Gaming And The Virtual Sublime

Gaming and the Virtual Sublime considers the ‘virtual sublime’ as a conceptual toolbox for understanding our affective engagement with contemporary interactive entertainment.

Gaming and the Virtual Sublime considers the ‘virtual sublime’ as a conceptual toolbox for understanding our affective engagement with contemporary interactive entertainment.

Gaming the System takes philosophical traditions out of the ivory tower and into the virtual worlds of video games. In this book, author David J. Gunkel explores how philosophical traditions—put forth by noted thinkers such as Plato, Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, and Žižek—can help us explore and conceptualize recent developments in video games, game studies, and virtual worlds. Furthermore, Gunkel interprets computer games as doing philosophy, arguing that the game world is a medium that provides opportunities to model and explore fundamental questions about the nature of reality, personal identity, social organization, and moral conduct. By using games to investigate and innovate in the area of philosophical thinking, Gunkel shows how areas such as game governance and manufacturers' terms of service agreements actually grapple with the social contract and produce new postmodern forms of social organization that challenge existing modernist notions of politics and the nation state. In this critically engaging study, Gunkel considers virtual worlds and video games as more than just "fun and games," presenting them as sites for new and original thinking about some of the deepest questions concerning the human experience.

Do you make small leaps in your chair while attempting challenging jumps in Tomb Raider? Do you say "Ouch!" when a giant hits you with a club in Skyrim? Have you had dreams of being inside the underwater city of Rapture? Videogames cast the player as protagonist in an unfolding narrative. Like actors in front of a camera, gamers' proprioception, or body awareness, can extend to onscreen characters, thus placing them "physically" within the virtual world. Players may even identify with characters' ideological motivations. The author explores concepts central to the design and enjoyment of videogames--affect, immersion, liveness, presence, agency, narrative, ideology and the player's virtual surrogate: the avatar. Gamer and avatar are analyzed as a cybernetic coupling that suggests fulfillment of Atonin Artaud's vision of the "body without organs."

Ethics in the Virtual World examines the gamer's enactment of taboo activities in the context of both traditional and contemporary philosophical approaches to morality. The book argues that it is more productive to consider what individuals are able to cope with psychologically than to determine whether a virtual act or representation is necessarily good or bad. The book raises pertinent questions about one of the most rapidly expanding leisure pursuits in western culture: should virtual enactments warrant moral interest? Should there be a limit to what can be enacted or represented within these games? Or, is it all just a game?

This essay sheds light on the future of the video game industry, explicates how advanced technologies can revolutionize the video game industry, and demystifies why esports have become popular as a type of spectator sport in the 21st century . The future of the video industry will not only be characterized by dynamism as it continues to metaphorically evolve, but will also be eminently auspicious for competitors in the video game industry. Technological advancements have profoundly changed the video game industry and have rendered it all the more technology-driven by sophisticated technologies. The video industry shows no signs of contracting anytime in the imminent future. The future of the video game industry is apt be more sublime than envisioned, especially as technological advancements are made which can further revolutionize the behemoth video game industry. In 2024, it is possible to play video games in an ultra-high definition 4,000 pixels resolution. In other words, the future of the video game industry will not be solely limited to shovelware mobile games pervading the video game industry. “The global gaming market was valued at $151,550,000,000 in 2019 and is expected to reach a value of $256,970,000,000 by 2025, registering a compound annual growth rate of 9.17% over the forecast period of 2020–2025. Game developers across emerging economies are continually striving to enhance gamer's experience, launching, and rewriting codes for diverse console/platforms, such as PlayStation, Xbox, and Windows PC, which are incorporated into one product provided to the gamers through the cloud platform. The emergence of cloud gaming” (“Gaming Market - Growth,” n.d.) has helped to substantially drive growth in the video game market. In the coming years, cloud gaming, mobile gaming, PC gaming, and console gaming are apt to become all the more prevalent as entertainment options among customers. “Recent advances in advanced cloud technology have turned the idea of cloud gaming into reality. In cloud gaming, the server, where all the games are stored, does all the computation work, which includes game scene rendering, game logic processing video encoding, and video streaming” (“Gaming Market - Growth,” n.d.). The rising popularity of esports, gaming live streams, and gameplay videos have also contributed to the growth of the behemoth video game industry. It stands to preponderantly reason that the future of the video game industry will not only allow the video game industry to reach an unprecedented size, but will also attract more competitors to enter the sizable video game industry. In the coming years, similarly to video streaming subscription services, such as Netflix and Hulu, customers are apt to have more video game streaming subscription services available to them with a broader selection of video games to choose from playing. In other words, for a monthly subscription fee, customers will be able to have the option to stream a myriad of video games on their video game home consoles and/or computers. In the coming years, video game streaming subscription services is apt to offer a plethora of video game streaming services. “This new sector is also seen as a serious competitor for the game market” (“The Impact Of,” 2019). The console video game segment is no longer the utmost lucrative segment of the sizable video game market. In the coming years, the future of the video game industry is apt to offer far more to customers than merely just new home console video games and new “virtual reality and augmented reality” (Koss, 2020) video game experiences. In 2019, the video game industry generated over $6,300,000,000 in revenue (Koss, 2020) from “augmented reality and virtual reality” (Koss, 2020) video games. Much to the relief of gamers, “companies are busy making virtual reality experiences more consumer-friendly, and it is only a matter of time before both the weight and price of virtual reality headsets drop” (Koss, 2020). Modern virtual reality video games are a far cry from the outmoded retro virtual reality video games of the 20th Century. In stark contrast virtual reality video games, augmented reality video games do not require the usage of a bulky headset to play and allow gamers to “interact with reality and not be removed from it” (Koss, 2020) when playing an augmented reality video game.

This book explains how designing, playing and modifying computer games, and understanding the theory behind them, can strengthen the area of digital humanities. This book aims to help digital humanities scholars understand both the issues and also advantages of game design, as well as encouraging them to extend the field of computer game studies, particularly in their teaching and research in the field of virtual heritage. By looking at re-occurring issues in the design, playtesting and interface of serious games and game-based learning for cultural heritage and interactive history, this book highlights the importance of visualisation and self-learning in game studies and how this can intersect with digital humanities. It also asks whether such theoretical concepts can be applied to practical learning situations. It will be of particular interest to those who wish to investigate how games and virtual environments can be used in teaching and research to critique issues and topics in the humanities, particularly in virtual heritage and interactive history.

This book responds to a growing interest in death, dying and the dead within and beyond the field of death studies. The collection defines an understanding of ‘difficult death’ and examines the differences between death, dying and the dead, as well as exploring the ethical challenges of researching death in mediated form. The collection is attendant to the ways in which difficult deaths are imbricated in power structures both before and after they become mediatised in culture. As such, the work navigates the many political and social complexities and inequalities – what might be deemed the difficulties – of death, dying and the dead. The book seeks to expand understandings of the difficulty of death in media and culture through a wide range of chapters from different contexts focused on literature, film, television, and in online environments, as well as several chapters examining news reportage of difficult deaths.