Volume 9, Issue 2, 2022
Articles
- Cardboard Poachers: Fan Cultures and Paratext in Board Games
This essay analyzes instances of transmedia storytelling, participatory cultures, and convergence drawing on the Star Wars X-Wing: The Miniatures Game and the broader Star Wars transmedia landscape. Of particular interest to this investigation is the nature in which board games like Star Wars X-Wing promote notions of interactivity and play, more so than examples present in other media industries and even the video game industry. The essay proposes that by analyzing instances of transmedia storytelling, participatory cultures, and convergence, this emergent fan culture will reveal itself to be a considerably appropriate source of information for academics within the field of media to draw from when applying and exploring pre-established theoretical views.
- Immersion as a Method and a Mindset
This essay engages and seeks to articulate voluntary and emergent forms of immersion as a continuum in live-action role-playing games. A player can shift from one to the other, back-and-forth and always in hybridized ways, throughout the same instance of an immersive experience. The essay argues that even strong immersion does not involve losing contact with the reality outside the object of immersion and some amount of consent from the person experiencing immersion is always necessary. Moreover, the essay compares two seemingly distinct postures—the larper and the anthropologist—to argue that they frequently share a common interest in understanding diverse human experiences by resorting to immersion to achieve that goal, giving way to understanding immersion as a method.
- The Fellowship of the Ring and Feminist Kinship
The focus of this essay is to analyze Reiner Knizia’s Lord of the Rings, exploring the extent to which thematic and trans-textual content, as well as novel play (cooperation), can offer multiple ways of considering and challenging knowledge (re)production and representation specifically linked to patriarchal structures. Knizia’s Lord of the Rings has been cited as one of the first popular collaborative games (released 2000) designed for a mass international English-speaking audience. The analysis is autoethnographic and autotheoretical, following feminist modes of enquiry read from a situated perspective and imagination in order to bring method to thought processes, articulating experiences and insights in a manner which brings both the pleasures of play and academic thought together.
- Serious Analog Game Development Across Disciplines
In this essay, we share our effort to use serious analog game design as a means for breaking down academic silos, as a window through which these questions, and others like them, might be best approached. Much of the discussion and research in serious games and game-based learning have focused on proliferation and effectiveness of the format. This article focuses more on how serious analog game design promotes integrative learning through intentional faculty collaboration with one another. The initiative—the AICS project (Analysis and Investigations through Cyber-Scenarios)—was first developed and piloted at a regional university in 2012, building upon previous collaborative efforts between faculty of several colleges, and taking as its focus the development of real-time, immersive cyber-based or cyber-oriented simulations. AICS remains a genuinely rich case-study from which to draw best-practices not only for unique and timely content and curriculum design but also under what conditions (theoretically and practically) collaborative academic professional development can be encouraged and sustained.