Kinephanos. Revue d'études des médias et de culture populaire
Kinephanos is a bilingual, inter- and multidisciplinary online academic journal dedicated to the study of matters closely or remotely related to popular culture and media. Films and TV series, video games, emerging technologies and fan culture are the main subjects covered and analyzed on this site. You will find articles that explore the issues and place of image and sound in popular culture from a variety of perspectives. Film and video game studies, cultural and media studies, the humanities and philosophy are the favoured disciplines. Please note that we are currently transitioning to a new OJS platform, and some issues may be inaccessible. For issues published since 2020, you can find them on the Érudit platform: https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/kinephanos/#back-issues.
The walking simulator genre is at the center of a deep controversy among game communities. Its critics reject its worth and even its place in the video game landscape while its supporters disagree on the legitimization of its derogatory label. This paper intends to historicize the rise of the walking simulator by means of a discursive analysis of four game communities : the players, the marketing entities, the developers, and the specialized press. The study reveals the evolution and crysallization of predominant uses, meanings and functions of the designation “walking simulator” in the video game landscape.
Copyright (c) 2019 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This article analyzes three casual game parodies (Cow Clicker, A.V.G.M. and Progress War) which mock the simplistic challenges and the behavioural reward system of casual games like FarmVille. In light of theories on parody, their visual elements, gameplay, and paratexts are analyzed to evaluate their critical potential. The comments posted by their players on forums and blogs, for their part, show that many of them do not detect the irony of these parodies or do not identify their target. In the discussion section, Bogost’s theory on the efficiency of procedural rhetoric is therefore nuanced with the idea that it should be complemented by an appropriate visual and textual rhetoric for it to work properly. The article also questions the subversive potential of the studied parodies by highlighting the fact that they do not only denigrate the simplistic and manipulative mechanics of casual games, but also the women players to whom these games are primarily addressed and who are still, to this day, marginalized in the gaming culture. The article finally develops the idea that casual game parodies lost their subversive appeal since they multiplied and evolved into a video game genre devoid of critical intent called “clicker games”, “idle games” or “incremental games”.
Wargame, Strategy, Action, and Multiplayer in the Early 1980s
Extensive literature underlines the importance to critically examine the phenomenon of game classification. In computer games magazines of the 1980 decade, the combination of “action”, “arcade,” or “real-time” with “strategy” is quite common. Here and there, the expression “real-time strategy” is used. But real-time strategy games as we will come to know them in the 1990s are not very similar to games labelled “real-time strategy” in the 1980s: we are simply not witnessing the description of the same gameplay or experience. Micro-histories of gameplay can underline different forms of continuities and reveal new perspectives on strategy gaming.
Copyright (c) 2019 Simon Dor (Auteur-e) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The Interplay of Thematic and Ludological Elements in Western-Themed Games
The Wild West has been productized and remediated a number of times over the last hundred of years – and even earlier than that. Computer and video games are a relative newcomer in this string of remediations, distilling the essential elements of the Western even further into archetypal scenes, characters and modes of play. Expanding on our previous works on genres, we study a colorful selection of Western-themed games, 31 in total, with the aim to reveal how a firmly established and codified theme affects gameplay. A well-established theme, such as the Western, manifests itself at very different depths based on the kind of game we are dealing with – at minimum, it acts as an artificial surface that does not affect the gameplay at all. At the other end of the spectrum, the theme affects all the aspects of a game, ranging from its audiovisual presentation to the narrative and the actions available to the player.
This paper outlines an impasse in game studies that others have called “genre trouble,” which can be traced to the scholarly discourses that engaged the concept of game genre and reproduced aspects of the ludology and narratology debate. Two lines of argumentation and inquiry about game genres can be discerned, a dominant ludological line and a less prominent but more productive agonistic orientation. The potential benefits of the agonistic approach to enrich and enliven studies of game genre are articulated to both the discourse community of game studies and the inherently political contexts in which the field is situated. In this context, genre trouble is not an obstacle to game genre analysis but its method.
Splendeur(s) et misère(s) des genres vidéoludiques
À l’heure où le jeu vidéo s’est imposé comme un objet culturel majeur, la structuration de son histoire et la catégorisation générique de ses productions forment un important chantier qui reste encore à défricher par les études vidéoludiques. À ce titre, le dixième art a l’avantage de pouvoir prendre appui sur ses prédécesseurs qui ont constitué de puissants cadres d’analyse à partir desquels il est possible de cartographier le vaste territoire des genres. Dans le champ de la littérature par exemple, on peut citer des références incontournables telles que Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Todorov 1970), Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Fowler 1982) Théorie des genres (Genette et al. 1986) ou encore Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire ? (Schaeffer 1989). L’analyse des genres trouve également écho du côté des théories du cinéma, notamment avec Theories of Film (Tudor 1979), Film/Genre (Altman 1999), Genre and Hollywood (Neale 2000) ou Les genres du cinéma (Moine 2002).
