Journal articles on the topic '190202 Computer Gaming and Animation'

Abstract Ian Hughes CITP MBCS, Senior Analyst loT at 451 Research and Chair of the BCS Animation and Games SG, takes us on a journey inside the humble desktop PC of the past to explain its potential for an even brighter future.

Machinima is a computer imaging technology typically used in games and animation. It prints all movie cast properties into a virtual environment by means of a camera positioning. Since cinematography is complementary to Machinima, it is possible to simulate a director’s style via various camera placements in this environment. In a gaming application, the director’s style is one of the most impressive cinematic factors, where a whole different gaming experience can be obtained using different styles applied to the same scene. This paper describes a system capable of automatically profile a director’s style using fuzzy logic. We employed 19 output variables and 15 other calculated variables from the animation extraction data to profile two different directors’ styles from five scenes. Area plots and histograms were generated, and, by analyzing the histograms, different director’s styles could be subsequently classified.

Abstract: In this paper, the pathfinding algorithm has been implemented using Unity 3D. Unity-3D is a game engine that provides a 3D environment to statistically incorporate various multimedia data into one platform. It was developed by Unity Technology in the year 2005 and has become one of the most popular platforms for developing 2D and 3D games. The gaming environment provides several elements such as the PhysX physics engine, animation system, terrain editor, etc. Pathfinding is a dynamic process in which the plotting of the shortest path or route between two points is being determined by a computer application. Algorithms are defined as the steps required for completing a particular objective or a task.

This article presents a case of collaborative pedagogy of digital humanities involving a virtual version of historic Salem, North Carolina. “Hidden Town in 3D” is a partnership between Middle Tennessee State University’s Public History, Animation, and Aerospace programs, and Old Salem Museums and Gardens. The object of Hidden Town in 3D is to use digital technologies to recover and represent the stories of the African Americans of Salem. The anticipated outputs for this project are an augmented reality application that can be used on-site at Old Salem, allowing visitors to see slave dwellings where they once stood and a virtual tour using gaming technology of the entire town in the year 1860 with African-American stories and homes reintegrated. Along with enhancing the museum’s visitor experience, these outputs enhance the educational experiences of undergraduate and graduate students through interdisciplinary, project-based learning. Thus, the technical work of modeling, animating, and augmented reality benefits teaching, historical scholarship, and museum offerings.

This article is one of the first to consider the digital phenomenon of computer-generated imagery (CGI) pornography, a highly significant site of convergence that combines the technologies, cultures and aesthetics of digital animation, video games and pornographic film. As much of this controversial new content is produced through the hacking of licensed video game franchises, CGI pornography typifies the democratic possibilities of the digital economy. However, this bizarre digital subculture exemplifies too the tension between ludic and labour-intensive digital practises: its production is embedded simultaneously in the anti-productive play of gaming, hacking and pornography, and in the intensive, neo-liberal labour practises associated with free labour and the video game industry. This article explores CGI porn as a specific site of convergence that fundamentally alters the aesthetics and function of digital pornography and relatedly the libidinal subject that is interpolated in this crucial aspect of digital culture. The filmic genre of pornography has a long tradition of producing affective engagement through vicarious access to the material body; its evocations of veracious materiality and presence are only amplified in a digital culture of virtuality and dematerialization. This article analyses how the technological construction of CGI porn is foregrounded in its images and films, highlighting the codes and patterns of the genre and blending them with a stark revelation of the restrictions and capabilities of CGI technology. The article explores how multiple instances of hypermediacy and hypersignification in CGI porn expose and affectively engage with the fact of convergence itself: that is, revealing technological capacities and limitations of digital animation and eroticizing its interpenetration with the films’ diegeses, aesthetics and representations of movement become the central function of this new cultural output. The libidinal focus of this type of digital pornography fundamentally shifts, then, away from the human body and the attempt to gain vicarious imagistic access to it through digital technologies. Instead, the labour of the animator, and the coding and characters they borrow from video game designs, become the libidinal focus of computer-generated pornography. As this new digital phenomenon uncovers and eroticizes the workings of CGI, so it dismantles the veracity and materiality promised by ‘real body’ digital pornography: CGI porn’s stark foregrounding of its technological constructedness clarifies the artificiality of its ‘real body’ counterpart. This article posits, then, an important new site of convergence. Pornography is a central node in the culture, politics and economics of digital technology, and the ways in which its convergence with CGI practises and video game culture has produced not just an entirely new digital phenomenon, but has fundamentally altered digital pornography's conception of the desirous subject and the material body, are crucial.

