After a nice afternoon in London checking out all the great shops (like Octopus and Fortnum & Mason – should have brought a larger suitcase!) and a nice dinner at the Crusting Pipe, I am headed back into the conference rooms for one last session. Unfortunately for me, and due to some poor planning on my part, I am only able to attend the first session today – luckily for me, it is a panel on avatars and identity.

The first presentation, by Kristine Jorgensen called I’m Overburdened!’ An Empirical Study of the Play, the Avatar and the Gameworld. The presentation centered around how players view the player/avatar relationship. Although this sounds eerily familiar for me, I am happy to hear that her overarching goals is to look at the relationship between the user interface and the player, in regards to the game-world and game design. When thinking about the avatar, she uses both Rune Klevjer, and Jonas’Linderoth‘s conceptualization of the avatar as an extension of the player (vicarious embodiment), as role, tool, and/or prop.  The bulk of the presentation was focused on player quotes and contextualizing them into the definitional constructs of the avatar (briefly) outlined (above).

The second presentation of the session, Emma Westecott’s The Player Character as Performing Object focused on the idea that gameplay is a performance act, looking at the moment of interaction between the player and the game-world (player as puppet-artist / puppeteer). Coming from a film and performance arts perspective and literature, and primarily semiotics of puppetry (Frank Proschan), the presentation was quite theoretical from perspectives that I am not familiar with and so made it quite interesting to think about the relationship between the player and the object of the avatar – controller and game. While I don’t usually take the direction of avatar as puppet (role, prop or tool..), I appreciated seeing the player / avatar relationship explained from a different angle. Apologies for my brief and perhaps inarticulate synthesis.

The final presentation of the day is Clara Fernandez-Vara’s Play’s the Thing: A Framework to Study Videogames as Performance which essentially is a set of tools in order to look at videogames, as well as the implications these tools carry. Performance in regards of “performance studies – human action in context (showing doing) which are necessarily activities that are separate from everyday life (Schechner, 2006; Huizinga, 1955). I spent most of the time listening intently, and taking notes, so here is the basic foundation:

Performance Framework: comparative framework

Three layers

Theatre (Pavis, Schechener)
Digital media
Games (not exclusively digital) – Hunicke et al

Theatre model – how do we understand theatrical performance

–          Dramatic text (what is ready before it begins)
–          Performance (actors concretizing the text)
–          Mise-en-scene (the necessity of the audience to make sense of the text and the performance)

Performance in digital media (Software as performance)

–         Code (instead of dramatic text – this is what the computer “has” to do –
–         Run-time (computer performs the text – the performance is not complete without an interactor – as co-performer
–         Interaction (player)

Games (Hunicke, R. M. Leblanc et al) MDA : A formal approach to game design and game research

–          Mechanics (what is needed to start playing – objects as part of the mechanics) [rules attached to the objects]
–          Dynamics (rules set into motion – applied rules, not translation of the rules, but the acting out of them)
–          Aesthetics – (ambiguous in MDA) [types of fun or activities that are engaging] what happens to the player while playing .. player experience

Player as performer and spectator = making sense of the actions (spectator) and making things happen, set things in motion.

So there it is – another interesting panel to wrap up another great conference with great people in a great place. I am both sad to leave and happy to go home and see my family. Safe travels to fellow delegates.

*Please disregard typos and poor sentence structures =)