I have a problem: it’s called preaching to the choir. Nobody here lacks faith in the history of games, and I can only hope that my talk will not reduce your enthusiasm. That realization eliminates the need for a homily on the value of historical studies. Instead, I will talk about the possibilities and promises facing the history of games as we plunge forward. What does history offer game studies and what might a history of games give back? These questions guide my thoughts at the end of this conference, which has given so much food for these thoughts.
Copyright (c) 2014 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Interview with Warren Spector conducted by Carl Therrien.
Preserving Game History at The Strong’s International Center for the History of Electronic Games
How should a museum study and preserve the history of video games? The Strong faced that question in 2006 when it began to build its collection of video games and related materials. In tackling this question, The Strong developed approaches that reflect its own particular nature and its engagement with broader trends in historiography and preservation. This experience offers a model for other institutions looking to collect, interpret, and preserve materials documenting the history of video games.
Unrepresented and Under-represented Video Game History
We present history as narrative to examine cause and effect, action and consequence, and the way these shape the subject of that history. Without these, what is the point of history? The desire for narrative structure influences research; one looks for connections between events, influences, motivations, shared origins, diverging alternatives, and closure to round off with. The dangers, of course, are that we see past things differently when we retroactively identify them as precursors, see concurrent events as competing or complementary instead of coincidence, see outcomes as endpoints, and find progressions where none exist. When narrative is given center stage, the result is often more journalistic than scholarly, and less useful even though it may be more memorable.
The Casual Revolution of... 1987 Making Adventure Games Accessible to the Masses
At the turn of the 21st century, the video game industry became increasingly interested in catering to so-called "casual gamers”—that is players interested in easily accessible games requiring limited time, effort and expertise. In his book on the phenomenon, Jesper Juul (2010) has termed “Casual Revolution” the process that became particularly observable with the success of the broadly-reaching yet technically underwhelming Nintendo Wii console. If a revolution is the sudden disruption of an established state of affairs, this casual revolution should presuppose the existence of something like a “hardcore regime”. The book’s focus being on the revolution itself as well as casual game design, very little information is given on the status quo ante; only a general perception that video games used to be mostly designed for (and played by) dedicated young male fans.
Looking at the history of video games through the prism of ludicisation processes
Serious games, news games and persuasive games show that games today permeate numerous other spheres of activity previously considered as separate from the gaming sphere, thus reciprocally blurring the definition of what a game actually is. It seems clear that the characteristics and dichotomies which are habitually used to defined games now need to be put into some perspective. For example, a game is no longer necessarily part of an activity which is carefully separated from the rest of a player’s existence as argued by Caillois (1958) while omnipresent incitements to play games bombard users of all digital devices. The emergence of these new game forms has led to the break-up of the “canonical model” of games defined by Johan Huizinga (1951) and taken up by Caillois, a model which had however provided a robust structure for a large number of theoretical frameworks used in games studies (Schmoll, 2010) and within which games were defined according to a set of intrinsic criteria (unproductivity, freedom, separation from everyday life etc.). Conversely this emergence of previously unseen ludic phenomena has breathed new life into other approaches to games which had perhaps received less coverage in studies of the subject and particularly the ideas developed by Henriot (1989).
Copyright (c) 2026 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
My approach in this paper is not a comprehensive history of Sid Meier’s Civilization series. I have little interest in reciting a general account of the series’ development or the early history of its developer Microprose, the company founded by Bill Steele and Sid Meier. My purpose is to provide a few methodological incursions into different, fragmentary pieces of the series history and engage with the games on technical, social and design-centric grounds not usually mentioned in general popular histories. I want to highlight the process of historical study and the many paths revealed in looking deeply into a computational object; seeing it situated in a design tradition and in the context its larger influence on a society of players.
The challenge of collecting and exhibiting videogames is a significant issue for contemporary museums. This paper provides a case study of Beam Software’s successful text adventure of the 1980s, The Hobbit, which offers some insight to the challenge of videogames for museums. The Hobbit is an exemplary text in this regard because it exists in so many variant forms, which raises questions about what/where/ and which one is the game.
As the History of Games International Conference has demonstrated, the past decade has seen an exponential rise in video game scholarship and preservation as video games edge their way into cultural institutions, most notably libraries, university archives, and museum collections. Commercially released video games were never intended to be collected for their historical significance, but their cultural impact is undeniable. The saturation of video games in contemporary culture is more evidence of their importance and validates their place in cultural institutions, including art museums. These institutions beginning to collect or acquire complex works, such as video games, are faced with new challenges from acquisition to exhibition to conservation. Conservation is particularly challenging because the choices a conservator or preservationist makes now will determine how, or even if, a video game is accessible to a future audience.
