The article proposes a new approach to understanding gamification. Its feature lies in taking into account the criticism expressed against gamification to date. The article examines in detail the history of gamification, it is shown that at its first stage (before 2015) approaches oriented towards extrinsic motivation prevailed, while at the second stage (after 2015) approaches oriented towards intrinsic motivation began to prevail. Ignoring this point just leads to the fact that the criticism expressed in the early 2010s (its main idea was that gamification is a new form of exploitation and manipulation) seems relevant today, although in fact it is no longer so. But it's not just about rethinking criticism, it's also about taking a fresh look at gamification itself, which has continued (since 2011) to be defined as «the use of game design elements in non-game contexts". And this is even despite the fact that such a definition no longer corresponds to the current situation. First, it is confusing by mixing gamification with serious games. Second, it is confusing by limiting gamification to non-game contexts. Third, it is silent about why gamification is used. Fourth, it does not explain exactly which elements are being implemented. Alternatively, we propose our own definition: gamification is a methodology for using metagame elements and mechanics to correct human behavior by creating a favorable emotional background.

The purpose of this article is to propose a method for analyzing the ideological content of video games while taking into account the agency of the players. The interactivity of video games as a medium has been attracting the attention of researchers for many years, raising, in particular, the question of how this unique property serves to broadcast certain ideologies. The ability of games to make ideological statements was discussed by Bogost, Frasca, Aarseth, and many other pioneers of game studies. Video games were analyzed both in the context of older media forms that promoted certain ideas through plots, visuals, and other traditional means, and as unique types of objects that can make statements through rules. I aim to introduce the player-as a subject who is able to transform and conceptualize the game based on their own cultural background - to this discussion. Using James Gibson's theory of affordances, I want to acknowledge the player's freedom of interpretation, the potential to assign one or another ideology to the game in each playthrough. On the one hand, the player acts as a consumer of content; on the other hand, they are a co-author who will use the tools offered by the video game to produce their own statements, to be interpreted independently. This leaves the final decision about the ideology of the game to the consumer; thus, game studies need an approach that allows the analysis of the ideological content of specific games. It is especially important in the light of more and more games prioritizing player freedom and not providing any clear plot or even victory conditions. Of course, research can still proclaim, and rightfully so, that the specific rules in such games bear traces of certain ideological systems - capitalism or secularism, for example. But individual players could undermine such interpretations both at the level of reading the game as a "text”, and at the level of interactive actions inspired by those readings.

This article is dedicated to the issue of achieving consensus in tabletop role-playing games and also addresses the question of how exactly players gain power over the interpretation of events within a tabletop RPG. A tabletop role-playing game presupposes that its participants constantly articulate statements which shift the current configuration of in-game elements and also play the role of being artistic descriptions of said shifts. The alternation and interplay of performative and descriptive statements, their convolution and also the fact that, in tabletop RPGs, unlike in the majority of the rest of the games known to humanity, the same words from natural languages are used both in order to produce a shift in abstract, symbolic structure of a game, and to artistically describe said shift, all lead to the situation where participants cannot tell a proper symbolic system of a given game from other symbolic systems which this game refers to. In this article, we propose an analytical model of a tabletop RPG which would make it possible to draw stricter borderlines between a given RPG's fictional world and its inner symbolic structure. Furthermore, it would 54 allow us to formulate a clearer question regarding the structures of power produced while playing an RPG, and what exactly players gain control over while playing it. Moreover, this model would enable us to explore in detail the processes of the individual and collective interpretation of events in a tabletop RPG, and classify facts within said interpretation in relation to whether they are held to be objectively or subjectively true.

This paper employs Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia as a framework to interpret internal tensions within contemporary digital games. To that end, I propose to acknowledge the multimodal character of entertainment software, with audial, visual, haptic, spatiotemporal and systemic elements of a game in constant interaction. But to properly understand said tensions - frequently dubbed "dissonance" in game criticism - it is important to acknowledge the complex multimodal structure of games that attempt to utilize culturally-rooted ways to describe the world, sometimes trying to combine several such ways at once. As a result, ,game-languages' are born: ways to utilize all game components to cover the specificity of certain narrative genres, to explain the nature of the world in terms consistent with its ideological stance. Quite often, one game combines several game-languages, and their mutually exclusive ideologies are a source of tension and dissonance. To illustrate the issue, I describe how three primary game-languages of Uncharted 3 - the language of Adventure, the language of Heroics, and the language of the Traditional Game - compete to describe an armed conflict to the player.

