digital narrative: play!
DESCRIPTION
Slides used to introduce some major concepts by play theorists John Huizinga and Roger Callois in Week 1 of LHUM P410: Digital Narrative Theory and Practice, a course in the Visual Culture and Interactive Media Studies Minor and Video Game Scoring Minor at Berklee College of Music.TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Lori LandayAssociate Professor, Cultural StudiesBerklee College of Music
LHUM P433Digital Narrative Theory & PracticeSPRING 2011
Homo Ludens, John Huizinga, 1938
PLAY is:
Free (voluntary)Separate from ordinary lifeUnproductiveFollows established rules, has limits of time & spaceOutcome is uncertain
Roger Callois’ Classification of Games Transformed into an Interactive 3d Model in a Virtual World
Kind of Play/Categories of Games + Player Agency
In this course, we consider video games from different perspectives, as:
PlayProductionTechnologyRepresentation
“We have to start making the real world more like a game.”
-- From Jane McGonigal’s TED talk
“The opposite of play isn’t work; it’s depression.”
-- From Stuart Brown’s TED talk
From "Tools for Creating Dramatic Game Dynamics" by Marc LeBlanc
CONSIDER HARDWARE & SOFTWARE
INTERFACE, DISSEMINATION, & PLATFORM MATTER
CONSTRAINTS & LIMITATIONS SHAPE WHAT IS POSSIBLE INA GAME, FORCE CREATIVITY
How do video games contribute to the human desire/need tocreate texts to make meaning about the world around them?
What stories, images, situations, experiences, emotions, andsubjectivities are constructed through games? How?
What is the process of encoding & decoding meaning?
What dominant, negotiated, and oppositional strategies of reading or viewing or playing are possible?
How is meaning created through sound, images, movement?