A Proposition of Mobile Fractal Image DecompressionMultimedia are becoming one of the most important elements of the user interface with regard to the acceptance of modern mobile devices. The multimodal content that is delivered and available for a wide range of mobile telephony terminals is indispensable to bind users to a system and its services. Currently available mobile devices are equipped with multimedia capabilities and decent processing power and storage area. The most crucial factors are then the bandwidth and costs of media transfer. This is particularly visible in mobile gaming, where textures represent the bulk of binary data to be acquired from the content provider. Image textures have traditionally added visual realism to computer graphics. The realism increases with the resolution of textures. This represents a challenge to the limited bandwidth of mobile-oriented systems. The challenge is even more obvious in mobile gaming, where single image depicts a collection of shots or animation cycles for sprites and a backdrop scenery. In order to increase the efficiency of image and image texture transfer, a fractal based compression scheme is proposed. The main idea is to use an asymmetric server-client architecture. The resource demanding compression process is performed on the server side while the client part decompresses highly packed image data. The method offers a very high compression ratio for pictures representing image textures for natural scenes. It aims to minimize the transmission bandwidth that should speed up the downloading process and minimize the cost and time of data transfer. The paper focuses on the implementation of fractal decompression schemes suitable for most mobile devices, and opens a discussion on fractal image models for limited resource applications.

The Digital Age has only just begun to change how we play, learn and work. In the 21st century technology knows no bounds smart devices such as tablets and phones are entering our everyday lives and are available at affordable prices, have great functionality and offer superior performance. We live in the Internet of Things era where digitization is the integration of digital technologies into everyday life.During this era of fast paced progression the education system must also adapt, develop and evolve itself in order to facilitate the new technological advancements and with it so must the limits of traditional learning be pushed to new heights. Digitalization is one such tool which will help us to transform the old paper educational system into a digital paperless one.Digital education involves the following main advantages: Online courses: Developed by experts in their fields and providing students with lessons which are accessible in real-time; Online exams: Making the examination process convenient for both teachers and students; Interactive content: Students are granted access to an interactive interface which lets them review multimedia content such as videos, presentation and hyperlinks; Animation: The visualization of content, presents the concept in a simplified way with the help of animation; Communication: Students and Teachers are connected in virtual classroom /chat, blog, platform/ designed to provide immediate feedback.Digital education requires a new classroom model to make learning difficult subject matter more exciting and interactive. “Gamification” in education increases motivation through engagement and offers many possible benefits including the following: students taking ownership over their creations; a more relaxed atmosphere which in turn facilitates a more fun and focused environment; the progress is visible through indicators; students often feel more comfortable in a gaming environment.In the following article we are going to present the integration of the core principles of gaming using different development platforms (Scratch / Game Maker / VBA in PowerPoint) and share the results which we achieved when we used this method to train our students grades 5 through 7 in a "gamified" classroom for the most popular international computer science and mathematics competition BEAVER.

Inverse kinematics (IK) has been extensively applied in the areas of robotics, computer animation, ergonomics, and gaming. Typically, IK determines the joint configurations of a robot model and achieves a desired end-effector position in robotics. Since forward and backward teaching inverse kinematics (FABRIK) is a forward and backward iterative method that finds updated joint positions by locating a point on a line instead of using angle rotations or matrices, it has the advantages of fast convergence, low computational cost, and visualizing realistic poses. However, the manipulators usually work in a complex environment. So, the kinematic chains are easy to produce the interference with their surrounding scenarios. To resolve the above mentioned problem, a two-step obstacle avoidance technology is proposed to extend the basic FABRIK in this study. The first step is a heuristic method that locates the updated linkage bar, the root joint, and the target position in a line, so that the interference can be eliminated in most cases. In the second step, multiple random rotation strategies are adopted to eliminate the interference that has not been eliminated in the first step. Experimental results have shown that the extending FABRIK has the obstacle avoidance ability.

