The player's power to change the game : ludic mutation / Anne-Marie Schleiner.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schleiner, Anne-Marie, 1970- author.

Series:

MediaMatters

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Video games--Social aspects.

Video games.

Physical Description:

160 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, [2017]

Summary:

In recent decades, a closer relation has arisen between games and activism, between games and war, between games and the city - what can be called as a gamification of certain regions of the world. What is the power of the game over life? Often the game imposes a kind of subjectification. The game's rules demand reflexive acts from the player. The player engages with the game's pre-programmed interactions, losing minutes and hours to the fascination of overcoming the challenge. And yet players also design and play their own games, thereby seizing back some of that which was lost to the game's digital regime. My underlying concern in this book is this power grab from the game. I understand these acts as player-driven transformation of an existing game into another, as a transformative process I refer to as ludic mutation. The remaker of games sees the world not as a given, fixed place composed of static objects, but as play material, to be reconfigured. Over the course of this writing, I investigate these player-driven changes to the game at varied scales and points of intervention, across gaming culture, in unique online communities of players, among artists, activists, and situated within the city - both in the digital game city and the augmented, mixed reality city.

Contents:

Lightness of digital doll play

Game modding: cross-over mutation and unwelcome gifts

Activist game rhetoric: clockwork worlds, broken toys, and harrowing missions

City as military playground: contested urban terrain

Toys of Biopolis

A tactical sketchbook for ludic mutation.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 151-155) and index.

ISBN:

9089647724

9789089647726

OCLC:

959036082