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In this article, Regina Seiwald explores how paratexts accompanying video games mirror their playfulness by being equally playful. Seiwald commences by probing what playfulness means in relation to the game and the player. This theoretical foundation allows for the analysis of two highly ludic paratexts, namely playable games incorporated in other games and playful marketing strategies. Various exemplary games are discussed to explore how video games that are surrounded by playful paratexts encourage players to critically reflect on their own act of playing and playfulness in general without destroying the illusion created by their fictive worlds.

This study analyses mechanisms through which Cold War themed video games played from an American perspective propagate US authoritarianism by reiterating concepts of Americanness generated in popular media during the Cold War era. These video games work with cultural, historical, and social stereotypes to generate a dichotomy between good and evil and they heavily rely on emotions and morality in their portrayal of communist, socialist, and Soviet enemy forces. Popular concepts associated with America are used to propagate democracy and (political) freedom, while simultaneously vilifying their adversaries. Through drawing parallels to American Cold War propaganda and its utilisation of popular media, this paper asks how stereotypical notions of America are generated through symbolism in an engagement with material objects as well as thoughts and beliefs. Topics engaged with are media control, free speech, programming, espionage, intrigues, paranoia, trust, and the morality of the individual in a hyperreal environment. This study is conducted in reference to Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis (2001), Freedom Fighters (2003), Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010), Tom Clancy���s Splinter Cell: Conviction (2010), Homefront (2011), and Alekhine���s Gun (2016). By considering mechanisms of propaganda in these games, it is shown how manifestations of Americanness are generated in them and how they affect friend and foe images., gamevironments, No. #13 (2020)

At a time when technology progressively pushes back nature, the sexual act runs the risk of being denaturalised. The notion of the sublime, which I argue is how humans react to the machine as a surrogate for nature and as a sexual stimulus in Crash (1973), is therefore of central interest in this article. Ballard himself has described Crash as ‘the first pornographic novel based on technology’ (1973, 6). This engagement with a technologised sexuality is explored as a subjective narrative stance, which grants authenticity to the fictive alter ego, who can probe alternatives to an extra-textual reality. This narrative mode is notably potent in relation to the narrator’s estimation of the merge between sexuality and technology in the form of car crashes uniting Eros and Thanatos. I therefore suggest that Crash can be read as an attempt to localise the natural and human in a world dictated by artificiality and technology.

Video games that incorporate other games in their game-world create interlacing fictional levels. These can be used to engage with concepts of “gameness” from within the game itself without abandoning the aesthetic illusion created by the macrogame, in which the minigame is embedded. In my paper, I delve into the question why we are willing to immerse ourselves in video game worlds even if they contain elements that overtly emphasise the fictionality of these games. I explore concepts of illusion as well as interlacing fictional levels from a theoretical perspective before I research various modes of games within games with or without an impact on the gameplay of the macrogame as well as their relationship to illusion. The outcome of my paper will be a comprehensive study of the critical potential of minigames, which is accomplished by discussing a large corpus of different video games.