Tapio Leino
City University of Hong Kong

Olli Tapio Leino is Assistant Professor at City University of Hong Kong. His publications, in e.g. Game Studies, Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds and the Springer anthology Philosophy of Computer Games address topics pertaining to interpretation, emotion, freedom, and existence in computer games.

“Can the Videogame Simulate Power?”
Bjarke Liborioussen
University of Nottingham, Ningbo

Bjarke Liboriussen is an assistant professor in digital and creative media at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. His research focuses on two main areas: games and the creative industries, and is published in journals such as Convergence, Games & Culture and Game Studies. Theoretical fuel is often drawn from the philosophy of technology.

”Current perspectives in Game Studies”
Paul Martin
University of Nottingham, Ningbo

Paul Martin is an assistant professor in digital media and communications in the School of International Communications, UNNC. His current research areas are digital game studies and technology in the classroom. His work in the area of game studies focuses on textual analysis, expression in games, and the phenomenology of digital game play. He is also conducting research on Japanese digital games as expressions of contemporary Japanese culture.

Seminar Programme:

10:00 Opening words by Prof. Richard W. Allen, Dean of School of Creative Media
10:15 Keynote address by Espen Aarseth
11:15 Peichi Chung
12:00 Jonathan Frome
12:45 Lunch
14:00 Olli Tapio Leino
14:45 Coffee break
15:00 Bjarke Liboriussen
15:45 Paul Martin
16:30 End

[Chinese DiGRA 2015] Felania Liu on the Trends and Tendencies of Researches on Games and Gamification Practices in Mainland China from 1980-2014

Felania Liu, Tsinghua University

Game Studies, as a booming research area of interest, attracted a growing number of scholarly attentions for the past 20 years. However, researches and practices of video game and game related issues in China, especially in mainland China, seems to stay out of the trends and sights of the international academia as well as the flourishing industry. This is, nonetheless, an illusion, as this paper will manifest. A synopsis to show the trends and tendencies of researches on games and Gamification practices for the past 40 years, this study is based on papers, articles and memoirs of people with first-hand experience of videogames and videogame industry in China, with the purpose to seek answers to questions like “Is Game a bliss or a blight to the society?”, “what’s the relationship between the government, the industry , the player and the games in China?”, and “Is there anything distinctly ‘Chinese’ regarding videogames studies and practices in China?”.

Author Info

Felania Liu is a game researcher and gamification practitioner. She is now in the History Department of Tsinghua University, with her research interest focuses on the nature of games and social impact of games, especially the interaction between reality and virtual worlds. She published extensively, wrote a book on Gamification and is one of the founders of the Gamification community in mainland China. She is also the vice president of Chinese DiGRA and actively promotes game researches in China.
Email:liumf14@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn

[Chinese DiGRA 2014] Damien Charrieras on The relevance of a cultural study of the technology of game engines in video game studies

[This abstract is from the Chinese Game Studies Conference at Ningbo Nottingham University, Spring 2014.]

On the relevance of a cultural study of the technology of game engines in video game studies (…+the case of Japan)

Damien Charrieras, City University of Hong Kong

This research addresses the impact of technological mediations on the contemporary creative practices of production in video games and new media arts. More specifically, our research focuses on game engines, a creative toolkit that offers a set of functionalities to handle graphics, sound, artificial intelligence processes during the production of video games. Current researches on video game engines consist on the one hand of case studies of game engines used by non-market game developers to modify the mechanics of existing commercial video games – “modding” (Nieborg & Van der Graaf, 2008). On the other hand, some researchers are studying the internal design of game engines as a software (Anderson, Engel, Comninos, & McLoughlin, 2008; Evans, Hagiu, & Schmalensee, 2008).

