Players Unleashed! : Modding The Sims and the Culture of Gaming

Sihvonen, Tanja

doi:10.5117/9789089642011

Cited by 51 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…More recently, Aardse [59] examined the ways in which young gaming fans exchange information across networks and various transmedia outlets in alternate reality games (ARGs), and Sihvonen [60] investigated how players of The Sims index, categorise and organise digital files related to the game. Black [61], Soto [62] and Henderson [63] investigated the effect fanfiction has on the literacy (traditional and digital) of young people.…”

Section: Fan Studies Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

‘Being in a knowledge space’: Information behaviour of cult media fan communities

Price

Robinson

2016

Journal of Information Science

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This article describes the first two parts of a three-stage study investigating the information behaviour of fans and fan communities, focusing on fans of cult media. A literature analysis shows that information practices are an inherent and major part of fan activities, and that fans are practitioners of new forms of information consumption and production, showing sophisticated activities of information organisation and dissemination. A subsequent Delphi study, taking the novel form of a 'serious leisure' Delphi, in which the participants are not experts in the usual sense, identifies three aspects of fan information behaviour of particular interest beyond the fan context: information gatekeeping; classifying and tagging; and entrepreneurship and economic activity.

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Section: Fan Studies Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

‘Being in a knowledge space’: Information behaviour of cult media fan communities

Price

Robinson

2016

Journal of Information Science

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“…Other researchers have studied modders and modding and have likewise demonstrated how the activity serves multiple ends: individuals can envision it as a creative practice or space, as a more-to-less serious hobby or leisure activity, and sometimes as a training ground for those with aspirations to work in the professional game industry [31,34,35]. But while all scholars have found that modders see what they do as work or labor to varying extents, they -and their respondents -dispute the charge that monetary compensation should always follow from their activities.…”

Section: Moddingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Laboring Artists: Art Streaming on the Videogame Platform Twitch

Phelps

Consalvo

2020

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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The relationship between labor and play is complex and multifaceted, particularly so as it relates to the playing of games. With the rise of the online streaming of games and play these platforms and activities have expanded the associated practices in ways that are highly nuanced and dictated in part by the platform itself. This paper explores the question as to whether the types of labor practices found in games hold across other non-game activities as they engage with streaming through an observational study of art streamers on Twitch. By examining art streamers and comparing their labor to that of games and game streaming, we find that not only are they similar in practice, but that that the structure of Twitch and platforms such as YouTube push this conformity. Thus, play and labor are not opposed and are in fact intermingled in these activities, in ways that are becoming highly platformized.

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“…However, first and foremost game modding is a practice employed by gamers: mods -i.e. modifications of games-are digital artefacts that avid gamers design by tinkering with their favourite games [22].…”

Section: Framework: Design Thinking With Game Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children challenging the design of half-baked games: Expressing values through the process of game modding

Kynigos

Yiannoutsou

2018

International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction

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In this paper we look at the potential educational value of placing children in a dual role of identifying and changing rules and values embedded in digital games by hacking them. Children's participation in the design of learning technologies is a difficult challenge to address, due to limitations in children's domain-knowledge around which these technologies are developed. Their role in the design process is thus usually limited to that of a user or tester. In this paper we discuss the role of children as "hackers" of what we call 'half-baked' games. By hacking a pedagogically engineered half-baked game in order to improve or change it, children are expected to challenge the values, the mechanics and the rules of a fully functioning, but faulty, or inappropriate game originally designed to provoke students to modify it. This discussion uses an example of children modding such a game provocatively called 'PerfectVille', which was specially designed to raise problems around the issue of urban sustainability. The game itself was designed with the use of a GIS rule-based authoring tool for game design called 'sus-x'. The children grappled with both value-laden issues and concepts embedded in the tool they used. The issue of taking children's values into account but also of helping them to build understandings of wider contested societal values can be addressed by studying the process by which children design and change games affording such experiences. It also illuminated their own perspective and values, which they embedded in the games.

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Players Unleashed! : Modding The Sims and the Culture of Gaming

Cited by 51 publications

References 11 publications

‘Being in a knowledge space’: Information behaviour of cult media fan communities

‘Being in a knowledge space’: Information behaviour of cult media fan communities

Laboring Artists: Art Streaming on the Videogame Platform Twitch

Children challenging the design of half-baked games: Expressing values through the process of game modding

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