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Survivance as a legal concept names the right to inheritance and more specifically the condition of being qualified to inherit a legacy. In an interview Jöelle Rostkowski, Vizenor explains: "[s]urvivance . is the heritable right of succession or reversion of an estate." This aspect of survivance is overlooked by those scholars of Vizenor's work who focus on the conjunction of the terms "survival" and "resistance", terms that are important most fundamentally as they intersect with the capacity to transmit and to accept the inheritance of the past that is itself the intersection of survival and resistance. Survivance is not a static object or method but a dynamic condition of historical and cultural survival and also of political resistance, practiced in the continual readiness of Indigenous communities to accept and continue the inheritance passed on by elders and ancestors. In this sense, claims made by recent Indigenous video-game developers to speak to youth through digital media by providing games that transmit tribal legacies of language, stories, ontologies, and ways of knowing and being in the world, speak to the practice of survivance. Indeed, the particular capacity of video games to engage oral storytelling and active participation in the making of stories offers a powerful means to encourage and sustain survivance. This essay focuses on the analysis of video game mechanics: the rules of the game that determine the opportunities made possible for, and the limitations imposed upon, player interactivity. Vizenor's concept of survivance enhances understanding of the powerful decolonizing potential of mechanics in Indigenous video games and these game mechanics illustrate in particularly clear ways the workings of survivance as an active engagement in the politics of what Vizenor calls "native presence." In the interview with Jöelle Rostkowski referenced above, Vizenor remarks: "The character of survivance creates a sense of native presence, a critical, active presence and resistance, over absence, historical and cultural absence, nihility and victimry."This essay seeks to show how the sense of a critical, active Indigenous presence is created, by analyzing the mechanics of two different types of Indigenous digital games. Resistance to "historical and cultural absence, nihility and victimry" is explored through the 2-D fixed shooter arcade game Invaders (2015 Steven Paul Judd, Elizabeth LaPensée, Trevino Brings Plenty). The Iñupiat puzzle platformer video game Never Alone (2014 Upper One Games) enacts survivance as the epistemological practice of a living, tribal presence past, present, and future. In these digital games, mechanics are designed to compel players to enact survivance. Understanding this relationship underlines the importance of the decolonizing potential of Indigenous video games.

Every Day the Same Dream is a short art game created by the radical game designers Molleindustria, formed and fronted by the Italian artist Paolo Pedercini. The game was produced in 2009 and has since garnered praise within and without the gamer community. This essay pursues a sustained close reading and playing of the game with the goal of providing an interpretation of its complex political meanings. During the exegesis of the game I explore new, interpretive forms of analysis that have arisen around the video game medium (i.e. Espen Aarseth's notion of simulational hermeneutics and Alexander Galloway's concept of gamic allegory). I argue that these forms tend to privilege the understanding of game mechanics and player actions over visual and narrative representations in a game. While these new hermeneutical methods are undeniably useful for uncovering the significance of a particular video game I show how they can be used to marginalize and eclipse interpretive methods focused on gamic representations, thus potentially truncating a game's overall significance or "message." This essay demonstrates that Every Day the Same Dream's political meanings cannot be exhausted by focusing exclusively on game mechanics or player actions, and that a critic needs to pay close attention to the entirety of a game's meaningful modalities—including visual and narrative representation—in order to understand the totality of a game's significance. In the end, while I engage with recent theories of interpretation within game studies, the core of the essay pursues a viable, political reading of Molleindustria's haunting, remarkable dream.

What do stories in games have in common with political narratives?This book identifies narrative strategies as mechanisms for meaning and manipulation in games and real life. It shows that the narrative mechanics so clearly identifiable in games are increasingly used (and abused) in politics and social life. They have »many faces«, displays and interfaces. They occur as texts, recipes, stories, dramas in three acts, movies, videos, tweets, journeys of heroes, but also as rewarding stories in games and as narratives in society - such as a career from rags to riches, the concept of modernity or market economy. Below their surface, however, narrative mechanics are a particular type of motivational design - of game mechanics.

Board games have often been recognised as a tool to model complex concepts in abstract environments for entertainment, education, and research in fields such as military and artificial intelligence. With more board games being designed and published, it is timely to draw attention towards board game design strategies and mechanics which capture the attributes that drive game play. The game design and the mechanics used define the structure, functionality, and play experience of these games. Towards this end, this paper presents a data driven review of board game mechanics and play-related attributes, their interactions and relationships. The analysis expects to draw insights into how board games can be utilised across diverse domains as a tool to understand and explore complex concepts through abstract models. The investigations focus on identifying the trends and patterns of board games being published and their individual mechanics over time. Moreover, the correlation between mechanics and play-related attributes such as game complexity, rating, and duration are explored. The interactions and similarities between individual mechanics based on co-occurrence, mutual information, and clustering based approaches are also illustrated. The results show that the level of complexity and engagement of a game is not a simple function of the set of mechanics used, but rather the interactions that exist between mechanics, and the nature of their specific implementation are the critical factors in determining play experience of a board game.