A History of Real-Time Strategy Gameplay From Decryption to Prediction
It is quite usual in strategy games to claim that strategies have a history of their own, chess being the canonical example (Murray 2002). The common strategies of a certain game change over time—often called the “metagame”— and can be retraced from a historical perspective. StarCraft II’s (Blizzard Entertainment, 2010-) community goes as far as to write histories of specific matchups (Alejandrisha et al. 2012), but every strategy game in some regards opens a space where gameplay can evolve.
Arcade-Style Game Design – Pinball’s Connections to Coin-Op Videogames
One of the three main traditions applied to the study videogames within the humanities is the history and analysis of board games, card games, or games like Dungeons & Dragons. While by no means representing the totality of the authors' research and methods, books including this angle include Rules of Play (Salen/Zimmerman 2003), Game Design Workshop (Fullerton et al. 2004), and Challenges for Game Designers (Brathwaite/Schreiber 2009). Tabletop game traditions are unlike the other categories that I'll address in that they are oftentimes games primarily of strategic decision making rather than skillful real-time execution. That is, when I as a player choose to move a knight to a certain position, or play a particular poker hand, that decision is easily performed with complete accuracy, without risk of error from overshooting or undershooting the knight's move, or accidentally playing a different hand in cards. Where chance is involved it generally can be calculated beforehand as a fixed probability as when rolling dice, spinning a spinner, or considering what the other and next cards may be in poker.
The Ends of History and the Tyranny of the Algorithm
In his sequel to the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, Douglas Adams (1980) described the ideal place where media historians can go for a night out on the town. It is called Milliway’s, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Here guests travel to the edge of the time-space continuum to enjoy rare and exotic dishes while watching the universe destroyed at the end of history. It is easy to see why this is the preferred dining spot of many historians, for it is here that the Janus gods of historians -- Temporality (Chronos) and Necessity (Ananke) – become one. At the end of the universe, all events become inevitable and the problem of an uncertain (and contested) future disappears from the world (like the elves leaving Middle Earth).
Techno-industrial celebration, misinformation echo chambers, and the distortion cycle
What is the object of video game history? If we are to believe many of the journalistic accounts published in the last 20 years, the answer to that question appears to be painfully obvious.
Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2012
Coming from University of Minnesota Press, Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (2012) continues the publisher’s tradition of releasing academic books on anime and Japanese popular culture, such as the annual journal Mechademia (2006– today), Thomas Lamarre’s The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (2009) and translated works from Japanese such as Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (2009) and Saitô Tamaki’s Beautiful Fighting Girl (2011). In Anime’s Media Mix, Marc Steinberg sets out to explore the links weaving together media, characters and toys in Japan since the 1960s. To do so, he chooses as his centerpiece example the transmedial movements of the character Atomu (also known as Atom or Astro Boy in English), the protagonist of the Tetsuwan Atomu manga and its anime adaptation that first aired in 1963. In what Steinberg describes as a “major historical coincidence,” 1963 is also the year that the term media mix entered the marketing lexicon in Japan (p. 138).
Copyright (c) 2015 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The Game Freaks Who Play With Bugs – In Praise of the Video Game Xevious
In 1967, the large-scale American amusement device manufacturer Williams and Company4 released a pinball machine by the name of Shangri-La. In the history of pinball, 1967 was the time when cabinets were already approaching their full maturity. First manufactured in the middle of the 1930s, pinball machines evolved at a similar pace to that of the economic growth in the United States. It is during this period that they thrived to the point of becoming one of the representative devices of electromechanical game machines alongside bingo and slot machines.
Like the film critic Donald Richie, most Westerners visitors to Japan who notice pachinko are overwhelmed by it. Roland Barthes, in his book on Japan, Empire of Signs, devotes a short chapter to this “collective and solitary game.” (Barthes, 1982, p. 27) Once you notice pachinko you discover parlours everywhere occupying the prime real-estate at the intersections of major thoroughfares in Japanese cities. These parlours have large and glittery entrances inviting you into a space of play unlike the arcades. You are assaulted by the noise of thousands of steel balls falling through pins, and the grey smell of cigarettes burning in the small ashtrays at each console. You walk down rows of brightly decorated vertical consoles, careful not to trip on the trays of shiny balls won by players, and young aides greet you politely while you try to figure out this popular game.
Formation et développement des cultures autour de la « Geemu ongaku » (1980-1990)
This article attempts to analyze the history and diffusion of the "game ongaku" (or video game music) in Japan. Despite their essential role in the formation of a Japanese video game music culture, two themes, scarcely addressed in Western research, guide this analysis: the development of a gaming culture in game centers (arcades) and the birth of the Dragon Quest console game series. The goal: to demonstrate how two phenomena of the same period – the 1980s - but from different contexts have definitively established a "golden age" of Japanese video game music and laid the foundation for what would become the modern Japanese music culture.
