Videogames and Agency

Videogames and Agency PDF Author: Bettina Bódi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000829871
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
Videogames and Agency explores the trend in videogames and their marketing to offer a player higher volumes, or even more distinct kinds, of player freedom. The book offers a new conceptual framework that helps us understand how this freedom to act is discussed by designers, and how that in turn reflects in their design principles. What can we learn from existing theories around agency? How do paratextual materials reflect design intention with regards to what the player can and cannot do in a videogame? How does game design shape the possibility space for player action? Through these questions and selected case studies that include AAA and independent games alike, the book presents a unique approach to studying agency that combines game design, game studies, and game developer discourse. By doing so, the book examines what discourses around player action, as well as a game’s design can reveal about the nature of agency and videogame aesthetics. This book will appeal to readers specifically interested in videogames, such as game studies scholars or game designers, but also to media studies students and media and screen studies scholars less familiar with digital games. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Videogames and Agency

Videogames and Agency PDF Author: Bettina Bódi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000829871
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 173

Get Book Here

Book Description
Videogames and Agency explores the trend in videogames and their marketing to offer a player higher volumes, or even more distinct kinds, of player freedom. The book offers a new conceptual framework that helps us understand how this freedom to act is discussed by designers, and how that in turn reflects in their design principles. What can we learn from existing theories around agency? How do paratextual materials reflect design intention with regards to what the player can and cannot do in a videogame? How does game design shape the possibility space for player action? Through these questions and selected case studies that include AAA and independent games alike, the book presents a unique approach to studying agency that combines game design, game studies, and game developer discourse. By doing so, the book examines what discourses around player action, as well as a game’s design can reveal about the nature of agency and videogame aesthetics. This book will appeal to readers specifically interested in videogames, such as game studies scholars or game designers, but also to media studies students and media and screen studies scholars less familiar with digital games. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Culture, Structure and Agency

Culture, Structure and Agency PDF Author: David Rubinstein
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761919285
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book addresses two key issues in sociological theory: the debate between structural and cultural approaches and the problem of agency. It does this through looking at the work of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim and the ideas of modern theorists like Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and Talcott Parsons. The book examines economics, rational choice theory, network theory, ethnomethodology, and symbolic interactionism.

Art and Agency

Art and Agency PDF Author: Alfred Gell
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191037451
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
Alfred Gell puts forward a new anthropological theory of visual art, seen as a form of instrumental action: the making of things as a means of influencing the thoughts and actions of others. He argues that existing anthropological and aesthetic theories take an overwhelmingly passive point of view, and questions the criteria that accord art status only to a certain class of objects and not to others. The anthropology of art is here reformulated as the anthropology of a category of action: Gell shows how art objects embody complex intentionalities and mediate social agency. He explores the psychology of patterns and perceptions, art and personhood, the control of knowledge, and the interpretation of meaning, drawing upon a diversity of artistic traditions--European, Indian, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Australian. Art and Agency was completed just before Alfred Gell's death at the age of 51 in January 1997. It embodies the intellectual bravura, lively wit, vigour, and erudition for which he was admired, and will stand as an enduring testament to one of the most gifted anthropologists of his generation.

Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems

Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems PDF Author: Catrin Misselhorn
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319155156
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
This book brings together philosophical approaches to cooperation and collective agency with research into human-machine interaction and cooperation from engineering, robotics, computer science and AI. Bringing these so far largely unrelated fields of study together leads to a better understanding of collective agency in natural and artificial systems and will help to improve the design and performance of hybrid systems involving human and artificial agents. Modeling collective agency with the help of computer simulations promises also philosophical insights into the emergence of collective agency. The volume consists of four sections. The first section is dedicated to the concept of agency. The second section of the book turns to human-machine cooperation. The focus of the third section is the transition from cooperation to collective agency. The last section concerns the explanatory value of social simulations of collective agency in the broader framework of cultural evolution.

Agency, Structure and International Politics

Agency, Structure and International Politics PDF Author: Gil Friedman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134743726
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
This book is the first in depth study of the concepts of agency and structure in the context of international realtions and politics. It is an important contribution to the study of international relations and politics.