This article discusses the main ways of using neural networks and machine learning methods of various types in computer games. Machine learning and neural networks are hot topics in many technology fields. One of them is the creation of computer games, where new tools are used to make games more interesting. Remastered and modified games with neural networks have become a new trend. One of the most popular ways to implement artificial intelligence is neural networks. They are used in everything from medicine to the entertainment industry. But one of the most promising areas for their development is games. The game world is an ideal platform for testing artificial intelligence without the danger of harming nature or people. Making bots more complex is just a small part of what neural networks can do. They are also actively used in game development, and in some areas they already make people feel uncomfortable. Research is ongoing on color and light correction, real-time character animation and behavior control. The main types of neural networks that can learn such functions are considered. Neural networks learn (and self-learn) very quickly. The more primitive the task, the faster the person will become unnecessary. This is already noticeable in the gaming industry, but will soon spread to other areas of life, because games are just a convenient platform for experimenting with artificial intelligence before its implementation in real life. The main problem faced by scientists is that it is difficult for neural networks to copy the mechanics of the game. There are some achievements in this direction, but research continues. Therefore, in the future, real specialists will be required for the development of games for a long time, although AI is already coping with some tasks.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind is a unique interactive 360° video experience of the Mar Menor that manifests the Anthropocene effects on the landscape as augmented, surreal and metaphysical interpretations of the artist’s experiences, during their residency and available secondary scientific data of the Mar Menor ecosystem. Through environmental, social, economic and cultural observations and encounters the team developed an immersive 360° environment that incorporates video and audio recordings with augmented, imaginary and predicted realities transformed from scientific data in obscure and profound guises. This 360° telematic installation incorporating live audience interaction within the original 360° video experience was exhibited at the Centro Cultural Puertas de Castilla in Murcia in May 2019. This collaborative project was developed following a ten-day residency on the Mar Menor, a 170 km² saltwater lagoon on the south-east coast of Spain in September 2018, where the majority of the primary research took place by gathering 360° video material from observations, experiences and interviews. The project has been developed by a team of three UK artists, each bringing specialist experience and knowledge of 360° video to undertake the research and create a unique understanding and manifestation of the changing ecosystem of the Mar Menor. This collaborative project includes and combines Paul Sermon’s co-located telematic experiences in 360° live video environments, Charlotte Gould’s immersive 360° animated augmented reality and Jeremiah Ambrose’s gaze-controlled navigation through 360° video narratives. This practice-based team of artists undertook this research using a range of video and gaming software and advanced hardware devices, including Insta360 Pro 8K video cameras and Oculus Rift head-mounted-displays in conjunction with live video switchers. This has produced a range of ultra HD 360° outputs involving stereo 8K and real-time 4K environments with augmented live 360° video and animation sequences through live chroma-keying effects.

This issue presents eight research papers focusing on different aspects of intelligence techniques and their applications in computer games and simulations. They are extended papers from those accepted and presented at the International Symposium on Intelligence Techniques in Computer Games and Simulations that was held in Shiga, Japan on March 1-2, 2007. The issue starts with a paper entitled gUsing Automatic Calibration with Microscopic Traffic Simulation,h which focuses on the use of a genetic algorithm for searching parameter spaces of a microscopic traffic simulation. The second paper, gOn-Line Fault Detection and Compensation of Hydraulic Driven Machines Using Modelling Techniques,h presents the use of modelling information for the fault detection of hydraulic driven machines as well as for the compensation of incipient faults. The third paper, gGeneration of Character Motion by Using Reactive Motion Capture System with Force Feedback,h focuses on animation making with reactive motion data generated from the interaction with force feedback and the virtual environment. The fourth paper, gModeling of Wood Aging Caused by Biological Deterioration,h looks into an application of an ant colony optimization algorithm to generation of wood aging patterns caused by biological deterioration. The next three papers are related to network games. The fifth paper, gIntelligent Synchronization for Mirrored Game Servers: A Real Case Study,h examines the effectiveness of an intelligent optimistic synchronization scheme for mirrored game server architectures in real multiplayer-online-game environment. The sixth paper, gI3P: A Protocol for Increasing Reliability and Responsiveness in Massively Multiplayer Games,h presents a peer-to-peer (P2P) approach for minimizing the server bottleneck in online gaming and for increasing response and reliability. The seventh paper, gHaar Wavelets for Online-Game Player Classification with Dynamic Time Warping,h presents an application of Haar wavelet for reduction of online game players' action sequences used in player classification. Finally, the eighth paper, gDeveloping Natural Language Enabled Games in SCXML,h looks into the potential of SCXML for the game design and implementation. As the guest editor of this special issue, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the authors in this issue for their hard job. Special thanks go to the anonymous referees for their assistance in the review process. Finally, I wish to thank JACIII staffs for their helps in coordinating the publication of the issue.

