Book Review: How Pac-Man Eats

Kulttuurin leikillistyminen ja pelillistyminen

Cybertext Challenge

This article discusses the changing role of literature in the contemporary media landscape. Literary scholarship may well maintain its importance in the digitalizing world, but this requires it to engage in an open dialogue with cultural and media studies. It is important that more attention is paid to contemporary literature as well as to new media offering significant pedagogical possibilities, which should be better acknowledged. The article's main focus is on the emerging field of digital literature. Cybertextuality, especially, is fundamentally changing our notions of the integrity of a literary work, reading, writing and interpretation. I attempt to describe and put into context one …

Tempo lembrado, lido e experienciado no texto virtual

In this article I will scrutinize Screen (2002, by WARDRIP-FRUIN & al.), a literary work set and experienced in a CAVE Virtual Reality environment, especially from the perspective of its temporal aspects. There are obvious themes of remembering, forgetting and textually constructing the past in this work, but most notably, Screen emphasizes the temporality of the reading act itself. I will analyze this highly special work in relation to the remembered, read, and bodily experienced time, and thus, attempt to better understand both the notion of fictive time and the temporality of fiction. Neste artigo vou examinar Screen (2002, por Wardrip-Fruin & al.), uma obra literária experimenta…

Pelaajabarometri 2010

Development trends in the book trade

Introduction to Expanding Universes : Exploring Games and Transmedial Ways of World-building

Transmedia is a wide concept, as by definition, it is a network of various media forms. It includes also games, both digital and more traditional forms of games. Transmedia productions are often built around a certain television series, but in some cases a digital game has been the core production as well. Games, however, have not been looked at in detail in their role as a part of a transmedia whole. It is important to pay attention to the specificity of games as a media form, to their product-audience relation, and to the way how they incorporate playfulness into that relation. Even in cases where games are just a minor part of the production, the playfulness involved in transmedia user p…

Constructing a Transmedia Universe : The Case of Battlestar Galactica

In this article, we define a ‘transmedia universe’ as encompassing the complexity of transmedia storytelling, production and consumption. In doing so, we use the popular science fiction television series Battlestar Galactica as a case study, including both the original and reimagined versions of the series and their various intramedia and transmedia, narrative and non-narrative, and diegetic and non-diegetic expansions. Moreover, we look beyond the official productions of the Battlestar Galactica franchise and include, for example, user-generated content within its transmedia universe. peerReviewed

The Scent of a Book : The Book and the Environments of Reading

Lastenkirjallisuuden digitalisoituminen

Lapsille julkaistaan yhä enemmän digitaalista kirjallisuutta. Kirjasovellukset ja ”rikastetut kirjat” on kuitenkin suureksi osaksi sivuutettu kirjallisuudentutkimuksessa. Monia aikuisille suunnatun digitaalisen kirjallisuuden toiminnallisuuksia pidetään erityisinä ja vain digitaaliselle kirjallisuudella ominaisina piirteinä. Näitä ominaisuuksia on kuitenkin ollut jo pitkään käytössä painetussa lastenkirjallisuudessa (esimerkiksi pop-up-kirjat sekä äänillä laajennetut kuvakirjat). Viimeisen vuosikymmenen aikana lasten digitaalinen kirjallisuus on laajentanut kuva- ja koskettelukirjojen ilmaisumahdollisuuksia hyödyntämällä erityisesti tablettilaitteiden kosketusnäyttöä, audiovisuaalisia mahdo…

Lukutaidon uudet ulottuvuudet

Teens, Media and Collaborative Cultures : Exploiting Teens' Transmedia Skills in the Classroom

Narrative Definitions for Game Design

Enhancing the benefits of learning games by utilizing narratives or narrative elements is not a new idea. Many existing learning games utilize more or less story structures, virtual worlds, and various characters as a part of a story. Computer game genres, such as adventure games and role-playing games, have received a lot of attention in the field of serious games by researchers and game developers. Hence, the potential of narratives for learning support is already clearly recognized. However, narratives have not yet offered unambiguous solutions to the design of learning games. For example, more often than not the use of embedded stories does not lead to a desired outcome that is an enter…

Digital Humanities in the Cultural Environment

Electronic literature publishing practices - Distinct traditions and collaborating communities

Tero Pasanen (1978–2022)

Nuorten liikuntakäyttäytyminen Suomessa : LIITU-tutkimuksen tuloksia 2020

Lastenkirjallisuuden digitalisoituminen : leikillisyys ja pelillisyys lastenkirjasovelluksissa

