Mia Consalvo
Baker, runner, gamer.
Address: Concordia University
CJ Bldg 4.407
7141 Sherbrooke St West
Montreal, Quebec
Canada
Address: Concordia University
CJ Bldg 4.407
7141 Sherbrooke St West
Montreal, Quebec
Canada
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Books by Mia Consalvo
Consalvo provides a cultural history of cheating in videogames, looking at how the packaging and selling of such cheat-enablers as cheat books, GameSharks, and mod chips created a cheat industry. She investigates how players themselves define cheating and how their playing choices can be understood, with particular attention to online cheating. Finally, she examines the growth of the peripheral game industries that produce information about games rather than actual games. Digital games are spaces for play and experimentation; the way we use and think about digital games, Consalvo argues, is crucially important and reflects ethical choices in gameplay and elsewhere.
Papers by Mia Consalvo
Consalvo provides a cultural history of cheating in videogames, looking at how the packaging and selling of such cheat-enablers as cheat books, GameSharks, and mod chips created a cheat industry. She investigates how players themselves define cheating and how their playing choices can be understood, with particular attention to online cheating. Finally, she examines the growth of the peripheral game industries that produce information about games rather than actual games. Digital games are spaces for play and experimentation; the way we use and think about digital games, Consalvo argues, is crucially important and reflects ethical choices in gameplay and elsewhere.
This paper will review some of the basic research about players, identity and avatars, to offer a starting point for argument. But the heart of the talk explores instances of games where avatar presentation and use depart from our traditional conceptualizations --either by their absence or their opposition to humanoid facsimiles. By doing so this talk challenges game studies' easy reliance on avatars as proxies for identity in games, and asks what happens when players fail to use or access such embodiments in their gameplay. It suggests alternative ways to understand player agency and identification in games, and moves beyond avatars as the principle means for doing so.
It does so through analysis of 80 games, identifying the major types of interactions employed, and highlighting games offering unusual social mechanics.
The second part of the lecture explores how social media applications are using interaction in novel ways, such as Nike's new running app, which invites users to broadcast the start of their run, turning friends' responses into real-time cheering.
In closing, the lecture identifies the range of social functions offered by social games, and points to other types of interactions enabled via social media, to encourage game designers to think beyond the boundaries of game design.
This course focuses on games through the lens of research-creation. Time will be spent at the beginning of the class investigating the evolution of research-creation (also known as arts-based research and creative making) as a recognized area of practice as well as the development of games as valid forms of entertainment, art, persuasion and catalysts for change.
The course then investigates how we can (1) advance research (broadly defined) through the act of making games; (2) use games as tools for doing research; and (3) creatively present research through games. Readings, class discussions, and course assignments explores these areas, focusing on the following goals: defining research-creation; understanding the multiple ways research-creation can intersect with games; debating/discussing/developing standards for assessing research-creation projects that use games in some way; and experimenting with game creation.
Course Objectives
By the end of the course students should be able to:
• Clearly articulate how research-creation expands our field of knowledge making
• Create small-scale/prototype games (analog or digital) as part of a research-creation project
• Integrate relevant theoretical frameworks into various projects