Despite modern game systems adopting motion matching to retrieve an appropriate short motion clip from a database in real-time, existing methods struggle to support complex gaming scenes due to their inability to adapt live the motion retrieval based on the context. This paper presents the design and implementation of a context-aware character animation system, synthesizing realistic animations suitable for complex game scenes from a large-scale motion database. This system, called dynamic motion matching (DyMM), enables geometry and objects aware motion synthesis by introducing a two-phase context computation: an offline subspace decomposition of motion clips for creating a set of retrieval sub-spaces tailored to specific contexts and a subspace ensemble matching to compare relevant sub-features to determine the most appropriate motion clip. We also show the system architecture and implementation details applicable to a production-grade game engine. We verified the effectiveness of our method with industry-level motion data captured by professional game artists for multiple configurations and character controllers. The results of this study show that, by finding motion clips that comply well with the scene context, one can leverage large motion capture datasets to create practical systems that generate believable and controllable animations for games.

AbstractMethods from the field of computer graphics are the foundation for the representation of geological structures in the form of geological models. However, as many of these methods have been developed for other types of applications, some of the requirements for the representation of geological features may not be considered, and the capacities and limitations of different algorithms are not always evident. In this work, we therefore review surface-based geological modelling methods from both a geological and computer graphics perspective. Specifically, we investigate the use of NURBS (non-uniform rational B-splines) and subdivision surfaces, as two main parametric surface-based modelling methods, and compare the strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches. Although NURBS surfaces have been used in geological modelling, subdivision surfaces as a standard method in the animation and gaming industries have so far received little attention—even if subdivision surfaces support arbitrary topologies and watertight boundary representation, two aspects that make them an appealing choice for complex geological modelling. It is worth mentioning that watertight models are an important basis for subsequent process simulations. Many complex geological structures require a combination of smooth and sharp edges. Investigating subdivision schemes with semi-sharp creases is therefore an important part of this paper, as semi-sharp creases characterise the resistance of a mesh structure to the subdivision procedure. Moreover, non-manifold topologies, as a challenging concept in complex geological and reservoir modelling, are explored, and the subdivision surface method, which is compatible with non-manifold topology, is described. Finally, solving inverse problems by fitting the smooth surfaces to complex geological structures is investigated with a case study. The fitted surfaces are watertight, controllable with control points, and topologically similar to the main geological structure. Also, the fitted model can reduce the cost of modelling and simulation by using a reduced number of vertices in comparison with the complex geological structure. Graphical Abstract

