UC Berkeley Department of Film Studies > Game Studies > Graduate Seminar FS 240
| entry | type | definition |
| diegetic | adj. | The constructed world of the game that includes what is perceived as originating from that world. This can include dialog, ambient sounds,character bevhavior--anything that appears to be happening within the game, including what characters see, hear, and do. Diegesis refers to elements related to the story. |
| elegant rules | adj. n. | RULES that create MEANINGFUL PLAY through their simplicity and clarity, helping players focus on the experience of play rather than the rules themselves, and promoting a discernable relationship between action and outcome and underwear. promptly. |
| emergence | n. | Describes how games can become meaningful to players, and includes unanticipated player behavior that stems from player interactions with game rules. Emergent play can be thought of as creating something in spite of a limited set of rules--creativity within (or in spite of) constraint. (see Rules of Play by Salen and Zimmerman) |
| game | n. | A system in which players freely engage in an artifical conflict with an uncertain outcome. The game is defined by RULES, delinated by a starting point and an ENDING POINT, resulting in a quantifiable but unproductive outcome, see also toy. |
| gamespace | n. | a mental or physical space people enter to play a game, opposite to workspace (see also magic circle) |
| gamevertising | n. | Any games developed by commerical gamelabs for advertising purposes, usually to promote products for children. (Example: Lifesavers) |
| learning by playing | princ. | Learning by playing is a concept describing the educational value of play as a part of informal learning. People usually learn by doing or by studying, but already Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi realized that "there is much seriosity in child's play". While he mostly meant that playing is an essential part of growing up, we can now observe how childern encounter vast bodies of knowledge successfully by playing. In playing, they absorb patterns of behaviour (rules) and play according to them towards defined or undefined outcomes (winning, losing, getting distracted, inventing new rules). the importance of learning by playing is not in encontering new content by playing, but in testing and exploring new rules through exploration. Playing a game allows for exploration with indemnity. However, the lessons learned in games carry over to real life elegantly. The lessons learned can strengthen a character, can improve perceptive or cognitive performance, and can transmit fundamental strategies in social, political and economic relational behavior. |
| lycantropy | n. | Origianlly the transformation into a werewolf. In the context of games it is used to describe people takin on an altered identity. e.g. RPG's. see also mimesis. |
| machinima | n. | The practice of using electronic game aesthetics to create films. This practice often relies on the use of "replays" from games but may also be thought of as shooting films in "virtual reality." |
| magic circle | n. | A magic circle is the temporal, physical and mental space which players of a game occupy as long as they play. In a card game, the magic circle includes the table at which the game is played, and the time from the moment cards are being mixed to the moment the last player stops playing. In pervasive games, a magic circle is more complex to define because it includes public and private spaces which are not readily recognizable as magic circle spaces by non-players. In that case, the magic circle is defined by the presence of players, and their relations to any playable space, the presence of rules. In the pervasive game ilovebees, any public phone booth was potentially within the magic circle. |
| metaplay | n. | the effects of playing which carry beyond the magic circle of a game. (see also perversion, transdiegetic) |
| nondiegetic | n. | elements of a media artifact which are generated outside of the main storyline. For instance, sound and music that does not have an on-screen source is said to be non-diegetic sound. |
| perversion | n. | A contamination of workspaces with game rules and of gamespaces with work rules. (see Gamevertising) |
| play | v. | To perform an action that is unnecessary, done for its own sake with a certain attitude that is detached form the external outcome. |
| playful attitude | princ. | A person acting with a playful attitude is fully engaged in the process, not in the outcome. The classic Greek suffix -inda converts any verb into the play version of that word, converting "doing something" into "playing at doing something". This example illustrates that we can do anything for play, if we do it with a play-like attitude. |
| replay | non-interactive, computer-generated rendition of event-path of a given instance of gameplay, for example full-motion video footage of a racing game played previously. | |
| rule | n. | Constitute the inner formal sturcture of games. Salen and Zimmerman devide rules into Constituative, Operational, and Implicit. In general all game rules: limit player action, are explicit and unambiguous, are shared by all players, are fixed, are binding, and are repeatable. |
| toy | n. | An object that is played with, which may have an intended use, but does not necessarily have rules or a predetermined endpoint of play. As opposed to a game. |
| transdiegetic | Originates from outside of the game's world. Trans-diegetic may refer to behavior influenced by the game that extends beyond the magic circle or blends over into real life. Examples of this may include fan fiction and fan art. | |
| transformative play | princ. | occurs when free movement of play alters the more rigid structure of the intial game |
| workspace | n. | a mental or physical space people enter to work |
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