下記の通り、ライプツィヒ大学のCäcilia Sauer氏と、Luca Paolo Bruno氏による，今年度の第4回定例研究会を10月26日に開催いたします．みなさまふるってご参加ください。
- Title:
- Playing by Ear: Audio Games(Cäcilia Sauer)
- Visual Novel Game Characters: Conventionality and Re-performance.(Luca Bruno)
- Date and Time
- 2018/10/26 16:00-
- Place
- Gakujikan 2F Reserch Room3(研究会室3), Ritsumeikan Kinugasa campus in kyoto
http://en.ritsumei.ac.jp/access/ - Speaker:
- Cäcilia Sauer, Ph.D. Student at Leipzig University, [j]Games: Japan Videogame Research Initiative
- Luca Paolo Bruno, Ph.D. student at Leipzig University
- Abstract:
- (Cäcilia Sauer)
This paper aims to present the status of the forthcoming Ph.D. Dissertation: „Playing by Ear: Audio Games“ (Working title). The topic of this dissertation is the aesthetics of audio-only games, the particularity of their gaming experience and their social impact on both visually-impaired and sighted players. In the recent years, video games have increasingly focused on visuals. Mainstream games are using graphics to attract their audience, with games like “Assassins Creed Origins” or “Final Fantasy XV” even implementing photo modes for players to take their time to enjoy the “beautiful landscapes”. Yet in Audio Games those “selling arguments” are missing. Audio Games are Games that, rather than graphics, use sound to build up gaming worlds and thus are far more accessible so people with all levels of sight. Up until now, Audio Games have always been more of a marginal phenomenon in video game industry with only smaller indie game companies or fans developing their own acoustical equivalent to visual video games (although in all kind of genres, including racing games, fighting games, RPGs, adventures and so on). In this presentation, I will present the results of the first fieldwork I have done up until now – both in Germany and Japan. Being a rather unknown phenomenon, not much is known about the audio game market in general. So currently I try to collect different data from both audio game players and developers, in order to create some kind of overview about audio game industry and its audience: Why do people play and create games which are rather restricted in their form of expression? Are they even considered as being “restricted”? And are only blind and visually-impaired players interested in this kind of audio-only games?(Luca Bruno)
This paper seeks to propose visual novel game characters as the fixed point from which the game-ic culture of Akihabara originates. Whenever it’s the male-oriented bishōjo or the female-oriented bishōnen, Akihabara characters serve not only as vital component of a media-mix, but in fact encompass the rules and the procedures by which conventions internal to the Akihabara cultural domain are reproduced at different points in time. While the cultural domain’s current state of development is in continuous flux (see Suan 2017), the procedures encompassed within the character remain constant, stabilizing the cultural domain on a game-ic framework in which characters and their constitutive elements become the baseline by they are recognized as belonging to that particular cultural domain. Furthermore, the presence of such a character within media activates the connections with the system of conventions, turning other media forms (such as animation, games, printed matter, etc.) into media forms proper to Akihabara, generating a meta-game of expectations and their confirmation/subversion. The character in itself, as an entity composed of conventional elements, acts as a separate category of intersubjective communicative construct (cf. Thon 2016), connected but distinct from media and story specificities. Once the character is present as an intersubjective communicative construct, no matter the state of the cultural domain or its elements at that specific point in time, the perspective shifts in function of the character. In other words, characters within the Akihabara cultural domain are the focal point in a system of procedures which allows the re-performance and the continuous development of conventions within the cultural domain. Visual novel games and their characters, by virtue of exposing these processes, are the most promising window into the game-ic tendencies of Akihabara’s culture.