In terms of both production and consumption, video games and gaming are a significant phenomenon in Russia, a fact acknowledged by the authorities and mainstream media. Although internet use in Russia has been a point of academic interest over the past few years, scholars have been slower to research video games despite their increasingly popular position in the media ecology of the region. Similarly, despite the abundance of theory and data on gaming in North America and Europe, game studies researchers have hardly skimmed the surface of the cultures, preferences and activities of gamers further afield. This dissertation investigates the online gaming sphere in Russia, presenting an empirical study of the industry, providing insight into gamers themselves, and analysing the media and political discourses surrounding gaming in Russia. In this study, I draw upon survey data, forum, website, and blog posts, user comments from gaming forums and analyses of local games to construct a picture of gaming activity and identity amongst gamers. In particular, I show how Russian-speaking gamers present themselves as members of a distinct subcultural group. Online gamers who participated in this study are shown to consume and discuss games in ways that can differ from elsewhere in the world, but they still retain common beliefs about the importance of expertise, taste and self-discipline within the gaming community. They display a great deal of knowledge about the games and communities available to them locally, while also consuming foreign games in selective and critical ways. For the reader conversant with game studies work, the dissertation constitutes a challenge to West-centric theories of gaming and gamers and demonstrates the importance of cultural context in shaping gaming practice. Throughout the dissertation, interactions between global and local, media and subcultural definitions of ‘gamer’ are crucial to understanding how gaming plays out in a Russian context. The self-definition of gamers differs greatly from mainstream media concepts of gamers. I contextualise discourses of the gaming self within an analysis of how the Russian media presents gamers as young people in need of moral and emotional guidance. Moreover, I show how contemporary media assessments of games and gamers have much in common with earlier moral panics about Western-inflected media and subcultures, such as rock music and style. Ultimately the gaming landscape in Russia is shown to be full of tensions, and the task of this dissertation is to identify, assess and compare these disparate discourses.

This study explores gender modeling specifically in avatar creation tools through the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV. The design of systems is often limited by the experiences of those who build them. In the video game industry; this means that systems are often designed by white, cisgender, heterosexual men. This demographic does not represent the wealth of people who play games and are subjected to these systems. The needs of marginalized communities, especially queer communities, in terms of affordances and representation tend to be overlooked or forgotten. This issue is apparent in avatar creation tools which define the types of bodies and identities that are allowable in the world of the game. Using Brenda Laurel’s research driven design tactics, modifications to Final Fantasy XIV’s current system were realized through a paper prototype and constant input from a group of self-identifying queer players. Both the feedback from these queer players and the modifications made to the prototype were condensed into a series of suggestions for the creators of these tools. Ultimately, I discovered that there are three key features which vastly improve the affordances of character creators for queer players; the inclusion of pronoun identification, the identification of gender identity, and the separation of both of these options from the character’s physical appearance. Designers who implement these findings in their work will contribute to creating environments that support queer identities.

This philosophical dissertation concerns the nature of play, a nebulous concept that is nonetheless vitally important to understanding the human being. Play is older than the spoken word and represents a mode of being in the world for many animals, including us. Many thinkers have attempted to unravel the mysteries of play but it has long resisted attempts to fully capture it. I begin Part One by defining play – a trickier proposition that one might expect – and examining the biological origin of the instinct for play in boredom and fun. Part One is a genetic account of play. Part Two contains a memetic account of play – these five chapters look at personal, human play in particular. They cover five philosophical topics: how the play concept has been used in the history of philosophy, the phenomenological experience of play, the relations between play and reason, the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of play, and the relation between play and the production of culture. By examining the discourse surrounding the concept of play in these spheres of human activity, this treatise provides a thorough philosophical understanding of play as a foundation upon which future studies of the play concept can build.

Identification record PELANT, Josef. Griefing in Online Games. Prague, 2017. 86 p. Thesis (Mgr.). Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts, Institute of Information Studies and Librarianship, 2001. Thesis lead Vít Šisler. Abstract The goal of this thesis is to find out the frequency of griefing (harassment or intentional provocation of other players) among the players of the most popular genres of online games, and to determine the typical characteristics of griefers, based on following factors: age, gender, preferency of the game genres, and motivational factors of competition, socialization, and teamplay. The goal has been achieved through questionaire survey with the use of quantitative method. Among the most important findings belong that men are substantially more frequently griefers compared to women, griefers are more focused on competition than other respondents, approximately half of the surveyed players have commited griefing, and almost every player has been a victim of a griefer. It has also been found that griefers are more likely to identify themselves as victims of griefing, compared to the rest of players. Keywords griefing, griefer, game studies, online games, second life, world of warcraft

Videogames are becoming an important means of expression for marginalized communities. Despite the growing body of research in queer game studies, transgender identity remains under-researched and lacking in empirical data. By using an experimental approach coupled with grounded theory and informed by current game and queer theory, this study aims to illuminate how transgender- identifying persons approach autobiographical videogame depiction of transgender experience. Ten participants were asked to play influential independent videogame Dys4ia, which depicts the author's hormonal replacement therapy, and semi-structured interviews were conducted. Their responses were coded, and a preliminary model of how Dys4ia works in the context of transgender media ecology was constructed. The term Procedural-autobiographic multimodality is introduced to describe an assemblage of interactive affordances, distinctive aesthetics and situatedness of Dys4ia in structures of minority media while considering video game-specific theories. This study attempts to empirically ground transgender queer game studies, suggesting avenues for future research and proposing a model of how videogames as procedural artefacts work alongside vlogs and other expressive means within transgender mediascape.