There is an increasing amount of digital literature for children, which has mainly gone undetected by literary studies. It is worth noting how many functionalities in digital literature, considered as novelties not present in print literature, have actually been employed in children’s literature (pop-up books, books with audio-extensions etc.) for a long time. During the past decade, tablet devices, especially, have been employed as platforms for children’s digital literature, which takes advantage of their touch screens, audio-visual capabilities and computing power. These literary apps, as well as various augmented books, follow many of the traditional traits of children’s literature, but…

Reply to Billieux and Fournier (2022) : collaborative shortcut to ontological diversity

Pelit ja transmediaalisuus

Playing with Time in Digital Fiction

The exceptional quality of digital fictions lies in their inherently dynamic nature, how they may be flexibly programmed to generate new content and alter the already existing contents. This adds a new temporal level, compared to traditional fictions. Digital games, especially, incorporate aspects of simulation and narration in their structure. As interactive and dynamic media form, games are specifically temporal in nature. They offer us the flexibility and preciseness of digital simulations, with the potential of psychologically engaging narrative qualities, which together open up a whole new field of experimenting with temporally dynamic media. Much of the new media fictions partake in a…

Remembered, Read and Experienced Time in Virtual Text (= Tempo lembrado, lido e experienciado no texto virtual)

In this article I will scrutinize Screen (2002, by WARDRIP-FRUIN & al.), a literary work set and experienced in a CAVE Virtual Reality environment, especially from the perspective of its temporal aspects. There are obvious themes of remembering, forgetting and textually constructing the past in this work, but most notably, Screen emphasizes the temporality of the reading act itself. I will analyze this highly special work in relation to the remembered, read, and bodily experienced time, and thus, attempt to better understand both the notion of fictive time and the temporality of fiction. peerReviewed

Hybrid Social Play Final Report

On the Prevalence of Addicted or Problematic Gaming in Finland

Highlights • A dataset from Finland in 2015 (systematic random sampling N = 4511) suggests an (unweighted) prevalence rate of certain “addicted gaming” (videogame play) to be 0.6% among local gamers and 0.03% among the whole population. • The implied prevalence of certain “problematic gaming” (videogame play) climbs to 1.4% among local gamers and 0.6% among the whole population. • Of those “addicted” individuals to whom videogame play was a problem “almost always,” eight reported their hours of play during a week (72, 30, 10, 7, 4, 1, 1, 1), which indicate that “addicted gaming,” if understood as excessive play, might not be optimal for describing such problems.

Serbian students' attitudes towards mathematics and mathematical education : Tempus Attitude Survey (TAS) 2013-2014 report

CD-romista digikulttuuriin : elektroninen lastenkirjallisuus Suomessa

Story beats in videogames as value-driven choice-based unit operations

We present a framework of story beats, defined as microunits of dramatic action, as a tool for the ludonarrative analysis of videogames. First, we explain the Goal - Action - Reaction - Outcome model of the story beat. Then, we present six types of story beats, Action, Interaction, Inaction, Mental, Emotion, and Sensory, providing videogame examples for each category. In the second half of the paper, we contextualise this framework in the classic game studies theory of videogame narrative and player action: unit operations, gamic action, anatomy of choice, and game design patterns, wrapping it up in the most recent trends in cognitive narratology. Ultimately, we present the story beat as a …

A Mission Impossible? Learning the Logic of Space with Impossible Figures in Experience-Based Mathematics Education

Most visual effects based on mathematically and physically describable phenomena and formalizable processes. Creating visual illusions, paradox structures and ‘impossible’ figures through playful and artistic procedures, holds an exciting pedagogical opportunity for raising students’ interest towards mathematics and natural sciences and technical aspects of visual arts. The Experience Workshop Math-Art Movement has a number of pedagogical methods, which are connected to visual paradoxes and perspective illusions. In the first part of our article, we introduce classroom exercises connected to the Hungarian artist Tamás F. Farkas’s paradox structures and impossible figures. There are certain …

Review of a PhD Thesis: Mia Muurimäki: Nykytaiteen politiikka museokontekstissa [Contemporary art and politics in the museum context]

World as Numbers : Living in an Algorithmic Culture

There is a long tradition of trying to grasp the world around us in mathematical terms. From early man perceiving the motion of celestial bodies, to Pythagoras’ ‘celestial harmony’ and to Kepler’s and Newton’s laws of motion, calculations have provided ways to reduce the messy world of instances to a handful of mathematical formulae. Einstein’s Relativity Theory, and even more the quantum physics, complicated the situation, but still, even with random elements involved, the statistics could provide a model to understand the processes of the universe. When calculations grew ever more complex, and computers became necessary tools to deal with them, this lead to the idea of seeing the whole of…

