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Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts

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https://hdl.handle.net/1853/70681

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Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs

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Leadership and Multifaith Program

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Sam Nunn School of International Affairs

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School of Economics

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School of History and Sociology

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School of Literature, Media, and Communication

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Imagined Fortresses: Video Games as Language

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-05-03) Fiorilli, Patrick Oliver

This dissertation argues that video games, as virtual worlds, are composed and experienced as language, and that they function as textual and philosophical machines essential to understanding virtuality, language, and finitude in today’s world. To this end, I describe how language manifests variously as material for video game design and play. In one regard, I argue that worlds emerge from the prescription of certain linguistic limits: the nonsensical, the inexpressible, or the impossible. Far more than agency and immersion, delimitation within the constraints of a video game’s language world defines the act of play. “Can I jump up there? Can I pet this dog?” In these cases, either the language of the game world holds the answers to these questions, and it will reveal them in turn, or it takes the questions themselves to be meaningless. The ledge is too high. You see a dog, but you cannot pet her. Traversing these limits, players paradoxically attempt to use language to escape language. As part of my comparative method, I locate a literary precedent for this paradox in the fiction of Mallarmé, Borges, Lispector, and Calvino. Mirroring the theoretical preoccupations of their poststructuralist counterparts, these postmodern authors reveal the implication of language in compounding formal and material spheres. Thus, this dissertation concludes that video games are virtual worlds in language which reveal their own enclosure and explore the very nature of delimitation.
Situated at a Distance: A Framework for Teaching Reflexive Inquiry through Digital Games

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-12-13) Anupam, Aditya

As science and technology (technoscience) grow increasingly complicit in systemic injustice, there is an urgent need for practitioners to conduct scientific inquiry as a reflexive process. Reflexivity in technoscience entails critically examining how one’s position in material, political, and cultural structures of practice relates to their process of scientific inquiry. For example, it can involve examining how one’s position as a researcher at a large for-profit corporation affects their framing of research problems. Teaching scientific inquiry as a reflexive process is necessary as it enables one to understand how values and assumptions permeate inquiry, and how one’s positionality can embody or transform them. However, teaching it is also a paradoxical challenge: it requires students to be positioned in the structures of practice, while also at a distance from them. Being positioned in practice is necessary because the structures of practice differ significantly from those of education. Simultaneously, being at a distance is also necessary because those structures can bind one’s understanding of a problem according to shared cultural norms. This raises two research problems: How do we design educational environments that position students in practice, at a distance? How can these environments support inquiry as a reflexive process? This dissertation makes two primary contributions towards addressing these research problems. First, I draw upon feminist STS and pragmatist scholarship to propose a framework that brings one’s positionality in structures of distribution, power, and culture into relation with the process of inquiry. The framework explores positionality in four ways: as one’s means, status, culture, and experience and brings them into relation to three interdependent processes of inquiry: problematizing, hypothesizing-experimenting, and resolving. By providing a systematic means of examining positionality and inquiry, the framework lays the grounds to analyze and develop responses to each question. This, I hypothesize, allows it to function both as an analytical tool to examine educational environments as well as a design space for educational environments that aim to teach scientific inquiry. Second, I hypothesize that digital games can approach these research questions because they can simulate the structures of practice, one’s position in them, and the processes of inquiry as they relate to those positions, all at a distance from real practice. I investigate this potential of digital games by using the framework to conduct case studies and design-based inquiry into multiple digital games. This process demonstrated how the framework can be a source of design possibilities for approaching the two research questions. Simultaneously, it also surfaced key strengths and constraints of digital games as environments to support inquiry as a reflexive process. Particularly, I highlight how the procedural, evaluative, and artificial affordances of digital games can support but also constrain them from teaching scientific inquiry as a reflexive process (as stand-alone environments), and how such games can be complemented.
Design agency: Dissecting the layers of tabletop role-playing game campaign design

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2016-05-27) Gasque, Travis M.