Simulacra represents the culmination of research project exploring spatial and environmental similarities called Mixed-Reality Machinima. The work considers the phenomenological similarities between Grand Theft Auto IV and New York City. Mixing live footage shot in NYC with real-time-rendered video game footage and Second Life footage is what defines this mixed-reality experimental film genre. All research was completed under the supervision and guidance of Dr. David Harris-Smith in the New Media and Communications Masters program at McMaster University. Machinima as a film genre is still young, and while it resonates within gaming culture it has created minimal impact outside of this informed community. However its potential to create film quickly, creatively, and effectively make it a powerful and underutilized tool. What differentiates machinima from computer animation is the production process. An animation production each scene is rendered by a computer in stages, Cinematography, lighting, environments and characters develop slowly, until a scene is ready for final rendering and that output is what the audience experiences. Machinima production more closely resembles a film set, where the environment, lighting, and characters are always rendering in real-time, like a video game. Characters move and interact in real time by joystick, keypad, or keyboard and the screen view is recorded directly and edited, and that output is what the audience experiences. The final work can take many forms, the mixed reality prefix indicates the addition of real footage with rendered footage yet retains filmic conventions. Simulacra resides within and explores the constraints of cinematic practice as described by filmmaker and academic Leo Berkeley (as cited in Horwatt, 2008). With research into film production practice, low and micro budget filmmaking, improvisation, and machinima, Berkeley is a foremost expert on the subject. The narrative and cinematic devices employed in Simulacra directly and intentionally connote filmic expectations; these devices are no less derivative than the content. The work in Berkely's terminology would be less avant-garde and more experimental, as the construct devising it is contrary to normal film making techniques. The work relies directly on them for privilege; just as a frame or a plinthe contextualize art from the world, film and filmic narratives derive contextuality from cinematic devices. Thus the intention in Simulacra has been to employ them openly, strategically allowing the widest possible entry within the media landscape the work is designed to inhabit. In this way the work is meant to test/potentialize a viewership outside of the informed machinima audience. The term 'mixed reality' carries the connotation of referential multiplicity and the contextuality/phenomenology of reality. By 'mixing' them there is an indication that there can be more than one; which intentionally problematizes the distinction between the real and the non-real. This multiplicity creates an interesting reference to fact vs fiction, and whether ideologically there is a disjuncture in mixing them. It is this disjointed effect of multiplicity that Simulacra means to creatively consider.

