Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>This thesis studies a subset of players of video games called "power-gamers" who play games in a way that mirrors labour as opposed to leisure. Through ethnographic fieldwork and exploration this thesis examines what constitutes "power-gaming" and seeks to unpack the differences between skill, fun, and labour. Chapter One analyzes how ethnographic fieldwork is… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>New conditions of materiality are emerging from fundamental changes in our ontological order. Digital subjectivity represents an emergent mode of subjectivity that is the effect of a more profound ontological drift that has taken place, and this bears significant repercussions for the practice and understanding of the political. This thesis pivots around mathematician Grigori '… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>On Tilt: The Inheritance and Inheritors of Digital Games accepts and extends Eric Zimmerman's contention that literacies currently being developed during video-game play will be more broadly applicable (outside games) in the next hundred years as Western work, education, entertainment, and citizenship spaces become ever more shaped like video games. </p><p> To the end of… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>This thesis is a critical response to Evgeny Morozov's article proclaiming the death of the cyberflâneur. Suspicious of the superficiality of his argument, I developed a practico-theoretical project to prove that the cyberflâneur is not dead but alive – or, if it were dead, to rescue it from its grave and bring it back to life. In the course of my response to Morozov, I develop a… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>This thesis explores the rhetoric of theft imposed on online music by comparing file</p><p>sharing to shoplifting. Since the litigation between the music industry and Napster, file sharing has been perceived, both by the entertainment industry and by a music listening public, as a criminal act. However, file sharing has more in common with home taping and music archives than… more Year: 2015, 2015
Member of: Trent University Graduate Thesis Collection
Abstract: <p>Game texts present unique and dynamic opportunities for lability: how readers can make choices while reading that alter the narrative's nature or outcome. Labile decisions are neither simply correct nor incorrect--the reader renders judgement to produce a desired outcome. When encountering labile challenges, players employ an interpretive strategy to resolve them. Many game texts… more
