No abstract

Die Game Studies haben in den letzten Jahren viel Aufmerksamkeit erfahren und werden betont multidisziplinär betrieben. Doch trotz eines »Iconic Turn« gibt es kaum Ansätze, die sich explizit mit der Bildlichkeit des Computerspiels auseinandersetzen. Ausgehend von den vielfältigen Darstellungsformen des Avatars - dem grafischen Stellvertreter des Spielers - erprobt Benjamin Beil einen neuen Zugang zum zeitgenössischen Computerspiel, der ludologische wie narrative Aspekte in einer bildwissenschaftlichen Perspektive vereint und den Avatar als »Schnittstelle« zwischen Raum, Interaktion, Interface und Perspektive vorstellt.

Computer games can be described as assemblages which, to use a term borrowed from Science and Technology Studies, provide different scripts, setting the scene for user practices. Scripts include the game world’s possibilities, restrictions, and the degree of freedom provided tothe player. Lately, a new genre of games challenges these specifics. Socalled editor games, like Minecraft or LittleBigPlanet, which entered the market with sweeping success, are not games in the traditional sense (in which players follow certain rules guided by narrative elements framing the gameplay). Instead, these sandbox games – often labeled as ‘digitalLEGO’ or ‘co-creative open worlds’ – afford constructing a game world rather than playing within one. Following a praxeological approach, this essay will try to make co-creative processes in editor games accessible as a research object, by performing a critical evaluation of established methods within Game Studies, complemented by an experimental focus group analysis.

No abstract

Abstract. As transmedia franchises increasingly populate our cultural environment, many questions arise about the effect of the different media involved in the depiction of storyworlds. Through the analysis of different examples, with special emphasis on the particular case of The Walking Dead, and drawing primarily from Henry Jenkins's concept of "transmedia aims to show how different media aesthetics contribute to the process of storytelling and enrich the experience of the consumer. Usually overlooked in other analyses, we argue that these formal and aesthetical characteristics, such as the interactive nature of video games, call for a broader approach that transcends the accustomed search of common narrative aspects. ThisThe Walking Dead: The Game (Telltale Games, 2012) and The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct (Terminal Reality, 2013). The transformations that the different media demand contribute not only to the narrative, but also provide different tools for the construction of storyworlds and different ways to engage with it.