This article presents the results of an empirical study of the "sportification” of amateur-level competitive computer gaming. How do amateur players, who are unlikely to become professional esports players, turn what is considered to be enjoyable entertainment into a collective activity that demonstrates traits traditionally associated with professional sports, such as self-discipline, a focus on achieving results and overcoming personal limitations? Ethnographic research, consisting of in-depth interviews and participant observations, was conducted in the last quarter of 2019 based on a series of tournaments (Rocket League, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, League of Legends, and Rainbow Six Siege) managed by a student esports club of a Moscow-based university. Such clubs combine different levels of esports practice: players who consider themselves amateurs who attend tournaments "for fun”, players seeking professionalization and who have already received the first modest revenue from their activity, as well as players who achieved the status of a cyberathlete through membership in one of the university teams. Thus, student esports represents an ideal environment for exploring the dynamics of changes in the meanings that players put into their activity, as well as for finding elements holding together what could be called "esports culture”. The analysis conducted in the present article is based not so much on the interpretations of the phenomenon of esports that exists in the field of game studies, as on two classical sociological traditions: the writings of Erving Goffman and Howard Becker, on the one hand, and those of Max Weber and Norbert Elias on the other. As a result, the process of the “sportification” of the amateur practice of competitive computer games is presented in the article as a change in the actors' level of reflexivity: towards the game, towards themselves during play, and towards the world around the game, occurring as they move through the stages of the “career of a competitive player”.

The authors attempt to speculatively reconstruct the concept of the "Soviet computer game”. They propose to consider gaming practices associated with computers as a derivative of the accepted ideological guidelines that accompany the Soviet project of machine modernization. Within this framework, the concept of the Soviet computer game appears as an unrealized historical alternative to the normative game design that has developed in countries with market economies. Despite the industry - or the electronic entertainment market - not having had the time to be properly established in the USSR, there were a number of discursive attitudes regarding the game as such, and the gaming function of computing devices in particular. Even early Soviet pedagogical theories assumed that "playing like a Soviet” involves performing activities structurally similar to labor, where the player becomes part of production. Later, cybernetic discourse, through game theory, indicated the possibility of formalizing any pragmatic activity as a game model; with the advancement of programming, the pragmatics of digital gaming as a way of educating and solving utilitarian tasks was developed. Based on the memoir archive of Soviet cybernetics, and publications in the late-Soviet press, the authors demonstrate that the Soviet computer game was not seen an entertainment product, but a representative model for solving problems in an algorithmic form. Thus, the article is not about specific games that could be called Soviet, but about the logic that guided and set the tone for the interpretation of certain computer-game phenomena in the USSR.

In this article I describe the implicit conceptualization of social order which exists in Death Stranding - localized in both the setting and the mechanics of the game - and compare it with the conceptualization of Thomas Hobbes's "Leviathan". First, the theoretical tension between Death Stranding and "Leviathan” is traced: the speculative conceptualization of the Leviathan and the procedural conceptualization of Death Stranding are compared by clarifying the role that the concepts of action, authorization, right and sovereignty play in Hobbesian theory and the video game. Secondly, the theoretical tension between the political and natural capacities of the Sovereign according to Hobbes is explicated; with the help of material from Death Stranding, a variant of its resolution is proposed, suggesting the conceptualization of the Sovereign-without-a-body: an instance devoid of physical capacity and materiality, yet still capable of maintaining social order as a product of its activity. Subsequently, attention is paid to the mechanics of state expansion in Death Stranding: I describe and analyze how the Sovereign-without-a-body's messenger - the protagonist of the video game - interacts with people outside the Sovereign's zone of influence, convincing them to consent to return to the commonwealth. This theoretical move makes it possible to supplement Hobbes's binary scheme of the state of nature and commonwealth with a third concept - the state of memory, in which the memory of the Sovereign turns out to be a decisive factor influencing whether the commonwealth will be restored to its former boundaries. By explicating the Hobbesian theory of imagination, I demonstrate that - in the state of memory - the Sovereign is contingent, not fully defined, and virtual.

