![]() Primarily concerned with how players relate imaginatively to the often major dissonance between gameplay and narrative in digital games, this thesis questions how the literate players of games reconcile these complex texts imaginatively. This thesis explores the ways in which suspension of disbelief works in digital games. They also underscore the fact that gamers cannot access a game’s algorithms directly and must instead construct an image of the game system, whose degree of fidelity towards the actual rules of the game may greatly vary (depending, for instance, if the gamer is playing to progress through the game, as opposed to playing to master the game mechanics). Their gamer- and gameplay-centric model features three interconnected spirals which represent the cycles gamers have to go through in order to answer gameplay, narrative, and interpretative questions, in both heuristic and hermeneutic fashion. To cast off the implications of redundancy or stagnation contained in a circle, they resort instead to the figure of the spiral, which accounts for the gamer’s progression through the game. As video games will always be defined by what the player is doing, Dominic Arsenault and Bernard Perron tackle the concept of gameplay in “In the Frame of the Magic Cycle: The Circle(s) of Gameplay.” Opposed to the spatial metaphor of Huizinga’s “magic circle” of gameplay, they conceptualize the partaking in a game as a cognitive frame, as an ongoing process.
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