The originality of our approach, anchored in the cultural studies of science and technologies and the materialist analysis of new technologies (Cubitt, 1998; Fuller, 2005; MacKenzie, 2006; Munster, 2006), is to address the question of the specificity of video games as a medium through the study of their technological conditions of possibility (game engines) rather than through the study of video game as an end product. Studying video games as finished products amounts to focus on the specific form of interactive narratives found in video games (Ryan, 2006) or on the ludic qualities of video games (Aarseth, 2001). The definition of the video game as a medium is not solely determined by video game publishers or the video game designers, but also by the specificities of the technologies used to produce them. As a digital and algorithmic object, video games are not only objects and representations but constitute more fundamentally a set of processes. The video game engines are the key technology handling the processes occurring inside video games and key to understand the specific techno cultural form of video games without resorting to ill fitted analogies with other forms of existing media.

Situated the crossing of interface criticism (Andersen, Pold, 2011), media ecology (Barker, 2012; Fuller, 2005) and critical theory of media (Galloway, Thacker, & Wark, 2013; Galloway, 2012), our research search to describe and assess the set of assumptions embedded in video game engines in relation to the notions of creation, art, professionalization, produsers, interactivity and generative art. Considered as more than a tool, we link the set of possibilities embedded in video game engines to certain discursive formations, situated practices and logic of experimentation in new media art (Barker, 2013).

After a general presentation of our ongoing project and a statement about the relevance of taking into account the medium of game engines in video game studies, this presentation focuses more specifically on a comparison of different conceptions of game engines in video game production practices, especially the peculiar use of in-house game engines in Japanese video games industries in relation with the practice of video game engines licensing and the circulation of game engines across diverse cultural contexts.

[Chinese DiGRA 2014] Felania Liu on The transmission history of DND to reflect on “Chinese” games

[This abstract is from the Chinese Game Studies Conference at Ningbo Nottingham University, Spring 2014.]

Does the Failure of DND Games and Success of Its Derivative Xianxia Games in China substantiate a “Chinese” Game Taste?－－ A Reflection of whether there are distinctly “Chinese” games

龙与地下城游戏的失败与仙侠类游戏的成功是否说明存在一种“中国”游戏品味？－－从DND在中国的传播反思“’中国游戏‘是否存在”

Felania Liu, Tsinghua University(清华大学刘梦霏 )

A representation of western gaming culture that has an influence on China even today, and representative in its failure that can help to understand the game industry of China, the transmission, localization and failure of DND and Fantasy Culture in China is an ideal object for observation for the quest of whether there are distinctly “Chinese” games. Through a historical analysis with the help of communication theories, this paper attempted to reveal the real cause for the failure: that because DND and Fantasy Culture approached and accepted by the Chinese people as majorly a form of Literature instead of as a Game, the whole idea of game in Chinese Industry is twisted, and this caused the “Triple Three Mode” of production, which eventually led to the absence of the unique “Chinese” games.

[Chinese DiGRA 2014] Yowei Kang on Hybrid interactive rhetorical engagements in MMORPGs

[This abstract is from the Chinese Game Studies Conference at Ningbo Nottingham University, Spring 2014.]

Applying Hybrid Interactive Rhetorical Engagements in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) to Analyze Multi-Modal Persuasive Interactions: Theoretical and Methodological Implications

Yowei Kang, Kainan University

Kenneth C. C. YANG, The University of Texas at El Paso

The emergence of MMORPGs as a popular game platform has attracted a lot of attention among scholars. However, digital game research has often been criticized for its theoretical and methodological limitations. In this paper, we employed a newly-developed concept, Hybrid Interactive Rhetorical Engagements (H.I.R.E), to analyze a gaming session from The World of Warcraft. H.I.R.E. is a rhetorical concept to examine online persuasive interactions during gameplay as a rhetorical phenomenon. we argued that there are both theoretical and methodological benefits to conceptualize gamers’ gameplay experiences as a rhetorical phenomenon. H.I.R.E. offers a comprehensive analytical tool to examine the important aspect of MMORPGs; that is, gamers’ gameplay experience as a process of rhetorical manipulations and persuasive interactions by all game participants. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.