This article elaborates how residual traces of a video game's national and cultural origins – overlooked or ignored due to limited funding – can be an ethically responsible part of game localization when the goal of localization is not simplyimmersion, full adaptation and economics, but the generation of cultural interaction. This article proposes that the moments of incongruity, when a player (uncomfortably) encounters residual traces, are a positive aspect of cultural circulation in that they help players learn how to become hybrid citizens. Far from being failures of localization, as industry professionals contend, thisarticle elaborates how these traces should be seen as successes of responsible localization practice.
Nintendo's Paper Mario franchise is aesthetically and mechanically centered around the interactions between the flat and the solid; at its core is a playfulness with dimensionality that consistently highlights not only the 2D or 3D, but the 2.5 dimensional. Through this lens, I examine each of the four Paper Mario video games, as well as their predecessors and related merchandise. The 2.5 dimensionality that is consistently thematized in these games enables us to think about a more holistic conception of the "media mix" that not only actively breaks down the distinctions between different media, but also between the worlds "within" and "outside" of the game.
Kawaii Japan: Defining JRPGs through the Cultural Media Mix
Despite frequent reference in academic and fan work to the video game genre known as JRPG (Japanese role-playing game), little critical scholarship has been dedicated to understanding how to conceptualize the genre. Frequently, JRPGs are framed as a cultural curiosity, with the “J” operating as a cultural appendix to established and well-defined genre of RPGs. The coordination between government and industry central to soft power, however, offers insight into the construction of the genre by highlighting the role the market plays in promoting culture. Drawing from representations of and discourse about gender in the MEXT’s Cool Japan campaign, this paper argues that JRPGs should be framed as one elemental part of a larger creative ecology that comes to define Japan and its culture overseas.
8-Bit Manga: Kadokawa’s Madara, or, The Gameic Media Mix
I would like to take the liberty of opening this article in this important journal special issue on the “Geemu et/and media mix” with a reflection on the title of my 2012 book, whose subject in many ways intersects with that of this special issue: Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Characters and Toys in Japan.
Geemu, media mix, et les études du jeu vidéo au Japon
It is safe and true to say that Japan’s contribution to the development of the video game industry is undeniable. Nevertheless, despite the impact of games and franchises such as Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985-), Final Fantasy (Square Enix, 1987-) or Pokémon (Nintendo, 1995-), specifics issues related to Japanese video games (terebi geemu or simply geemu in Japanese) only achieved in raising the interest of a small group of fans.
Les modalités de captation d’attention dans l’art immersif à l’ère de l’anthropocène
Our attention, targeted by the hyperindustrial society (Bernard Stiegler) is the object of an economy (Yves Citton), and its modalities of capture take the form of strategies annihilating « (...) the processes of psychic and collective individuation that characterize the life of the mind. » (B. Stiegler). We will observe how contemporary artists, through their immersive art devices, capture our attention on these disruptive phenomena and strategies of de-individuation of the human being. In Tino Sehgal’s work, the capture of attention becomes a mode of creation that is quick to fill the space of the Palais de Tokyo with visual poetry, sound, and imaginary narratives. The spectator becomes a cog of an immense performative « machinery », driven by actors-performers to live different gratifying immersive experiences, tinged with inter-human relationships. For Maurizio Cattelan, the diversion of attention is used as a process to delay perception in order to, in the end, astound us and denounce genocidal policies. Trapping the spectator in the heart of a scripted white cube, while shocking consciences, in tantamount to alerting them to the dangers of the de-individuation produced by « a shadowless world, illuminated 24/7, devoid of otherness (...). » (Jonathan Crary). Finally, in the era of the Anthropocene, the societal disruption and the de-notisation planned by the cultural industry, a humanist alternative on the fringes of international speculative markets rehabilitates the psychic individual: the one of The New sponsors society. The spectator is established as a co-author of a piece based on « trust to get along and no longer by an act of authority. » (François Hers).
Copyright (c) 2020 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Éléments naturels et espaces immersifs dans les œuvres de Doug Aitken à l’ère de l’Anthropocène
Beyond a new geological era, the Anthropocene is also an experience and an imaginary world twisted by visual and plastic contemporary artists. Since the end of the XXth century, artists like Doug Aitken examine the relation of the museum visitor to artistic work and its environment. They create audiovisual media as well as installation art from natural elements, fauna and flora, in order to place the visitor in a visual, physical and mental immersive situation, so that he/she can become aware of phenomenons such as time passing and perception boundaries.