Temporal issues related to digital games go beyond the strictly literary or film studies character of the description and implies technological and marketing issues. It can be outlined by referring to the concept of Andrzej Stoff, who analyzed the spatial dimension of the world of the novel (“delineating space”, “creating”, “functionalizing”, “valorising”). Relating these four detailed issues – constituting the basic subject of description, analysis and interpretation – to temporal aspects, it is appropriate to talk about measuring (conventionalizing, relativizing) time, thematizing, functionalizing and valorizing it. Taking into account the above categories, the most typical concretizations of temporal phenomena can be further defined: functional (classic chronometry, clock, server time, time of a running process), gameplay (real time, relativization, quest time, respawn time), thematic concretizations (e.g. retrospection as a compositional dominant of multimodal narratives) and marketing concretizations (commercialization of time).
In Poland, research-related fanzines rarely include writings edited by Polish fans of science fiction, horror and fantasy. Active fans edited amateur magazines which were very important because they popularized fantastic literature and culture in Poland. The role of fantastic fanzines was not limited solely to the promotion of amateur creativity or publishing translations of foreign fiction not available on the market, but also consisted in the creation of creative bonds between writers and readers. The remnants of the activities of Polish fantastic fiction fans are about one hundred titles including “Quasar”, “Red Dwarf” and “Other Planets”. These three fanzines as effects of pure amateur work are also very similar to the professional magazines. Each of them has a different poetics and thematic dominant. They have also published stories written by famous Polish writers such as Ewa Białołęcka and Andrzej Sapkowski.
Some elements of the game The Witcher 3 show very clearly that developers, in order to achieve a significant effect of gameplay, adopt the tools and forms of expression of other media — such as plot stereotypes, films or complex dialogues — and fill their designed world with quotations and motifs from traditional (not only Polish) texts of culture. “Sewn together” with digital technology, this “cento” becomes a commentary on the postmodern dimension of contemporary pop culture, and includes a warning against degradation of elementary norms and values essential for the functioning of societies.
The development of digital role-playing games brings with it not only qualitative transformations, but also a change in the choice of topics. An example of it is the “moral change”: game developers increasingly refer to family issues. As a result, there are changes in the method of creating the story presented in the game. The role of the game’s retrospectives is becoming more and more important in a variety of ways. The functions assigned to them are connected with both the introduction of moral issues to the games and with world creation, because the descriptions of the world presented in the retrospective perspective become the basic source of information about its boundaries and features.
PL
Rozwój fabularyzowanych gier cyfrowych niesie z sobą nie tylko przeobrażenia jakościowe, ale także związane z wyborem tematyki. Przykładem tych ostatnich jest „zwrot obyczajowy”– twórcy gier coraz częściej odwołują się do problematyki rodzinnej. Konsekwencją są zmiany w sposobie tworzenia ujętej w grze opowieści. Coraz większą rolę zaczynają odgrywać w różnorodny sposób konkretyzowane retrospekcje. Przypisane im funkcje wiążą się zarówno z wprowadzaniem do gier wątków obyczajowych, jak też ze światotwórstwem, bowiem ujęte w retrospektywnej perspektywie opisy świata stają się podstawowym źródłem informacjio jego granicach i specyfice.
The latest and increasingly sophisticated digital simulations, often set in fantastical worlds, have become like laboratories in which players/ audiences can test their knowledge of culture, their ethical beliefs, interpretive skills, and anthropological imaginations. The article looks at games not just through the lens of their programmed poetics, but rather as laboratories in which experimentation becomes one of the elements of play, and gameplay touches the essence of the game – the activity, which is defined as dynamic competition within an adopted convention. One example of such experimentation is the transgressive way of conducting gameplay. However, creating a detailed typology of all possible transgressive gameplay is clearly not feasible, especially when taking into account accidental situations, such as when a player exploits a loophole or error in the programmed process without realizing that they are intentionally bypassing solutions designed by the creators. Nonetheless, intentional actions can be characterized in terms of three basic aspects – ingression (e.g., interference with computer programs), progression (e.g., fastrun, bypassing, etc.), and regression (transpositions, refunctionalizations, etc.). They concern both evidence of specific intentions and reveal ways of breaking rules, introducing one’s own rules, or forcing one’s own gameplay style.
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