This paper will create, define & develop the concept of retroactive characterisation as a narrative device for games. In doing so, it will investigate a method of conveying character and narrative to a player after a given event has already taken place, hence, retroactively. The paper will present data collected through surveys and interviews held in conjunction with test sessions. The paper presents and discusses this data through compiled diagrams and interview transcripts, in order to fulfill its purpose of determining the validity of retroactive characterisation as a narrative device in games.

This study focuses on video game developers and their working environments in a growth industry. While some research documents the culture of video games and the people who play them, much less is understood about the labor environment for those who make games. I conducted 20 personal interviews with game developers in order to learn more about what inspired them to select this field, how they gained entry to it, and what their work is like today. Using insights from the interviews, I analyze how workers contend with its male-dominated culture and how creative skilled laborers deal with the challenges of corporate control and precarious work in the new economy.

Nonbinary game characters are often designed based on harmful stereotypes such asfollowing a strict androgynous aesthetic or as not being human. This thesis studies both howthese stereotypes are perceived by the represented gaming audience, and also if analternative method can be successful in nonbinary character design. Two sets of fournonbinary characters were created in which two characters were based on existingstereotypes, and two were inspired by nonbinary celebrities and members of a nonbinaryforum. The artefacts were included in a survey in which the participants chose the most andleast successful design, motivated their answers, and also discussed trends and stereotypesthey had noticed in nonbinary characters. Based on the performed research and the surveyresults, the suggested solution is to create more nonbinary characters, especially visiblyhuman ones.

<p>What is game studies? What separates that inter/disciplinary space from a larger notion of games research—and who decides? In recent years, scientometric research within game studies has increased as scholars have attempted to more concretely define a field which has been volatile since its formal origins in the early 2000s. But a recent controversy between scientometrics and gender studies (Lykke, 2018) has revealed a potential shortfall with relying on metric studies alone. Metrics can reveal which theories, themes, and scholars have been most privileged within a discipline, but only within predetermined boundaries, a limitation in a multi-disciplinary field which begs the question of who gets to determine those boundaries. Games research draws from many fields, from media studies to literature to computer science and psychology, but unless that work makes it into game studies journals, it will never be included within a metric analysis of game studies. In many fields, these boundaries may arise organically to create disciplinary lines. In game studies, however, anecdotal evidence indicates such boundaries have historically excluded work grounded in feminist, queer, and critical race theories. This project therefore employs a mixed methods approach to metrics research that allows for a broader view of not just game studies, but games research. This mixed methods approach, which I call <i>rhetorical metrics</i>, utilizes contextualized metric data to create a rhetorical approach to the scientometric measurement of a field, thereby providing empirical data underscoring anecdotal knowledge of exclusions in game studies. </p><p>In this project, I build on previous metric analyses of game studies by thickening data with additional perspectives. This data includes gender identity information, keyword clusters on themes beyond traditional game studies, such as information on race or queerness in games, and data on scholars who publish inside and outside of game studies journals. By revealing where different types of scholarship on games appear, and where certain knowledges are privileged (or not), this form of expanded, intersectional metric analysis allows for a more inclusive view of games studies than current studies provide, and results in a flexible research methodology that can be similarly applied to other inter- and multidisciplinary fields. </p>

Video game adaptations of the classical world are becoming increasingly intricate, and the study of video games as artifacts of classical reception and adaptation is likewise becoming increasingly important for the field of historiography. Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, set during the Peloponnesian War, recreates, among other aspects of the Greek world of the period, the political setting of Periklean Athens. This thesis examines instances of Athenian political representation within the game which depart from the typical image of Athens' politics as informed by primary source accounts, knowledge of sociocultural practices, and archaeological finds. It argues that the game depicts the Athenian democracy as a republic with a strong aristocratic element rather than as a direct, participatory democracy. The paper recalls the tradition of reception and adaptation of democracy in political thought and examines some of the resulting attitudes towards democracy. It suggests that the game's depiction of democracy as an oligarchic republic is a result of the developers' passive adoption and repetition of popular theories regarding the form and function of democracy, past and present. Players' likelihood of adopting and perpetuating a misshapen image of democracy is briefly discussed. The conclusion considers the potential for video games to influence players' perceptions of political systems and participation in them and, in light of that capacity, advocates for closer scrutiny of adaptations of the classical world which engage in political representation. It also ponders the possibility of novel interpretations of democracy as the next step in the tradition of democracy's reception and adaptation.