The paper investigates the video game discourse of the Russian state media from 2011 to 2015. Critical discourse analysis serves as a methodological framework for this work, and Foucault's power/knowledge model is used to explain the logic behind the «grotesque discourses». In the Russian press, video games are described as an instance of inculcation, provoking overintense emotions and forcing individuals to commit symbolic acts impossible from the standpoint of "normal" pedagogy. The paper problematizes the mythologization of violence in video games and identifies the main tropes used to establish the connection between video games and violence (murders) as "natural" and "obvious". Particular attention is paid to the publications of Aleksandr Minkin, a reporter at "Moskovskij Komsomolets" ("Moscow Komsomol Member") and one of the most prominent critics of video games, as well as to the media coverage of the first school shooting in Russia (shooting at school № 263 in 2014). It is shown that video games are used in the media discourse as an explanatory principle that allows a shift from the crime to the criminal, to those acts which reveal moral depravity or psychological disorder, and those circumstances which foster criminalism. Pointing to the games helps restore the "normal" connection between social and moral qualities, explaining the crime committed by an honours student from a "good family" as being the result of the depictions of violence in video games affecting the child's psyche. Video games are also described as a factor in shaping the "digital generation" or "generation of gamers" - odd and politically dangerous. The dangers that games create for both gamers and society in general (the non-distinction between the "real" and the "virtual", the illusion of a "possible restart") allow the journalists and experts to insist on strengthening measures of supervision and protection, and expanding legal and medical control.

The article analyzes the implementation of an online educational module and its impact on the organization of the classroom's interaction order. The latter is institutionally constrained by the presence of a goal and the distribution of roles between teacher and students. The introduction of a digital learning platform adds a technological context to the institutional setting. The article considers technologies as possessing communicative affordances - opportunities for action made possible or delimited through their use. Technologies bring new interactive resources to the process of education and can affect the organization of the classroom's interaction order. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we analyzed video recordings of the telemediated interaction of Russia-based students and teachers within a gamified online educational module. We investigate a case in which a student's correct answer is nevertheless corrected by the teacher. We demonstrate that the teacher initiates the correction because they are guided by the ordering of the game elements within the interface. Based on a detailed analysis of the teacher's mouse movement in relation to ongoing turns-at-talk, we show that this orientation is sustained by all participants. The work contributes to classroom interaction studies and affordance theory and develops the methodology of multimodal transcription for mediated contexts. The primary result of the study is an empirical demonstration that the relevance of technological affordances for interactants is situationally produced, and that this process is associated with the interweaving of the institutional and technical context of interaction. The conclusion discusses the relationship between affordances and institutional norms.

Video streaming has become very popular among game enthusiasts. Live streams of computer games, where there is the possibility of communication, are developing as community meeting places; a number of social scientists are calling this a trend towards new online "third places". Today's debate draws attention to the reproduction of a participation culture trough streaming, in the space of which everyone can express themselves creatively, share their opinion, experiences, and information. At the same time, there is a tendency towards the capitalist appropriation of streaming by media businesspersons who stimulate the monetization of participation. Investigating the "sociality of streaming", the authors highlight the supplementation of the "Let's Play" discourse with topics from the current agenda, understanding live streams as public media arenas. In the public arenas of computer game live streams, the dramatization and selection of global or local news information in a specific media format takes place. The article demonstrates this phenomenon using the example of the coronavirus, the most prominent topic of spring 2020. The pandemic vocabulary appears in different sections of Twitch game streams, such as titles, audio/ video content, and the chat. Banter and obscene vocabulary are characteristic of the game stream space, however, this is combined with charity fund-raising broadcasts in support of doctors.

In this paper we conduct an analysis of the critical narratives of Stardew Valley and compare them to other relevant videogames in order to develop new possibilities for an ecological critique of capitalist extractive economies. Critical narratives of this game are aimed primarily at the alienating conditions of labour and deeply devastating modes of production under capitalism that impact and severely damage the environment. Analysing these narratives, we superimpose the immediate messages of the game with the procedural rhetoric and material conditions of their existence. Over the course of our analysis, we highlight a material-narrative dissonance which, in the case of Stardew Valley, fails to function as a communicative strategy of the game and remains its mere external contradiction. Although the game's critical narrative may seem overly utopian and its political imaginary a bit underdeveloped, the game elaborates on concrete ways to tackle the alienation of labour and resolve the ecological crisis. In addition to this, the paper covers the history of the interplay between the video game industry and the field of global ecological crisis research. We compare the attempts to raise awareness of the videogames' own materiality that preceded Stardew Valley. We conclude that Stardew Valley utilises the language of sustainable co-existence and wasteless local production, expanding this logic both to the sphere of labour and the spectrum of environmental problems. In the case of ecological critique, some gameplay decisions in Stardew Valley enable us to come up with new strategies aimed at creating critical narratives about the environment in videogames. Thus supplementing Stardew Valley's findings with critical tropes derived from other games (mainly, Rain World), we were able to gather a set of theoretical instruments that could facilitate the creation of games about ecosystems. 244 Following Donna Haraway's emphasis on the crucial role of narrative framing ("it matters which stories tell stories"), we highlight new opportunities for the entire medium of videogames.