Browsing by Subject "Video games"

Gacha game is a new type of video game that gained popularity in the 2010s and the 20s. In popular gacha games such as Genshin Impact, Fate/Grand Order, and Blue Archive, like a video game version of lottery, players pay virtual or real currencies to obtain random valuable items or playable characters. In Embodied Fate, the author conducts a symptomatic reading of the gacha game: to analyze the desire structure of gacha gaming from the perspectives of media studies, ludology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. Numerous theoretical frameworks and critical categories are used for the analysis, including database consumption, character merchandising, psychoanalysis, avatar theory and action theory of ludology, neoliberalism, and precarity. By contextualizing gacha games in the anime media mix, it is shown that the production and consumption of virtual characters are the foundation of gacha games’ desire structure. Also, the author purposes that over-possession, the sophisticated dynamics between the player and the character, boost the desire for repetitive gacha gaming. Last, the author puts gacha games in the wider context of late capitalism and shows that neoliberalism creates gacha games and gacha players develop parasociality with characters to resist the insecurity of their precarious lived experience.

Virtuality—specifically the influence of the immaterial digital world—has been identified as an accomplice of twenty-first century media driven crises. From arguments that video games cause mass shootings to the emergence of “alt-facts” in the 2016 Presidential election, our encounters with digital media have prompted questions about what is real and, more importantly, how do we know it. Split Reality explores an extended history of virtuality to argue that these challenges are new versions of old anxieties. I approach the virtual as a realm of immaterial experience different from but deeply connected to the material world. While immaterial contexts inform our experiences of the world, they have often been considered sources of illusory, counterfeit, or otherwise lesser information. This perceived illegitimacy motivates the eradication of immaterial contexts from daily experience through assertions that the material world is the only source of viable information. These attempts do not account for the importance of representation, the imagination, or the virtual to the construction of meaning and, therefore, of reality. The second half of Split Reality focuses how twentieth century shifts towards embracing virtual worlds allowed thinkers to imagine alternative realities as critical tools to change how audiences understood and acted in the material world. These writers were able to imagine media forms that maximized the potential of virtual worlds as critical tools will minimizing their tendency toward delusion by accepting, rather than ignoring, the influence of the immaterial world as a legitimate source of reality. This acceptance is sorely needed to cope with digital culture, as I demonstrate in the emergence of “alt-facts” in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election as an example of what can happen when we are inattentive to the existence and influence of the virtual worlds around us.

The technology necessary for hands-free video gaming is available, especially for head-gesture-centric controls. However, remapping controls to head gestures ranges from frustratingly tedious to impossible. I propose a common language of gestures and game actions that categorizes the controls by their use frequency. My suggested categories are primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary. The most preferred gestures and more frequently used controls are classified as primary while the least preferred gestures and least frequently used controls classified as quaternary. I also propose constructing an interface software and API to gather data from game designers, hardware designers, and users to suggest optimized game controls for users requiring accessibility. I created a demo for one branch of this for my technical project -- a game to help players determine which gestures they can perform the most accurately so that these gestures may be paired with controls most vital to successful gameplay.