The computer game is perhaps the fastest growing and most quickly evolving cultural leisure technology in the western world. Invented as a form just under 40 years ago with the creation of Space War at MIT, computer and video games collectively account for hundreds of billions of dollars in sales across the world. And yet critical analysis of this cultural form is still in its infancy. Perhaps the sheer speed of the development of games may account for this. Thirty years ago, strategy games were screens of text instructions and a prompt where you could type a weather forecast. Today pretty much all games are flawlessly shaded and rendered polygons. The technology of film has barely changed at all in the same period. In any case, the critical study of games began in the eighties. The focus initially was on the psychology of the gamer. Most game players were children and teenagers during this period, and the focussing of their leisure time on this new and strange computer technology became a source of extreme moral panic for educators, parents and researchers alike. Later, research into the cultures of gaming would become more nuanced, and begin to detail the semiotics and narrative structures of games. It is in that kind of frame that this article is positioned. I want to look closely at a particular strategy game series, The Settlers. Firstly, however, a description of the strategy game genre. Strategy games put the player into a simulated inhabited environment and give the player almost total control over that environment and its simulated inhabitants. The strategy game has many genres, including the simulation game and the god game, but the sub-genre I will focus on in this paper is the real-time strategy game. The game requires the player to develop a functioning economy, geared around the production of weapons and armies, which are sent out to combat neighbouring tribes or armies. Real-time games typically give greater tactical control of the armies to the player, and slightly less detailed economic control. The aim is basically to amass as much gold or whatever as possible to buy as many troops as possible. However, the game I am about to discuss is, in addition to being a simple game of war, a very interesting simulation of economic and logistical constraints. The Settlers is series of fantasy computer strategy games developed by the German game design firm Blue Byte. The three extant Settlers games can be considered an evolution of game design rather than a continuing narrative, so, given the time constraints, for the purposes of this paper I will address only one game in the series, the most recently released title, The Settlers 3. The Settlers 3 tells the story of three expansionist empires, the Romans, the Egyptians, and the Asians, who have been thrust onto an uninhabited continent by the gods of their peoples to determine who is the fittest to survive. In other words, the game is founded from the beginning on a socio-Darwinian premise. In each level of the game, the settlers of each tribe must, under their player's direction, build an efficient and well maintained colony with a fully operating economy in order to achieve a set objective, which is usually to wipe out the opposing tribes by building up a large army, though it may be also to amass a predetermined level of a particular resource. Each level begins with about twenty settlers, a small guard hut to define the limits of the borders and a barely adequate supply of wooden planks, stone slabs and tools with which to begin to construct the economy. The player chooses building types from a menu and places them on the screen. Immediately the appropriate number of settlers walk across the landscape, leaving visible tracks in their wake, to pick up tools and supplies in order to construct the building. Typically, the player will order the construction of a woodcutter's hut, a sawmill, a stone cutter and a forester to ensure the steady flow of the basic construction materials to the rest of the colony. From this point more guard huts and towers are constructed to expand into new territory, and farms are built to feed the miners. Once constructed, the mine produce coal, gold and ore, which is sent down to the smelters to make iron bars (to make swords and tools) and gold bars (to pay the troops). Luxuries such as beer and wine are produced as a sacrifice to the gods. This results in rewards such as magical spells and promotion of the soldiers. Occasionally, incursions of enemy troops must be dealt with -- if they take a guard tower in battle, the borders, represented by lines of coloured flags, shrink, leading to the collapse and destruction of any building outside the boundaries. Finally, sufficient swords, bows and spears are produced, the soldiers are promoted, and they set off to pillage and destroy their neighbours' territory. If the previously mentioned enemy incursions were frequent enough, the final conflict where the player's warriors brutally annihilate the enemy is tremendously satisfying. The problematics of that particular game construct are left as an exercise for the audience. When territory is taken, the villages of the enemy go up in smoke and their resources are left lying on the ground, for the settlers to pick up and use for the benefit of the player. One of the things that make the game so fascinating to play is the complexity of the simulation. It must be said right away that the game employs many abstractions to make it playable and not utterly boring. For instance, only the miners out of all the settlers actually need food, and the mechanism by which new settlers are actually created is a bit vague (you construct a building called a "residence", and when it's completed, new setters simply troop out. And there only seem to be male settlers, unless you play the Amazons). Nonetheless, the game still quite explicitly details things most games of its type gloss right over. Unlike most games, pulling out all the stops in production just leads to bottlenecks where the transportation infrastructure can't get the goods to their destinations. Production levels have to be carefully monitored and throttled back where necessary to ensure the smooth flow of resources from A to B, C and D. Resources themselves -- coal lumps, gold bricks, fish, loaves of bread, swords --are modelled individually: you can actually track the process whereby an individual sheaf of wheat is harvested, picked up by a settler, carried off to the mill, turned into flour, sent to the bakery, made into a loaf of bread, and delivered to the coal miner for consumption. With its attention to the gritty detail of getting stuff from one place to the next, The Settlers is one of the very few truly logistically precise strategy games. Before I begin the analysis proper, I want to introduce some key terms that I'll be using a bit idiosyncratically in this paper. I'll be talking about gameplay quite a bit. Gameplay is a bit of a sliding signifier in the discourse of gaming theory -- loosely speaking it's that indefinable something that gets a player heated up about a game and keeps them playing for days on end. But here I want to be more precise. I'll offer a strategic