Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> Researchers are encouraged to study the social uses and effects of gaming before stereotypes form and guide both their own and the public's thinking. The rise of online games comes at a particular historical moment for social reasons as well as technological ones and prompts a wide array of questions. The transition of public life from common spaces to private ones is exemplified in the move of game play from arcades to homes. As our real-world civic and social institutions experience steady decay, what is the impact of transferring our social networks and communities into virtual spaces? Will games become our new third places, and how will that affect us? These are questions researchers can answer but ones that need to be addressed before ideologues, defenders, and attackers muddle empiricism. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Game studies entering academia means that games are finally positioned at the heart of a dedicated field of learning. There is a tension however as the need and demand for game studies has faced the opposing, structural forces that slowdown the development. It is hard to ignore the cultural significance of digital games and play, particularly as numerous game play experiences underlie personal relations and histories within an ICT-Penetrated society. Rather than a single “game culture,” there are several of them, as visible and invisible sense-making structures that surface not only in games themselves, but in the language, practices, and sensibilities adopted and developed by groups and individuals. As the academia is loaded with expectations of providing games industry with workforce or opportunities for more innovative and experimental game culture, it is good to remember that the fundamental task of universities is to create knowledge and promote learning. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article looks at the specificity of the image within contemporary video games and examines what might be thought of as the distinct qualities of a game gaze that is different from the cinema gaze. This necessitates a consideration of the specific temporality of video game play where the aesthetic is generated in a maelstrom of anticipation, speculation, and action. Video games prioritize the participation of the player as he or she plays, and that player always apprehends the game as a matrix of future possibility. The focus, always, is not on what is before the player or the “what happens next” of traditionally unfolding narrative but on the “what happens next if I” that places the player at the center of experience as its principle creator, necessarily engaged in an imaginative act, and always orientated toward the future. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Recent scholarship has made it clear that people within synthetic worlds (otherwise known as virtual worlds or MMORPGs) produce commodities and currencies with market value, whereas other work has established the increasing importance of social networks within and between worlds and across the boundary that appears to separate them from the rest of users' lives. To tie these two threads together and account for the use of these environments for the development of expertise and credentials, the author proposes adding a third form, cultural capital, to the mix and outlines a model for understanding capital in all its manifestations: material, social, and cultural. This model will make it possible to explore how actors within synthetic worlds transform, or parlay, these forms from one into the other and how these forms are used across all the domains wherein users act, blurring any qualitative distinction between virtual and real worlds. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Coordination game theory is quite important to a number of literatures but has had very few direct empirical tests because that would require experimental participation by large numbers of people. Large games however can produce natural experiments: situations that through no intent of the designer offer controlled variations on a phenomenon of theoretical interest. Unlike any other social science research technology, such games provide for both sufficient participation numbers and careful control of experimental conditions, making them like Petri dishes for social science. This article examines two examples of games as Petri dishes for macro-level coordination effects: (a) the location of markets inside EverQuest and (b) the selection of battlefields inside Dark Age of Camelot. </jats:p>

<jats:p> In this essay, I discuss the ways in which, in the context of Lineage, the game that’s actually played by participants is not the game that designers originally had in mind, but rather one that is the outcome of an interactively stabilized (Pickering, 1995) “mangle of practice” of designers, players, in-game currency farmers, and broader social norms. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Although recent critical studies have begun to acknowledge the aesthetic connections that films and video games share, too often these studies neglect to extend an analysis to consumer culture. As video games now make up an important segment of the film industry’s market, this critical engagement is needed to extend the scholarship on video games. Specifically, this essay critically engages the concept of interactivity as an important theoretical construction in the study of video games. Through an analysis of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King video game, the authors discover that interactivity can be limited in a way that augments the synergistic connections between films and video games. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Hybrid reality games (HRGs) employ mobile technologies and GPS devices as tools for transforming physical spaces into interactive game boards. Rather than situating participants in simulated environments, which mimic the physical world, HRGs make use of physical world immersion by merging physical and digital spaces. Online multiuser environments already connect users who do not share contiguous spaces. With mobile devices, players may additionally incorporate interactions with the surrounding physical space. This article is a speculative study about the potential uses of HRGs in education, as activities responsible for taking learning practices outside the closed classroom environment into open, public spaces. Adopting the framework of sociocultural learning theory, the authors analyze design elements of existing HRGs, such as mobility and location awareness, collaboration/sociability, and the configuration of the game space, with the aim of reframing these games into an educational context to foresee how future games might contribute to discovery and learning. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Live action role-playing games share a range of characteristics with massively multi-player online games (MMOGs). Because these games have existed for more than 20 years, players of these games have a substantial amount of experience in handling issues pertinent to MMOGs. Survey and review of live action role-playing games, whose participant count can be in the thousands, reveal that features such as size, theme, game master-to-player ratio, and others interact to form complex systems that require several different groups of control tools to manage. The way that these games are managed offers a variety of venues for further research into how these management techniques can be applied to MMOGs. </jats:p>