Ontological diversity in gaming disorder measurement: a nationally representative registered report

Gaming-related health problems have been researched since the 1980s with numerous different ontologies as reference systems, from self-assessed ‘game addiction’ to ‘pathological gambling’ (in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM]-IV), ‘internet gaming disorder’ (in the third section of the DSM-5) and most recently ‘gaming disorder’ (in the International Classification of Diseases [ICD]-11). Our goal was to investigate how screening instruments that derive from different ontologies differ in identifying associated problem groups. By using four central screening instruments, each representing a different ontological basis, we hypothesized differences and similarities…

Games for enhancing basic reading and maths skills : A systematic review of educational game design in supporting learning by people with learning disabilities

A cultural approach to networked-based mobile education

Abstract This paper discusses cultural conditions for networked-based mobile education. In our paper, we demonstrate how an Integrated Meta-Model that we have been developing in our MOMENTS project, i.e. Models and Methods for Future Knowledge Construction: Interdisciplinary Implementations with Mobile Technologies, can be used as a heuristic tool for research and pedagogical practice with technology, drawing attention to such cultural and pedagogical aspects and relations which are easily left unnoticed. This Integrated Meta-Model consists of four levels: (i) cultural discourses and practices; (ii) pedagogical models and principles; (iii) action, and (iv) individual acts and activities. Th…

Experiential Education of Mathematics: Art and Games for Digital Natives

As attitude-researches point out, students tend to sustain an aversion to mathematics, while remaining largely ignorant of how deeply embedded it is in the world around them. Most students however are able to recognize patterns and numerous research and empirical evidence indicates that they become easily motivated when mathematical connections are presented in ways which relate to their experiences by triggering their natural curiosities. PISA and TIMSS results and recommendations are that students should find education enjoyable, develop self-belief and stamina to address challenging problems and situations. Experience-centered education of mathematics through arts and playful activities …

GAMEHIGHED Initial Report : Output 1: Initial Research & Analysis Report. Higher-ed Programmes for Careers in Game Design & Development (2019–2022)

Ihan kuin kirja, mutta parempi! : hybridikirjoja lapsille ja aikuisille

Esports Transmedia Universes

Reading Victory Garden : Competing Interpretations and Loose Ends

Immersive gaming as journalism

This chapter discusses immersion and how it may be applied to journalism. It begins by unraveling the concept of immersion itself as a reminder that it is not only connected to virtual reality or augmented reality technologies, but rather that it is a multifaceted concept that may be understood in many ways. The chapter turns specifically to the theorizing done in the context of digital games research, where immersion and some related concepts have been explored in detail over the last decades. This theorizing helps us see how immersion can be understood and in what way the concept may be problematic. The chapter maps out some of the historical precedents for immersion, discusses alternativ…

Phenomenological Strands for Gaming Disorder and Esports Play: A Qualitative Registered Report

The recent inclusion of gaming disorder in the ICD-11 as a mental disorder has further increased the importance of researching the health spectrum related to gaming. A critical area in this regard is the lack of clarity concerning the differences between gaming disorder and intensive play, the latter of which often involves several gaming hours per day without related health problems. In this study, we approached the above question by interpretive phenomenological analysis with interviews in two groups of highly involved videogame players: those who seek or have sought clinical help for their problems with gaming (n=6), and those who play esports more than 4 hours per day without self-repor…

Game of Thrones -pelin Let's Play -videot ja populaarikulttuurin vastaanotto esityksenä

Suositun Valtaistuinpeli (Game of Thrones) -tv-sarjan myötä George R. R. Martinin Tulen ja jään laulu -kirjasarjaan perustuvasta transmediauniversumista on tullut ilmiö, jolla on faneja huomattavasti laajemmin kuin vain fantasiaharrastajien piirissä. Tässä artikkelissa pyrin selvittämään tapoja, joilla ihmiset kokevat Valtaistuinpelin maailman, hahmot ja tapahtumat, ja sitä, miten he niitä tulkitsevat ja suhteuttavat omaan elämänkokemukseensa. Hypoteesina on, että Let’s Play -videot tarjoavat hedelmällisen aineiston pelien ja yleisemmin populaarikulttuurin synnyttämien kokemusten tarkasteluun.Tutkimusmenetelmänäni on Game of Thrones -videopelistä tehtyjen Let’s Play -videoiden analysointi e…

Introduction: Exploring Nordic Game Research

Nordic DiGRA 2012 Conference was held at the University of Tampere on June 6-8, 2012. In this Special Issue of the Transactions of DiGRA journal, we present a selection of the best papers of that conference.

Understanding Twitch Esports Communities through Livestream Chat Analysis