No abstract

Fitness trackers promise a longer and better life for the people who engage with them. What is forgotten in their analysis for HCI, though, is how they re-conceptualise the very notion of what constitutes a 'step'. We discuss everyday edge cases illustrating how fitness trackers fail to address goals and ideals of people using them. They merely re-affirm the fitness of already fit people and can have an adversarial effect on others. For future designers, we offer strategies to become aware of their own biases and provide implications for designers potentially leading to more non-normative and diverse designs of trackers.

In games, loss is as ubiquitous as it is trivial. One reason for this has been found in the established convention of on-screen character death as a signifier for failure (Klastrup 2006;Grant 2011;Johnson 2011). If that's all that games have to offer in terms of addressing an existential trope of human experience, the worried protectionist concludes, shouldn't we dismiss this intrinsically flat medium as inferior to more established media forms such as film or literature? (Ebert 2010). Contrary to this view, this paper discusses gameplay examples that shed light on how this medium might leverage its expressive resources to arrive at rich representations of loss.First, the notion of loss implied in Sigmund Freud's work "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917) will be discussed in relation to losing in games. Looking at procedurality, fictional alignment and experiential metaphor as three expressive gameplay devices identified by Doris Rusch (2009) will help explain the expressive shortcoming of losing and lay out what is at stake with profound gameplay expression. Moreover, it will serve as the keywords structuring the following analysis of three videogames, Final Fantasy VII (1997), Ico (2001) and Passage (2007), and their design decisions fostering deep representations of loss. Keeping the Freudian notion of loss in mind, we can trace its repercussions on the three expressive dimensions respectively. Following a separate analysis of each gameplay example, the last section will discuss some commonalities and differences and arrive at the identification of desired object, permanent disruption and linearity as design aspects modeling loss in more compelling ways than losing.

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version usually differs somewhat from the publisher's final version, if the self-archived version is the accepted author manuscript.

Background. Building on previous studies on racism and whiteness in video games, this article investigates how deck building games provide platforms for identity tourism, the symbolic appropriation of marginalised experiences, through their coupling of mechanics and racial stereotypes. Aims. The aim is to contribute to our understanding how dominant ideologies are expressed through simulation and gaming in a deck building context and how games similar to ASCENSION: DAWN OF CHAMPIONS (henceforth A: DOC) perpetuate racism and coloniality through gameplay design. This is part of an ongoing game studies effort to critique white supremacist and imperial structures in games. Method. In this article, I conduct a first-person close reading of A: DOC as an emblematic case study for contemporary deck building design. Using critical whiteness theory, I pay special attention to the gameplay design of the four Champion characters Nairi, Kor, Sadranis, and Dhartha in order to demonstrate the interplay of ludic, racial, and social performative elements in the construction of playful identities. Analysis. The deck building principles of A: DOC provides a racial pedagogical arena which creates affective links between gameplay and white supremacist values. In coupling digital deck building mechanics with stereotypical fantasy characters, the game invites players to take the roles of fantasy tourists and thereby become implicit in white supremacist play. Even though the characters Nairi, Kor, Sadranis and Dhartha are leaders of different genders and races, their “diversity” is established via popular racial cybertypes like the white female diversity advocate, the technologically advanced white male emperor, the aggressive Black male, and the Asian male exotic Oriental.