[Chinese DiGRA 2014] Yong Ming Kow on Grassroots cultures and participatory practices

[This abstract is from the Chinese Game Studies Conference at Ningbo Nottingham University, Spring 2014.]

Grassroots Cultures and Participatory Practices

Yong Ming Kow, City University of Hong Kong

Participatory practices are forms of “grassroots cultural production” (Jenkins, 2006). In this dissertation research work, we investigated the relationship between grassroots cultures and participatory practices (Kow & Nardi, 2009; Kow & Nardi, 2011; Kow & Nardi, 2014; Kow & Nardi, 2012). We define grassroots culture as the ways members of a social group cooperate and self-organized for mutual benefits outside governmental or corporate institutions. Local grassroots cultures may differ due to varying economic and social conditions.

We examine participatory communities of the online video game World of Warcraft, which is available in nine different languages including English and Chinese. We conducted twenty-five in-person interviews in California and China. We participated in Chinese and U.S. online forums and chatrooms between April 2008 and January 2011. All in-person and phone interviews were transcribed. All forum and chatroom interviews were electronically logged.

We found that the modders in the American and Chinese modding communities had similar goals, but cooperated differently. For example, the U.S. modding community gave each participant the same right to post and write messages in the forums and chatrooms. The Chinese modding community controlled participants’ ability to write and post in the forums and chatrooms. While U.S. modders benefitted economically when advertising companies bought out sites or employed sites’ administrators; Chinese modders had not seen such support from Chinese advertising companies. Thus, the Chinese modders thus had fewer incentives to participate in an open environment.

In the global environment, participatory communities vary due to varying local histories and environment. We urge researchers to pay attention to grassroots cultures as gaming research scales to global level.

References

Jenkins, H. (2006). Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Media Consumers in the Digital Age. NYU Press.

Kow, Y. M., & Nardi, B. (2009). Culture and Creativity: World of Warcraft Modding in China and the U.S. In W. S. Bainbridge, Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual. London: Springer-Verlag.

Kow, Y. M., & Nardi, B. (2011). Forget Online Communities? Revisit Cooperative Work! ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Hangzhou, China: ACM Press.

Kow, Y. M., & Nardi, B. (2012). Mediating Contradictions of Digital Media. UC Irvine Law Review, 2 .

Kow, Y. M., & Nardi, B. (2014). Rethinking Participatory Culture: Lessons from Core Teams in China. In D. Wong, & W. Kelly, Videogames and Virtual Realities in East Asia. London, UK: Routledge.

[Chinese DiGRA 2014] Sebastian Möring on Global metaphors in games

[This abstract is from the Chinese Game Studies Conference at Ningbo Nottingham University, Spring 2014.]

Global metaphors in games?

Sebastian Möring, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong

This paper explores what global metaphors can mean for the study of computer games. It will tackle the question from two angles. The first angle is concerned with the question of which metaphors in games can be considered as global in that they can be projected on or found in many games. The second angle takes an intercultural approach and asks if the metaphors found in games would also count for different cultures like the Chinese culture, which would make them global metaphors.

The first part of the paper starts with the observation that the study of metaphor and/in games is a very recent perspective in game studies and systematic studies of the topic are rare. Commonly, authors omit to explain how metaphors in games work and why the notion of metaphor is applied in the first place. This paper therefore introduces the metaphor-simulation dilemma/paradox (Möring 2013; 2012) derived from an investigation of the Western metaphor discourse of game studies. It then offers to discuss a central and therefore presumably global metaphor associated with computer games – the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor. This paper makes the argument that this central metaphor can be projected on games due to the spatiality which many games provide, since many of them (first-person shooters, platformers, games in virtual environments etc.) simulate the space we live in in our non-computer game lives. This coincides with one central assumption of cognitive linguistic metaphor theory, founded by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (2003), that our metaphorical system is grounded in our bodily existence in space (Lakoff and Johnson 1999).