In the field of digital media, the study of interactive narratives holds the aesthetics of agency and dramatic agency as core to digital design. These principles hold that users must reliably be able to navigate the interface and the narrative elements of the artifact in order to have a lasting appeal. However, due to recent academic and critical discussions several digital artifacts are being focused on as possible new ways of engaging users. These artifacts do not adhere to the design aesthetics foundational to digital media, but represent a movement away from the principle of dramatic agency in interactive narratives. In an attempt to understand this separation and offer a solution to this developing issue, another non-digital interactive medium was studied: tabletop role-playing games. The designers of this medium were studied to understand the techniques and methods they employed to create dramatic interactive narratives for their users. These case studies suggested the designers used a third design aesthetic, design agency, to help balance the tension between agency and dramatic agency of the users of their medium. This design aesthetic could provide a balancing force to the current issues arising within interactive narrative.
Storyscape, a new medium of media

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2016-03-31) Blumenthal, Henry (Hank)

A storyscape is the new medium of storytelling. It originates in the model of transmedia storytelling defined by Henry Jenkins (2006a) in Convergence Culture and applied to The Matrix franchise. The storyscape medium is conceptualized from the author/designer perspective as four gestalts that create a whole from stand-alone parts. The four gestalts are mythopoeia, character, canon, and genre. This approach frames the authoring of this story-centric model in opposition to the design approaches of world-building or storyworlds. The four gestalts also provide an academic approach that unites theory and practice with a unified design vocabulary and an orientation toward the creation of a cultural and creative product that is defined as the storyscape medium. Storyscapes, such as The Star Wars franchise or the Marvel Universe, consume the lion’s share of our cultural capital (Johnson 2014). Therefore, the development of a consistent vocabulary, a design approach, and an understanding of how they create meaning and define worldviews is critical to our understanding and practice of a new medium (Dena 2009). Starting with the frame of storytelling as a practice and previous aesthetic models such as The Poetics, this research charts the evolution of the storyscape medium across topics of academic transmedia approaches, principles, affordances, and the connecting or conceptualizing principles that act as gestalts.
A new dramaturgy for digital technology in narrative theater

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013-05-20) Rouse, Rebecca

Many contemporary theater practitioners and scholars agree that the investigation of the relationship between digital technologies and theater is an important yet relatively unexplored topic, both in theory and practice. A debate regarding the fundamental nature of performance and more specifically the quality of liveness in the face of media has been the dominant conversation on this topic. While the liveness debate is important, it is not the only angle from which to approach questions of specific types of technology and performance. This dissertation takes a different approach, while taking the liveness debate into account. This dissertation examines relevant historical and contemporary theory and practice in the area of digital technology in theater, and then describes a new method of practice and analysis in the form of a new dramaturgy. This new dramaturgy is then applied to examples of selected work and also used hands-on to create a two-part case study to try out its usefulness in practice. The first part of the case study is a production design created with the new dramaturgy in collaboration with undergraduate students within the context of a special topics course. The second part of the case study is a full-scale production by a professional director, incorporating elements of the production design created in the first part of the case study.
A third space: technological art as artistic production and technology research and development

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013-04-08) Fantauzza, Jill

While the visual arts and technology development map oppositionally in our culture, there are similarities in work. Visual artists and technology developers imagine, conceptualize, design, and build artifacts and then release them into the world. As part of this work, many artists and technologists develop high levels of conceptualization, technical, and fabrication skill. While artists have always worked with industrial technologies such as paint and pigment chemistry, metalworking equipment, heavy machinery, and kilns, for example, many postindustrial artists are using high technology both as medium and highly-charged cultural material. These artists work with similar materials as technology developers: electronics, computation, robotics, bioengineering materials, and smart materials, for example. Their work often bleeds into technological development as they create new technologies and new interactions with technologies in the course of their projects. This dissertation traces the evolution of the ideas of art and technology from foundations in ancient Greece through the present. There are tensions between technological art, or art that uses high technologies as a medium, and the contemporary art world, as well as between technological art and engineering practice. This dissertation locates technological art along a spectrum between traditional fine art and engineering practice, in a third space of both artistic production and technological R&D. Through examples from my work and the work of others, I surface the dynamics of practice in this third space and how these practices can lead to emergent art and technology.
Play beyond flow: a theory of avant-garde videogames