Reconstructing Agency in Developmental and Educational Psychology

Reconstructing Agency in Developmental and Educational Psychology PDF Author: Paul Downes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351588036
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
This book reconstructs the foundations of developmental and educational psychology and fills an important gap in the field by arguing for a specific spatial turn so that human growth, experience and development focus not only on time but space. This regards space not simply as place. Highlighting concrete cross-cultural relational spaces of concentric and diametric spatial systems, the book argues that transition between these systems offers a new paradigm for understanding agency and inclusion in developmental and educational psychology, and for relating experiential dimensions to causal explanations. The chapters examine key themes for developing concentric spatial systemic responses in education, including school climate, bullying, violence, early school leaving prevention and students’ voices. Moreover, the book proposes an innovative framework of agency as movement between concentric and diametric spatial relations for a reconstruction of resilience. This model addresses the vital neglected issue of resistance to sheer cultural conditioning and goes beyond the foundational ideas of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, as well as Vygotsky, Skinner, Freud, Massey, Bruner, Gestalt and postmodern psychology to reinterpret them in dynamic spatial systemic terms. Written by an internationally renowned expert, this book is a valuable resource for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the areas of educational and developmental psychology, as well as related areas such as personality theory, health psychology, social work, teacher education and anthropology.

Semiotic Agency

Semiotic Agency PDF Author: Alexei Sharov
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030894843
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
This book invites readers to embark on a journey into the world of agency encompassing humans, other organisms, cells, intracellular molecular agents, colonies, populations, ecological systems, and artificial autonomous systems. We combine mechanistic and non-mechanistic approaches in the analysis of the function and evolution of organisms, their subagents, and multi-organism systems, and in this way offer a theoretical platform for integrating biosemiotics with both natural science and the humanities/social sciences. Agents are autonomous systems that incorporate knowledge on how to make sense of their environment and use it to achieve their goals. The functions of all agents are supported by mechanisms at the lowest level; however, the explanatory power of mechanistic analysis is not sufficient for complex agents. Non-mechanistic methods rely on the goal-directedness of agents whose dynamics follow self-stabilized dynamic attractors. The properties of attractors depend on stable or slowly changing factors, and such dependencies can be interpreted as sign relations if they are adaptive in nature. Agents can replace or redirect mechanisms on demand in order to preserve their functions; for performing higher-level semiotic functions, mechanisms are thus only means. We assume that mechanism and semiosis are not mutually exclusive, and that simple agents can interpret signs mechanistically. This assumption allows us to extend semiotic analysis to all agents, including ribosomes in cells, computers, and robots. This book challenges established traditions in natural science and the humanities/social sciences: semiotics no longer appears as restricted to humans and rational thinking, and biology is no longer limited to rely exclusively on mechanistic reasoning.

Institutional Work

Institutional Work PDF Author: Thomas B. Lawrence
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521518555
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This book contains a series of essays and empirical case studies exploring the nature of institutional work.

Agency and Consciousness in Discourse

Agency and Consciousness in Discourse PDF Author: Paul Thibault
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847142664
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
In the past two decades there has been considerable interest in the ways in which subjects are positioned in discursive practice. This interest has entailed a focus on the role of language and discourse in the processes in and through which subjects are constituted in discourse. However, questions of agency and how it relates to consciousness have received less attention. This book explores the ways in which agency and consciousness are created through transactions between self and other. The book argues that it is necessary to regard body-brain interactions in the context of the social and discursive practices which act upon human bodies. These issues of agency and individuation are explored in relation to infant semiosis, as well as in relation to children's symbolic play. Thibault looks at the importance of the self-referential moral conscience in relation to the interpersonal dimension of all acts of meaning-making. This conscience is also connected to the development of a self-referential viewpoint which the book argues is connected to the ecosocial semiotic systems of thinking about consciousness as a complex system operating on many different levels. The author discusses and evaluates the work of linguists, psychologists, biologists, semioticians, and sociologists such as Basil Bernstein, Mikhail Bakhtin, J. J. Gibson, M. A. K. Halliday, Walter Kauffman, Lakoff & Johnson, Jay Lemke, Jean Piaget and Stanley Salthe, to develop a new theory of agency and consciousness.

Agency in Poverty and War

Agency in Poverty and War PDF Author: Vivianna Rodriguez Carreon
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040095623
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
This book examines how people's self-awareness is affected by both internal and external factors amid war and poverty. It explores how agency has influenced the inward human development of rural women who face triple disadvantages related to gender, ethnicity, and access to economic power. It presents a multidisciplinary perspective on the intersection of war and poverty through narratives of surviving women. It advances understandings of how rural people, peasants, and Indigenous Peoples of Peru, particularly women, have experienced poverty and war as a combination of oppression, repression, and aggression. It explores their agency is affected and how it evolves during and after conflict in their search for truth and justice. It does this by taking the capability approach combined with insights from perspectives on raising consciousness and inner transformation in human development in which awareness of rural people’s experience enables them to be free and can move them from survival to conscious agents. This book offers new narratives to evaluate the hazards of poverty and war and the potential human security for rural people agency and empowerment in building peace. It will be of interest to scholars and practitioners of development studies, peace and security, political Latin America geography, rural communities, peace and conflict studies, human development and political studies.