Recent research has attempted to describe meaningful experiences with entertainment media that go beyond hedonic enjoyment. Most of this research focuses on noninteractive media, such as film and television. When applied to digital games, however, such research needs to account for not only the content of the medium, but also the unique dimensions of digital games that distinguish them from noninteractive media. Experiences with digital games are shaped by the game mechanics that define the users' interaction with game content, as well as by the opportunities for social interaction that many games offer. We argue that the complex interplay of these dimensions (narrative, mechanics, and context) facilitates or inhibits meaningful user experiences in ways that are unique to digital games.

Learning and playing represent two core aspects of the information and communication society nowadays. Both issues are subsumed in Digital Education Games, one major field of Serious Games. Serious Games combine concepts of gaming with a broad range of application fields: among others, educational sectors and training or health and sports, but also marketing, advertisement, political education, and other societally relevant areas such as climate, energy, and safety. This work focuses on collaborative learning games, which are Digital Educational Games that combine concepts from collaborative learning with game concepts and technology. Although Digital Educational Games represent a promising addition to existing learning and teaching methods, there are different challenges opposing their application. The tension between a game that is supposed to be fun and the facilitation of serious content constitutes a central challenge to game design. The often high technical complexity and especially the instructors' lack of control over the game represent further challenges. Beyond that, the distinct heterogeneity of learners who often have different play styles, states of knowledge, learning speed, and soft skills, such as teamwork or communication skills, forms a pivotal problem. Apart from that, the vital role of the instructor needs to be taken into account. Within the scope of this dissertation, the problems mentioned above are analyzed, concepts to solve them introduced, and methods developed to address them. The first major contribution contains the conceptualization of a framework for adaptation of collaborative multiplayer games as well as for the control of those games at run-time through an instructor using the Game Master principle. The core concept hereby addresses the design of a model to represent heterogeneous groups and to represent collaborative Serious Games. Based on that, a novel concept for adaptation of collaborative multiplayer games is developed, implemented, and evaluated. Automatic recognition and interpretation of game situations, as well as determination of the most well suited adaptation based on the recognized situations, is a major challenge here. Further, a concept is developed to integrate an instructor in a meaningful way into the course of the game, giving him/her the necessary resources to recognize problems and to intervene and adapt the game at run-time. Therefore, it will be taken into account that the elaborated concepts are applicable in a generic way independent of the underlying game. The second major contribution of this work is the conceptualization and design of a simulation of players and learners in a collaborative multiplayer game that behave realistically based on a player, learner, and interaction model. This is supposed to enable an evaluation of the adaptation and Game Mastering concepts using freely configurable player and learner types. The concepts introduced and developed within this thesis have been thoroughly evaluated using a twofold approach. As a test environment, a collaborative multiplayer Serious Game was designed and implemented. Within that simulation environment, the developed Game Mastering and adaptation concepts were assessed and tested with large sets of virtual learners. Additionally, the concepts were evaluated with real users. Therefore, two different evaluation studies with a total of 60 participants were conducted. The results of the conducted evaluations help to broaden the areas of application of Serious Games as well as to improve their applicability, hence raising acceptance among instructors. The models, architectures, and software solutions developed within this thesis thus build a foundation for further research of multiplayer Serious Games.

With regard to the contemporary discussion of gamifying processes in various domains, it is obvious that there exists a naive notion that simply adding leaderboards/pins/points/badges would lead to success. Even though other instances of gamification mechanics could actually perform better. The literature has not yet managed to prove whether different domains require different mechanics in order to impact on engagement and motivation. To address these critical issues, a literature review was conducted across six domains that examined game mechanics, including their uniqueness for gamification research. Findings show a myriad of mechanics with different sharing properties, which are more or less domain-congruent. These mechanics can be separated into four levels: general, mostly similar, partly similar and unique. The findings enable a better understanding of how to employ situation-congruent mechanics to a given context, which is important for both research and practice.

Purpose
The purpose of this study is to examine consumer attitude toward gamification in the context of over-the-top (OTT) media service. The particular focus of this paper is on game mechanics from the mechanics-dynamics-aesthetics framework and its effects on consumer attitude toward both gamification and OTT media service provider brand.


Design/methodology/approach
A 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects factorial experiment to examine the three core elements of game mechanics – components, controls and courses on consumer attitude, which was operationalized in eight vignettes with a sample size of 296.


Findings
It was found that the three elements in game mechanics demonstrated a multiplicative effect. The different combinations of elements in game mechanics would result in eliciting different consumer attitudes toward gamification and brand. Despite one combination that attained a high positive consumer attitude toward gamification in OTT, that same combination was not effective in creating a high positive attitude toward the OTT provider brand. The findings demonstrate the need for OTT providers to be clear of their gamification objectives before selecting the combination of game mechanics.