From there this paper develops the second angle from where it questions if these observations count for a Western perspective only. It will contrast the Western perspective with Chinese metaphor research. To do so it demonstrates that the game The Marriage (Humble 2006) simulates a metaphorically structured model of love in that it exemplifies many common conceptual metaphors which are commonly used in Western thought to speak about love. It will then compare these findings with common Chinese metaphors used to conceptualize love (see Yu 1998; Liu 2002; Wu 2007). Despite many similarities in Western and Chinese metaphorical systems one can see differences. This paper discusses two of them. Firstly, it discusses the fact that different cultures can have the same conceptual metaphors but parts of them can be interpreted differently in different cultures. As such Chinese and Western thought share the LIFE IS A JOURNEY METAPHOR, yet, interpretations of the journey element differ. In Western thought the journey is thought of as linear whereas in Chinese (and also Vedantic and Buddhist philosophy (see Mukherjee 2009)) the journey element is interpreted as circular (Wu 2007, 57–58). From a Chinese perspective the reincarnation implied in many computer games would never have posed a philosophical problem. Games would have rather confirmed Chinese thought. Secondly, some metaphor researchers say that the LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphor is present in Chinese as in Western (Leung 2008). However, it would be more likely in Chinese that somebody speaks using the LOVE IS A BOAT metaphor which inherits the structure of the LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphor but is subordinated to it (Wu 2007, 34–35). This is contrary to Western thought (Lakoff 2001 in Wu 2007, 34). Nevertheless, even if the LOVE IS A BOAT metaphor is more prevalent in Chinese this would still allow Chinese to consider The Marriage as a simulation of love since the LOVE IS A BOAT metaphor contains many structures of other spatial love metaphors.

References

Humble, Rod. 2006. The Marriage. http://www.rodvik.com/rodgames/marriage.html.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.

———. 2003. Metaphors We Live By. With an afterword from 2003. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press.

Leung, Winifred Yuk Ying. 2008. “A Contrastive Study of Chinese and English Metaphors of Marriage.” LCOM Papers 1: 21–35.

Liu, Dilin. 2002. Metaphor, Culture, and Worldview: The Case of American English and the Chinese Language. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Möring, Sebastian. 2012. “Tackling the Metaphor-Simulation Dilemma.” In Proceedings of DiGRA Nordic 2012 Conference: Local and Global – Games in Culture and Society. Tampere, Finland. http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/12168.04280.pdf.

———. 2013. “The Metaphor-Simulation Paradox in the Study of Computer Games:” International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations 5 (4): 48–74. doi:10.4018/ijgcms.2013100103.

Mukherjee, Souvik. 2009. “‘Remembering How You Died’: Memory, Death and Temporality in Videogames.” In Proceedings of DiGRA 2009. http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/09287.24412.pdf.

Wu, Shixiong, George. 2007. “A Corpus-Based Synchronic Comparison and Diachronic Interpretation of Lexicalized Emotion Metaphors in English and Chinese.” http://commons.ln.edu.hk/eng_etd/3/.

Yu, Ning. 1998. The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: A Perspective from Chinese. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub.

[Chinese DiGRA 2014] Hanna Wirman on Chinese gaming

[This abstract is from the Chinese Game Studies Conference at Ningbo Nottingham University, Spring 2014.]

Radical gameplay, non-radical innovation?

Hanna Wirman, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

The ways in which Chinese gaming is portrayed in English language media conveys a lot of controversy and extremes. Game player community and gamer representations in such reporting varies from addicted players and their treatment centers to highly professional player teams and, further, goldfarmers whose play takes the shape of merchenary grinding. The design and development sector, meanwhile, is characterised in terms of mischievous imitation and copycatting and simultaneously plagued by piracy and limitations such as console bans. However, recently media attention has focused on the fast growing market, investment opportunities and local developers in China.

