Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> This article develops and expands on earlier work of the authors, which posits the idea of considering gamers as a (media) audience—enabling parallels to be drawn with wider literatures and debates on audience research and media fan cultures. In particular, drawing on some illustrative examples from qualitative research (funded by the British Academy) into the everyday lives of gamers, this article suggests that the concept of ‘‘scene’’ (borrowed most notably from music fan studies) allows us to understand how gaming and game-related narratives are located within the ordinary and everyday lives of gamers but take on greater significance within certain physical locations. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This study aimed to explore the use of digital games among older adults and provide a set of ‘‘benchmark data’’ with respect to the uses and gratifications of these players. To find out who these older players of digital games are, what games they prefer, and what playing motives they have, an exploratory survey was administered among 124 individuals aged between 45 and 85 years old. The results of this survey confirm that the majority of the older digital game audience exists of solitary players with a particular fondness for casual PC games. The most popular playing motive among the respondents was challenge, while social interaction proved to be the most important predictor for the time that respondents invested in playing digital games. </jats:p>

<jats:p> A two-part quantitative and qualitative study of role players within a virtual game world examined their prevalence, practices, and identity formation. Drawing on unobtrusive behavioral data captured by the game, combined with a large survey and traditional ethnographic methods, the study found that role players both negotiate identity and use their time online as a moratorium for their offline lives. </jats:p><jats:p> Descriptive results showed that role players are a relatively small, but psychologically burdened subgroup. When examined from the theoretical perspectives of Goffman’s Self-Presentation theory, Huizenga’s Magic Circle, and Turkle’s early work on online identity formation, these players were seen as largely using virtual spaces as creative outlets and for socialization. The worlds also functioned as coping mechanisms for players frequently unable to gain acceptance, social connectivity or social support offline due to their personal situation, psychological profile, or their minority status. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This second of two articles concludes the examination of narrative in computer and video games. Where appropriate, results are schematically and chronologically presented to illustrate the unique nature of interactive narrative. Despite modern advances in games technology and design, the findings reveal notable gaps in areas such as the use of back stories, cut scenes, narrative structure and content, emotions, and archetypes, all of which may be expanded to offer richer and potentially more believable narratives. The findings from both essays draw attention to three salient aspects warranting greater efforts during the future development of interactive narrative: temporal, depth, and depiction. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article argues that the game player’s epiphany when regaining control after an aporia is similar to the metaphorical awareness of the connection between representation and meaning in other art forms. The player may experience what the article calls an embodied metaphor, a heightened sense of the linkage between two different orders of reality, real physical gesture and its on-screen representation. Beyond the aesthetic, this metaphor may also increase the player’s sensitivity to broader informatic or protocological control outside of the game world, a concept Alexander Galloway develops from Gilles Deleuze’s Societies of Control. The embodied metaphor attaches a kinetic materiality to the abstractions of contemporary informatic organization, making them, at least momentarily, concrete and tangible. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Synthesizing research in philosophy and phenomenology, this article offers a sympathetic critique of Vivian Sobchack’s view of digital moving images. Focusing on contemporary first- and third-player video games, it examines how digital imagery inscribes bodily dimensions onto a nonindexical world and the different ways in which we inhabit cinematic and electronic space. More specifically, it draws upon the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to build a phenomenological model of bodies in digital imagery and argues that video gaming is a fully embodied, sensuous, carnal activity. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The rapidly expanding ‘‘free-to-play’’ online game payment model represents a huge shift in digital game commercialization, with cash payments for virtual items increasingly recognized as central to ‘‘free game’’ participation. In this article, the authors look at implications of this trend for gameplay experiences (especially in terms of immersion, fairness, and fun) and describe a fundamental shift in player self-perceptions as consumers rather than members of a gaming community. This change is occurring at a time when the line separating game and physical worlds is becoming less distinct. The new business model entails a subtle but significant reduction in consumer rights awareness, which explains why some members of the greater gaming community are negotiating a new sense of fairness and arriving at a new consensus regarding legitimate gameplay. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article argues how players can control a player character influence interpretation and facilitate engagement within a game. Engagement with player characters can be goal-related or empathic, where goal-related engagement depends on affects elicited by goal-status evaluations whereas characters facilitate empathic engagement. The concepts of recognition, alignment, and allegiance are used to describe how engagement is structured in games. Recognition describes aspects of character interpretation. Alignment describes what kind of access players have to a character’s actions, knowledge, and affects. Allegiance describes how characters elicit sympathy or antipathy through positive or negative evaluation of the character. </jats:p>

<jats:p> First Encounter Assault Reconnaissance (F.E.A.R.), a first-person shooter video game, was released on the Xbox 360 console in 2006. What makes the game analytically interesting is the creation of a game-world designed to promote a feeling of uncertainty in the player. This article explores the ways in which the ambience of uncertainty is developed within the game. Freud’s writing on the uncanny and Kristeva’s closely related work on abjection is drawn upon to explore how the game works rhetorically to place the player in an unsettled psychological state. The article argues that the use of the heavily gendered symbolism of the uncanny and the abject is value laden and that consequently we must pay attention to that which we cast out, reject, repress, and destroy in the fictive universe of video game play. The article concludes by suggesting that texts such as F.E.A.R. may resonate with wider uncertainties around the self in late-modern life. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Do digital games and play mean the same things for different people? This article presents the results of a 3-year study in which we sought for new ways to approach digital games cultures and playing practices. First, the authors present the research process in brief and emphasize the importance of merging different kinds of methods and materials in the study of games cultures. Second, the authors introduce a gaming mentality heuristics that is not dedicated to a certain domain or genre of games, addressing light casual and light social gaming motivations as well as more dedicated ones in a joint framework. The analysis reveals that, in contrast to common belief, the majority of digital gaming takes place between ‘‘casual relaxing’’ and ‘‘committed entertaining,’’ where the multiplicity of experiences, feelings, and understandings that people have about their playing and digital games is wide ranging. Digital gaming is thus found to be a multifaceted social and cultural phenomenon that can be understood, practiced, and used in various ways. </jats:p>