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010-11-11) Schrank, Brian

Videogame tinkerers, players, and activists of the 21st century are continuing, yet redefining, the avant-garde art and literary movements of the 20th century. Videogames are diverging as a social, cultural, and digital medium. They are used as political instruments, artistic experiments, social catalysts, and personal means of expression. A diverse field of games and technocultural play, such as alternate reality games, griefer attacks, arcade sculptures, and so on, can be compared and contrasted to the avant-garde, such as contemporary tactical media, net art, video art, Fluxus, the Situationists, the work of Pollock or Brecht, Dada, or the Russian Formalists. For example, historical avant-garde painters played with perspectival space (and its traditions), rather than only within those grid-like spaces. This is similar in some ways to how game artists play with flow (and player expectations of it), rather than advancing flow as the popular and academic ideal. Videogames are not only an advanced product of technoculture, but are the space in which technoculture conventionalizes play. This makes them a fascinating site to unwork and rethink the protocols and rituals that rule technoculture. It is the audacity of imagining certain videogames as avant-garde (from the perspective of mainstream consumers and art academics alike) that makes them a good candidate for this critical experiment.
Reframing interactive digital narrative: toward an inclusive open-ended iterative process for research and practice

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010-07-08) Koenitz, Hartmut

In more than two decades of research and practical experiments in interactive digital narrative (IDN), much insight about the relationship of narrative and digital media has been gained and many successful experiments have been undertaken, as a survey of the field illustrates. However, current approaches also limit the scope of experimentation and constrain theory in interactive narrative forms original to digital media. After reviewing the "interactivisation" of legacy theory (neo-Aristotelian poetics for interactive drama, poststructuralism for hyperfiction, 20th century narratology for interactive fiction and as a general theory for IDN), the thesis introduces a theoretical framework that changes the focus from the product-centered view of legacy media towards system and the process of instantiation. The terms protostory describing the overall space of potential narratives in an IDN system, narrative design for the concrete assemblage of elements and narrative vectors as substructures that enable authorial control are introduced to supersede legacy terms like story and plot. On the practical side, the thesis identifies limitations of existing approaches (e.g. legacy metaphors like the timeline, and authoring tools that support only particular traditions) To overcome these limitations a software toolset built on the principles of robustness, modularity, and extensibility is introduced and some early results are evaluated. Finally, the thesis proposes an inclusive, open-ended iterative process as a structure for future IDN research in which practical implementations and research co-exist in a tightly coupled mutual relationship that allows changes on one side to be integrated on the other.
Ambivalent animal

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010-04-01) Thomas, Geoffrey Piers

The Ambivalent Animal project explores the interactions of animals, culture and technology. The project employs both artistic practice and critical theory, each in ways that inspire the other. My creative practice centers around two projects that focus on domestic pets. These projects highlight the animal's uncertain status as they explore the overlapping ontologies of animal, human and machine. They provide concrete artifacts that engage with theoretical issues of anthropocentrism, animality and alterity. My theoretical work navigates between the fields of animal studies, art and design, media and culture studies, and philosophy. My dissertation explores animality through four real and imagined animal roles: cyborg, clone, chimera and shapeshifter. Each animal role is considered in relation to three dialectics: irreducibility and procedurality, autonomy and integration, aura and abjection. These dialectics do not seek full synthesis but instead embrace the oscillations of irresolvable debates and desires. The dialectics bring into focus issues of epistemology, ontology, corporeality and subjectivity. When the four animal roles engage the three dialectics, connected yet varied themes emerge. The cyborgian animal is simultaneously liberated and regulated, assisted and restricted, integrated and isolated. The cloned animal is an emblem of renewal and loss; she is both idealized code and material flesh and finds herself caught in the battles of nature and nurture. The chimera is both rebel and conformist; his unusual juxtapositions pioneer radical corporeal transgressions but also conform to the mechanisms of global capital. And the shapeshifter explores the thrill and anxiety of an altered phenomenology; she gains new perceptions though unstable subjectivity. These roles reveal corporeal adjustments and unfamiliar subjectivities that inspire the creative practice. Both my writing and making employ an ambivalent aesthetic--an aesthetic approach that evokes two or more incompatible sensibilities. The animal's uncertain status contributes to this aesthetic: some animals enjoy remarkable care and attention, while others are routinely exploited, abused and discarded. Ambivalence acknowledges the complexity of lived experience, philosophical and political debate, and academic inquiry. My approach recognizes the light and dark of these complex ambivalences--it privileges paradox and embraces the confusion and wonder of creative research. Rather than erase, conceal or resolve ambiguity, an ambivalent aesthetic foregrounds the limits of language and representation and highlights contradiction and irresolution.
Applying new media theories to understanding the design of new media applications : a study of agency and everyday data on the Web

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2000-12) Sutton, Katherine Mary