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Articles 1 - 13 of 13
Full-Text Articles in Art and Design
The Robot On The Hill, James Ryan
The Robot On The Hill, James Ryan
College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations
“The Robot on the Hill” is a rogue-like autobattler that procedurally models the state of the individual in the information age. The game abruptly transitions between diverse framings - a hill, a bedroom, a pond, a chessboard, the void - in order to highlight the disjointedness that is present in the informationalizing of self and reality. It dialogues with Byung Chul Han and Heidegger to portray what Han describes as a ‘narrative crisis’ in modernity and the devaluation of experience. When the value of experience diminishes and disintegrates, “all that is left is bare life, a kind of survival.” …
Machines Of The Absurd: Leveraging Generative Ai For Creativity, Humor, And Playfulness, Tyler Sanders
Machines Of The Absurd: Leveraging Generative Ai For Creativity, Humor, And Playfulness, Tyler Sanders
College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations
Machines of The Absurd is a collection of four projects exploring how generative AI can be leveraged for creativity, humor and playfulness.
1. neverOS — A node-based visual playground for interacting with large language models.
2. Other Calc — An iOS app with a calculator interface, where players can “calculate” text instead of numbers.
3. What Must Burn — An experiment where players type in text that can be dragged into a campfire to produce contextually appropriate sound effects.
4. Jazz vs Waffles — A turn-based comedy game, where players battle anything they type in.
Together, these projects make the …
Spirits Of The King, Ali Al-Ani
Spirits Of The King, Ali Al-Ani
College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations
Spirits of the King (SotK) is a 1v1 card game where players use essential resources to conjure spirits from a shared pool to defeat their opponent. Players must make strategic sacrifices to keep themselves from danger or to threaten their opponent, ultimately revealing how much they are willing to risk for victory. The themes, mechanics, and material design of SotK are very heavily inspired by information found in Aleister Crowley’s The Lesser Key of Solomon.
Athalea: Fear And Hate, Santiago Posada-Jaramillo
Athalea: Fear And Hate, Santiago Posada-Jaramillo
College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations
Athalea: Fear and Hate is a single-player 2D role-playing video game (RPG) for PC using pixel art and a minimalistic aesthetic. Through conversations, environmental storytelling, and the main character’s own thoughts, the game explores, through a critical lens, fascist rhetoric and the way that fascists use power in order to help the player to be better equipped to properly understand how fascism operates. Different from traditional portrayals in media that tend to use an easily identifiable set of symbols and historical references, Athalea: Fear and Hate exposes fascism in a different context with the goal of making the core of …
An “Other” Experience Of Videogames: Analyzing The Connections Between Videogames And The Lived Experience Of Chronic Pain, Gracie Straznickas
An “Other” Experience Of Videogames: Analyzing The Connections Between Videogames And The Lived Experience Of Chronic Pain, Gracie Straznickas
College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations
In this dissertation I argue for the connections between the lived experience of chronic pain and videogames, exploring what interacts with and influences them. To answer this, I draw on cripistemology as I engage in autoethnography, close-reading and close-gameplay, restorying, mixed methods design, formal interviews, surveys, and inductive coding. I further argue for pushing back against the unhelpful binaries that define the “human” and a false idea of “universal” experience or ability, instead pointing to the intersectionality that better reflects the biopolitics of disability, including both debility and capacity. I engage with these methods in three specific projects that consider …
Raid Elite, Wenda Li
Raid Elite, Wenda Li
College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations
This game inspiration are the real-time strategy game and raid in MMORPG. In this game, you need to get familiar with and operate five different characters. There are two bosses you can choose to fight. This game use Unity 2020.3.18f2c2 as game engine. All art is hand drawn. The design goal is making a game with certain depth which requires some effort to win. The design challenge for myself is design some interesting boss fights and accomplish a complete game which has good visual feedback.
The Machine Upstairs, Jacob Friedfeld
The Machine Upstairs, Jacob Friedfeld
College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations
Immersive simulation design, broadly speaking, is a game design philosophy centered around player expression, emergent gameplay, and dynamic narrative. Contrary to what the phrase may imply simply by reading it, immersion in and of itself is not necessarily enough for a game to be classified as an “immersive sim” (or IMSIM for short). Many different types of games can utilize immersion to great effect, but immersive simulations require a level of flexibility and rule/system-based approaches beyond the scope of games that occupy similar genres.
The Machine Upstairs represents an exploration of the immersive simulation philosophy and an investigation into its …
Lucid, Gabriela Garcia
Lucid, Gabriela Garcia
College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations
The PC video game, Lucid, promotes self-reflection and emotional exploration by balancing interactive dream journals with a meditative platform puzzle. Players switch between reflecting on their dreams through dream journals and following the main character’s story as they realize they are in a dream. To finish the platforming portion, the player travels up and around the mountain by completing short puzzles. This is done to deliver the last living flower from the garden to the castle at the top of the mountain.
By building personal dream journals into the game, Lucid highlights how games can be used as tools for …
Playfair Axiom, Alexander Bakos
Playfair Axiom, Alexander Bakos
College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations
This game seeks to bridge nuanced gameplay with more expansive themes of existentialism, life, and death. I attempt to bridge these concepts together through the mechanics and visuals, both of which play an integral role to one another. Through consistently evolving imagery that increases in complexity from a gameplay perspective I seek to elicit a reflective and emotional response from the player. My attempts with the project are to allow players to draw their own conclusions on what the greater meaning of the game is as well as what each individual component in the game could represent. Oftentimes, the subtleties …
Meowster Thesis, Xiaojing (Monica) Fan
Meowster Thesis, Xiaojing (Monica) Fan
College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations
Meowster Thesis is a game about cats, loneliness and what it means to be alive. It is also what keeps me alive thru isolation during Covid-19 pandemic.
For|Rest, Jes Klass
For|Rest, Jes Klass
College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations
In for/rest, players navigate a world built around an interpretation of the liminal space of grief. Glitching, blinking roots are all around an otherwise grey, empty space and as players destroy these roots they gradually resaturate the landscape. Each time a root is destroyed, the player will watch it disintegrate in front of them while some form of animal or plant spawns in the root’s stead. On rare occasions, instead of a plant or animal, a human will phase into the world as a root disintegrates. This human, Charlie, roams around the forest and offers the player a chance to …
Abandoned Spaces, Anthony Tate
Abandoned Spaces, Anthony Tate
College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations
The goal of this project is to show how color can display an emotional connection to the environment. How colors can be portrayed to human emotions without telling the audience. As well as having the audience imagining what kind of economy that used to be in the environment. The objective is to create a game that will tell a story from the environment and how colors are used to help tell a story of the environment. This thesis project is a game that attempts to show how colors can be related to emotions.
Designing An Interactive Theatre Game With Dynamic Asynchronous Play, Ardian Amiti
Designing An Interactive Theatre Game With Dynamic Asynchronous Play, Ardian Amiti
College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations
This project proposes the use of asynchronous narrative mechanics and dynamic elements of gameplay to further the player’s sense of interaction with characters and the environment of the game, inspired by interactive theatre performances such as Sleep No More. The player plants seeds in a garden which is maintained by several Non-Playable Characters, influencing both the environment and the narrative. Scenes occur according to the state of the garden, but do not wait for the player to be present. Plants grow and wilt as time passes. Sometimes the player cedes control as the characters tend to or cut down plants, …