and worth a read in this context.... http://www.digra.org/dl/db/06276.21027.pdf here's an excerpt.....
"Computer-mediation, particularly as regards videogames, involves a paradox of self-reference. The combination of the apparatus itself and the player’s representative (sometimes called an ‘avatar’) seem thus to act as a kind of ‘virtual shifter’, enabling the various levels operative in a given videogame to constitute one another. A player works in a relation of primary digitalisation to their avatar, while still ascribing secondary boundaries to other objects within the game space. Wilden would describe the player’s situation as an open system in which feedback through the various levels of communication forms a message-in-circuit. From this perspective, player and apparatus are poles in a complex, ecosystemic relation. A number of highly important correlations can be drawn from Wilden’s treatment of the open system and the feedback relationship. Because feedback implies the memory of anterior states of the system and environment, a recognition of complex temporal movement is inherent to the model. However, this temporality need not be confined to the digital progression of purposeful action or the inexorable advance of a clock. More analogue flows of temporal experience are also possible in videogames (gamers often speak of losing track of time when playing particularly absorbing games), and the theory is competent to discuss these as well. Just as crucially, since the system is open, it is able to approach a given goal via various paths, adjust to noise or error in its efforts to attain the goal through feedback and even change goals completely or invent new ones. Thus the theory is thus constitutively competent to describe complex, multifinal, redundant and nonlinear objects such as videogames. The forms of oscillation (disavowal and negation) can be applied to the goals of a particular game, and the movement of the player’s avatar towards or around that goal analysed in terms of its analogue and digital functions.
It is also possible using a cybernetic approach to describe a game within the wider context of culture. Videogames, even when they insist on greater visual and auditory realism, are for the most part talking about becoming more cinematic (some games actually boast that they include lens flare among their ‘special effects’). Analogue or iconic communications drawn from cinematic codes such as genre can thus be reflected in a game as player goals that influence both the aesthetics of the game and the kinds of microgestures the player has at their disposal. ".. und .....
wotz sex happenings
lots of other stuff.. "In the past decade, beginning with Ultima Online, a new genre of interactive play has emerged in the form of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs).2 These games combine the power of traditional forms of roleplaying games with a rich, textured graphical framework. The result has been the emergence of game spaces which provide players with new and unusual opportunities for learning. As these games become
increasingly popular and as they begin to approximate large scale social systems in size and nature, they have also become spaces where play and learning have merged in fundamental ways, where players have become deeply enmeshed in the practices and cultures of interactive play, collaboration, and learning. More important is the idea that the kind of learning that happens in these spaces is fundamentally different from the learning experiences associated with standard pedagogical practice. In this paper, we examine how this new world of games has captured the imagination and how the play of
imagination that it engenders yield insights into the way play, innovation, and learning are connecting for the 21st century."