CTS 172 Videogame Final, CTS 172 Video Games and Culture Mid-Term

How does Huizinga define the magic circle?

"As temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart" and "inside the circle of the game the laws and customs of ordinary life no longer count"

What is immediacy?

"It promises transparent, perceptual immediacy, experience without mediation...deny the mediating presence of the computer and its interface"

What is Superplay?

A generic term that describes a range of gaming practice that demonstrate mastery through play.

What is Remediation?

A medium represented within another medium. (A book made into a movie)

What is the ideology of ability?

A preference for able-bodiedness. It defines the baseline by which humanness is determined setting the measure of body and mind that gives or denies human status to individual persons.

How does James Newman define superplay?

A range of gaming practices that differ significantly in their execution and implementation but that are bound together by a common desire to demonstrate mastery of the game through performance

What is a Memento Mori and in what painting was it discussed in class?

A reminder of death. In Hans Holbein's "The Ambassadors"

What is the Tail-Spin Effect?

A surface illusion of system simplicity which belies more complex underworkings

What is Johann Huizinga's "magic circle?"

A temporary world within the ordinary world that serves as a grounds for play wherein special rules for play apply.

What does ASW mean?

Any Space Whatever

Why do Garda and Pawel believe that the term "indie game" is distinct from the term "independent game"?

Because the economic, social and technological circumstances of a given period co-determine the ways independent games are being created. "indie" games are defined by the period of the mid 2000s

Who is responsible for the theory of remediation?

Bolter and Gruisin

Define cheating, trifling, and spoilsporting

Cheaters: respect goals but not rules Triflers: respect rules but not goals Spoilsports: respect neither rules nor goals

Who discusses meta rules?

Chris Deleon

Name three mechanical exploits

Collision detection (wall jump in mario) Order of operations (vine wrap in mario) Memory manipulation (wrong warp in mario)

What is the conflict mineral that is in all of our phones, computers, etc.?

Coltan

What is the medical model of disability?

Disability as a property of the individual body that requires medical intervention

What is the byproduct of electronics manufacturing, the maintenance of the technology industry, and the discarding of technological devices referred to as?

E-Waste

What are the 3 forms of independence?

Financial independence, creative independence, publishing independence

What is the difference between game theory and game studies?

Game theory = analysis of strategies of competition between two rational decision makers and game studies = the study of games, the act of playing them, and the players and cultures surrounding them.

What are mechanics as Deleon defines them?

Games mechanics are the involuntary physical, mechanical, electrical, or algorithmic operations of technical equipment

What does superplay reveal about games?

How plastic and malleable they are.

What is Meta Rule 4:

If playing against other players, the other players should not be disturbed outside of the game, nor unfairly distracted within the game by meta commands that are not part of the core gameplay.

What three tenants constitute the theory of remediation?

Immediacy, Hypermediacy, Remediation

What is hypermediacy?

It emphasized process or performance rather than the finished art object

What is the prisoner's dilemma?

It is a standard example of a game analyzed in game theory that shows why two completely rational individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interests to do so.

Explain the Digital ASW

It is forged out of contact with a radically inhuman realm, the digital ASW lacks an originary contact with the space of human activity

What is remediation?

It is the representation of one medium in another remediation, and we will argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media

What is the social model of disability?

It opposed the medical model by defining disability relative to the social and built environment

What are the two main categories of mechanical utilizations for speedrunners?

Mechanical Optimizations and Mechanical Exploits

What is Meta Rule 5:

Mod community notwithstanding - and even then only when all players involved have identical installations of the modifications - the computer game should be played as released and/or patched by the developer, and save data files should be affected only through gameplay within the game.

What author discusses the three effects of expressive processing?

Noah Wardrip-Fruin

What do RTA and TAS mean in terms of speedrunning?

RTA = real time attack, a human player inputting and playing in real time TAS = tool assisted speedrun, a programmed set of inputs pre-progammed by a human and input by a computer

Who is the creator of magic the gathering and the author of the article "metagames"?

Richard Garfield

What art exhibit does Mark Hansen allude to in order to discuss the digital ASW

Robert Lazarini's Skulls

Name 2 mechanical optimizations

Routing (choosing fastest way) Movement (smooth, optimal movement) Menuing (learning, memorizing menus) Counting (keeping track of data) Animation canceling

How does Narcissa Wright breakdown speedrunning?

She states that a game is input, output, repeat. The goal of a speedrun is to lower the number of input/output cycles from agreed upon start to agreed upon finish as much as possible

What is the Etymology of meta?

Something reflects or represents the very characteristics it alludes to or depicts

Etymology of Meta

Something within something else. Something beyond itself i.e. meta-physics

What does Tobin Siebers say is at the core of disability theory?

That it requires making changes to the social and built environment

The price of coltan soared in the year 2000 because of

The Christmas time release of the PlayStation 2 console

What is the Eliza Effect?

The Eliza Effect-illusion that an interactive computer system is more intelligent or more complex than it actually is.

What is Immediacy?

The cultural logic in which we desire to erase media, or make media transparent

What is the Simcity Effect?

The development of system understanding through play

List the first 2 of Chris Deleon's meta rules

The game is to be interacted with only by standard controllers The physical integrity of the hardware is not to be violated

What is Meta Rule 1:

The game is to be interacted with only by standard input controllers

What game does author Manuel Delanda speak to in order to demonstrate his concept of emergence?

The game of life

What are Mechanics?

The involuntary processes of a game (physical, mechanical, electrical, or computational) that are not freely chosen by the player.

What are the three narratives woven throughout braid?

The ludic narrative, the courtly love narrative, and the atomic/military history narrative.

How does Nigel Howard define the metagame?

The metagame is "the game that would exist if one of the players chose his strategy after the others, in knowledge of their choices"

What is Meta Rule 2:

The physical integrity of the hardware is not to be violated

What is Anamorphosis?

The physical, sea sick reaction that one gets when something must be seen from a very specific singular position in order for it to resolve

What are the last 3 meta rules?

The player should be directly and independently responsible for actions made during the game. Players should not be disturbed outside of the game. The game should be played as released or patched by dev.

What is Meta Rule 3:

The player should be directly and independently responsible for the actions made during the game, not having some other person or a programmed bot perform gameplay actions on their behalf

What community was able to create an enormous text document in order to help a blind player play the legend of Zelda: ocarina of time?

The speedrunning community. This community knew all of the precise inputs necessary for getting through the game as quickly as possible and so could break it down input by input.

What is a Metagame?

The things that happen in, on, around, through, and between games.

What is Bernard Suits' definition of a game?

The voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles

Undersea cables and their locations are heavily protected because

They often converge upon one location or area, and so damage to said area could disconnect an entire country and/or continent.

In a game of Mortal Kombat, jumping back and forth across the screen without attempting to engage in combat with one's opponent is an example of

Trifling

Contrary to what the image of "the cloud" and the futuristic image of satellites would have us believe, the world's internet is actually conducted via...

Under water fiber optic cables

What is problematic about deciding video game rules?

Video games conflate the rules of the game with the mechanics of the equipment

What is Hypermediacy?

a "style of visual representation whose goal is to remind the viewer of the medium". Hypermediacy plays upon the desire for immediacy and transparent immediacy, making us hyper-conscious of our act of seeing (or gazing).

Explain the ASW

it demarcates a fundamental shift in the human experience of space, a shift from an extended, visually apprehensible space to a space that can be felt only by the body.