definition. Gameplay is a way of quantifying the operations of a kind of economy of desire that operates between the player and the game itself. This economy has, as its constitutive elements, such factors as attention span, pleasure, ratio of novelty to repetition. These elements are in constant circulation in a game and the resulting economy is responsible for a good deal of the dynamism of the experience: in other words, the gameplay. What I want to focus on in this paper is what comes from the precise moment where two, quite central impulses of gameplay are in perfect balance, just before the first surrenders its grasp and the second takes over. The first impulse of play consists of two elements -- the visual presentation of the game, i.e. the pretty pictures that draw you in, and the narrative pretext of the story, the thing that gives what you are doing some kind of sense. It is on these two elements that classical ideological analysis of gameplay is typically founded. For instance, the archetypal platform game where all the female characters are helpless maidens who only exist as a way of getting the masculine protagonist into the action. The second impulse of gameplay is what might be called the "process", the somewhat under-theorised state where the visual trappings of the game and the motivating story line have slipped into the background, leaving only the sense of seamless integration of the player into the game's cybernetic feedback loop. The visual presentation and narrative pretext of The Settlers draws the player into a familiar fantasy of pre-modern existence. Presented to the player is a beautifully rendered virgin wilderness, filled with rolling hills, magnificent mountain ranges and vast forests, resounding with the sounds of the stream and brook, and the rustling of the wildlife. Into this wilderness the player must project an empire. That empire will consist of an elaborately detailed network (and I use the term deliberately) of cottage industries, labourers, paths, commodities, resources, defensive structures and places of worship. Real-world economic activities are consummately simulated as complex flows of information. The simulation is always fascinating to watch. Each node in this network, be it a fisherman's hut, a bakery, or a smelter, is exquisitely rendered, and full of picturesque, yet highly functional, animation. For instance, the process of a fisherman leaving his hut, going to a stream, setting his line, and catching a fish is visually expressive and lively, but it also is a specific bottleneck in the production process -- it takes a finite time, during which the carrier settlers stand around waiting for produce to deliver. This, then, is the game's crucial dialectic. What is depicted is a visually sumptuous, idyllic existence, but on closer inspection is a model of constant, uninterrupted, backbreaking labour. There are not even demarcations of day and night in the game -- life is perpetually midday and the working day will last forever. To put it less simply, perhaps, the game purposefully reifies the human social condition as being a reflexively structured mechanism of economic production under the guise of an ideologically idyllic pastoral paradise. It positions the player as not merely complicit in this mechanism but the fundamental point of determination within it. The balancing moment then is the point where the player begins to ignore or take for granted the visual lushness of the game's graphics and to focus instead on the underlying system, to internalise the lessons of the game -- the particular ideological and discursive assumptions about how economic and political systems successfully operate -- and to apply these lessons to the correct playing of the game, almost like a transition between REM dream-state sleep and deep sleep. And the analogy to sleep is not entirely specious -- critics and players alike have noted the way time stops when you play a game, with whole nights and days seemingly swallowed up in seconds of game time. The type of focus I am describing is not an interpretative one -- players are not expected to gain new insights of meaning from the act of playing at this new level of intensity, instead they are simply to blend their thoughts, actions and reactions with the dynamic processes of the game system. In a sense, a computer game is less a textual form than it is a kind of tool: in the same way proficient word processor users becomes so fluent in the operations of their software that the trappings -- toolbars, menus, mouse -- become secondary to the smooth continuous process of churning out words. Such a relationship does not exactly inspire thoughtful contemplation about the repressive qualities of Microsoft's hegemonic domination of office software, and the similar relationship with the computer game makes any kind of reflexivity about the gameplay's cultural referents seem simply counterproductive. It's an interesting dilemma for the theorist of gaming -- the point at which the underlying structure comes most clearly into focus during the state of play/analysis is also the moment when one is most resistant to the need to draw the wider connections. In this paper, I've tried to take a suggestive approach, to point out some of the ways that ideological assumptions about culture and production can be actualised in a simulated environment. And hopefully, I've also pointed out some of the pitfalls in a purely ideological analysis of games. Games are never just about the ideology. A nuanced analysis from a cultural studies point of view must also take into account the quite complex ways games not only articulate certain ideologies but they also complicate them. Beyond that, analysis must take into account the ways that games go beyond the paradigm of textuality and begin to take on the aspect of being whole systems of symbolic manipulation and transmission. It is only at this point that any kind of comprehensive and theoretically precise engagement with games as cultural texts and processes can be seriously begun. References Crawford, Chris. The Art of Computer Game Design. Berkeley, California: Osborne / McGraw-Hill, 1984. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Fleming, Dan. Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1996. Freidman, Ted. "Making Sense of Software: Computer Games and Interactive Textuality." CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Ed. Steven G. Jones. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995. 73-89. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London and New York: Verso, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Nick Caldwell. "Settler Stories: Representational Ideologies in Computer Strategy Gaming." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/settlers.php>. Chicago style: Nick Caldwell, "Settler Stories: Representational Ideologies in Computer Strategy Gaming," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/settlers.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Nick Caldwell. (2000) Settler Stories: Representational Ideologies in Computer Strategy Gaming. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/settlers.php> ([your date of access]).