This paper takes an approach of Foucauldian discourse analysis to examine the major Western frameworks around Chinese play and contextualises them within the theoretical viewpoints of orientalism and (non-)radical innovation. As an ever-growing field of study, Chinese gamers and game developers have created a game entirely of their own. It may be a modification of what’s been produced elsewhere – proposing a literal ‘sameness’ (Vukovich 2012) – but how problematic is it really?

References

Leifer, R., McDermott, C.M., O’Connor, G.C., Peters, L.S., Rice, M., and Veryzer, R.W. 2000. Radical Innovation: How Mature Companies Can Outsmart Upstarts. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Said, E.W. 1962. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.

Vukovich, D. 2012. China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC. Abingdon: Routledge.

Chinese DiGRA launched 电子研究协会中国分会成立

The Digital Game Research Association now has a Chinese branch. In April the inaugural event of Chinese DiGRA took place at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. This event – the ‘(Chinese) Game Studies Conference’ – attracted scholars with an interest in developing game research on Chinese games and gaming cultures from all over the Chinese-speaking world as well as from Europe and North America. The conference began with a PhD consortium led by Espen Aarseth, involving candidates working in Europe, Hong Kong and mainland China. The two day conference took in papers running the gamut of Chinese game studies, including work on the history of digital games in China, Chinese gaming cultures, and discourses around Chinese games.

The conference’s two keynotes set the tone for the development of Chinese game studies. Espen Aarseth (ITU Copenhagen) reflected on the establishment and development of game studies as an academic field, and Gino Yu (Hong Kong Polytechnic University) gave a fascinating review of the development of digital games in China.
The event marked the launch of Chinese DiGRA, an effort on the one hand to develop DiGRA as a truly international organisation and on the other to give game scholars working in and on China a research network, to support teaching and PhD development in the region, and to disseminate and promote Chinese game scholarship around the world.
We would welcome anyone who is interested to subscribe to the Chinese DiGRA mailing list, which you can do here. Our website is currently a bit bare but we are working on it and it will soon have information on getting involved in Chinese DiGRA, upcoming events, projects and other news. In the meantime please feel free to contact me with any inquiries or comments on the initiative.

电子游戏研究协会现在有中国分会了！Chinese Digra成立于2014年4月在宁波诺丁汉大学举行的“中国游戏研究会议”上(http://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/events/2014/(chinese)-game-studies-conference-call-for-participation.aspx)。这次国际会议吸引了有志于在中国和中华文化区推广游戏研究和游戏文化研究的研究者。与会的研究者们包括港澳台和大陆学者、以及欧洲和美洲的研究者。此次会议首日为博士生论坛，由游戏研究的领军学者Espen Arseth进行指导，参会的博士生则来自欧洲、香港和中国大陆。“中国游戏研究会议”为期两天。会议主题涵盖了中国电子游戏的历史、中国游戏文化，以及围绕着中国游戏的一系列问题。

本次会议的两个主题演讲为中国游戏研究的发展奠定了极好的基调。来自哥本哈根信息技术大学的Espen Arseth教授回溯并反思了游戏研究作为一个学术领域的建立历程，香港理工大学的Gino Yu教授则讲述了中国的电子游戏发展历程。

这次会议中，秉持着使电子游戏研究协会向更国际化的方向发展的目的，为专注于中国的游戏研究者们提供更好的学术交流网络，为了向本区域的教学与博士培养提供支持，以及为了更好地向世界传播中国游戏研究界的声音，Chinese DiGRA(中国电子游戏研究协会)得以成立。

我们欢迎社会各界人士订阅Chinese DiGRA的邮件列表，请点这里。我们的网站目前内容还不丰富，但我们会逐步完善，补充Chinese DiGRA接下来的活动、项目和其他信息。有任何问题，欢迎留言。