Research limitations/implications
This study adds to the body of knowledge on consumer attitude toward gamification, especially in the OTT market where there is still literature is limited.


Practical implications
OTT providers should determine their objectives for using gamification and design the game mechanics according to the optimal combination of elements – components, controls and courses.


Originality/value
According to the author's knowledge, this is the first paper to examine consumer attitude toward gamification and OTT provider based on game mechanics. It provides an understanding on the interaction of elements in game mechanics and shows that different element combinations can be used to meet different goals.

This project investigates how players of digital games apply their own play with the intent to transmit political messages to other players. Acts of activism are collected from a sample of commercial multiplayer online games; three taxonomies are proposed of which one is used to present the findings, and popular patterns or structures of activism are identified. It is found that in-game activism often takes its cue from activism in everyday life, but that some original topics emerge, for example, the ownership of virtual worlds and practices of in-game political activism such as novel forms of rallies. Current political activism often appears to utilize generic and widely-shared game mechanics, rather than mechanics specific to individual games or genres. Games are therefore selected for their topics, availability, and costs, and popularity with the target audience ; This project investigates how players of digital games apply their own play with the intent to transmit political messages to other players. Acts of activism are collected from a sample of commercial multiplayer online games; three taxonomies are proposed of which one is used to present the findings, and popular patterns or structures of activism are identified. It is found that in-game activism often takes its cue from activism in everyday life, but that some original topics emerge, for example, the ownership of virtual worlds and practices of in-game political activism such as novel forms of rallies. Current political activism often appears to utilize generic and widely-shared game mechanics, rather than mechanics specific to individual games or genres. Games are therefore selected for their topics, availability, and costs, and popularity with the target audience

This article investigates how players of digital games apply their own play with the intent to transmit political messages to other players. Acts of activism are collected from a sample of commercial multiplayer online games; three taxonomies are proposed of which one is used to present the findings, and popular patterns or structures of activism are identified. It is found that in-game activism often takes its cue from activism in everyday life, but that some original topics emerge, for example, the ownership of virtual worlds and practices of in-game political activism such as novel forms of rallies. Current political activism often appears to utilize generic and widely-shared game mechanics, rather than mechanics specific to individual games or genres. Games are therefore selected for their topics, availability, and costs, and popularity with the target audience.

The article examines the structural foundations of interactions between gamers in online games on the example of the youth segment of Russian audience of computer games. The analysis of the main elements of in-game mechanics structuring the communicative interactions of gamers in online games is carried out on the basis of the B. Latour's actor-network theory, allowing us to consider the game as an actor of socio-technical interactions. According to the results of the author's research conducted in 2019–2020 by means of online questionnaires, the mechanisms of long-term and short-term association of players in online games are highlighted and the structural bases of their interaction are characterized: the dominant and secondary motives of group formation in video games, the factors of prolongation of contacts between players. It was revealed that gamers give preference to short-term gaming teams with a free exit. A long-term play group is recruited from people who know each other, with whom they maintain contacts in everyday life while playing is perceived as a form of joint leisure. It is shown that an online game creates a field for active construction of new social connections between the members of the gaming community. The potential of the possibilities of including game mechanics and "non-human" actors in new forms of gamification of education is outlined.

Since 2007, a surge of new gambling opportunities, often referred to as social casino gaming, has emerged on social media platforms and mobile apps. At the present time, the social casino gaming industry is unregulated and challenges our conventional understanding of gambling and risk. Currently, the minimum age requirement to create a profile on Facebook and engage in social casino games is 13 years of age. The emergence of this new gambling frontier, and its low barrier to entry, inevitably adds a new layer of risk and raises several ethical considerations for public health and risk regulation professionals, particularly to developers' use of game mechanics and advanced data analytics. Using findings from a virtual ethnographic case study focusing on Zynga Poker (ZP), this article will call attention to potential ethical and risk concerns about game mechanics and the use of big data to personalise players' gameplay to optimise player engagement and monetisation.

This study examines how politically themed computer games function as digital campaigning tools during elections. To make sense of this understudied phenomenon, the concept of political campaigning games (PCGs) is introduced and defined as advergames that promote a partisan political position in an electoral context. The study bridges theoretical literatures from game studies, media studies, and political communication to mount the argument that PCGs convey a persuasive political message through the rhetorical devices deployed in political cartoons as well as computer games. Methodologically, I develop a framework for rhetorical game analysis and apply it to 4 games from European national elections. The analysis expounds the games' strategic political messages as well as how they are rhetorically argued through game mechanics. The findings reveal that PCGs exemplify changing dynamics in digital campaigning, reify the enduring effectiveness of conflict framing, and codify how games can be designed to enact political rhetoric.