Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> One of the greatest problems in contemporary social science is the decline of participation in political and civil spheres. Video games and digital worlds are promising new modes of association capable of connecting people in a way that passive forms of mass communication are unable to. This essay shows the strength of video games as a medium for associational life by turning to the thought of one of the preeminent philosophers of collective action: Alexis de Tocqueville. Although Tocqueville lived long before the advent of video games, his theory of democracy provides an excellent account of the benefits of civic associations. Among these are teaching enlightened self-interest, creating feelings of efficacy, protecting individuality, and establishing meritocratic norms. Video games are capable of providing each of these goods, making them an effective supplement, though not a replacement, to traditional associational life in an age of increasing fragmentation. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Digital games are major part of popular culture. They are also an important part of the history of play and as such they deserve to take their rightful place in our cultural legacy. However, they have received little attention in the academic literature on preservation. Despite this lack of interest, some institutions have recognized the significance of preventing the loss of these valuable materials but to what extent is their longevity ensured? What is the current status of game preservation? What are the challenges facing institutions as they ‘‘play games with cultural heritage?’’ This article provides an overview of the current state of play and, using a comparative case study analysis, provides an insight into the issues, which lie ahead. </jats:p>

<jats:p>Released in 2008 for the Playstation 2, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 is a roleplaying game with a diverse genre pedigree. It is a combination of dungeon-crawling RPG and social interaction ‘‘datesim,’’ all wrapped up in the thematic trappings of occult mystery and Japanese popular culture. Using Ian Bogost’s (2007) concept of procedural rhetoric, this article examines how Persona 3’s use of genre conventions and gameplay-based rhetorical frames construct the game’s message, as well as how those structures can inform our understanding of genre for the digital game form.</jats:p>

<jats:p> Body movement-controlled video games (BMCVGs) are a genre of video gaming utilizing body movement to control game play that is becoming increasingly popular. Despite the popularity and widespread interest in BMCVGs, there is limited information available about the nature of the players’ experiences when they engage in BMCVG play. A total of 14 young adults played 6 different BMCVGs for 6 min each and performed traditional cycling exercise in a randomized order. After two familiarization sessions, on a third occasion, subjects rated their enjoyment and completed the Flow State Scale-2 questionnaire. The BMCVGs were rated more enjoyable than traditional cycling exercise and the Flow dimensions Challenge-Skill Balance and Merging of Action and Awareness scored significantly higher than the norms for exercise activity and instead corresponded more closely to the norms for sporting activity. These findings suggest that BMCVGs could therefore act as a gateway for sedentary individuals to become involved in sporting activities. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Videogames’ ability to depict cultural iconographies and characters have occasionally led to accusations of insensitivity. This article examines gamers’ reactions to a developer’s use of Africans as enemies in a survival horror videogame, Resident Evil 5. Their reactions offer insight into how videogames represent Whiteness and White privilege within the social structure of ‘‘play.’’ Omi and Winant’s (1994) racial formation theory notes that race is formed through cultural representations of human bodies organized in social structures. Accordingly, depictions of race in electronic spaces rely upon media imagery and social interactions. Videogames construct exotic fantasy worlds and peoples as places for White male protagonists to conquer, explore, exploit, and solve. Like their precursors in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, videogame narratives, activities, and players often draw from Western values of White masculinity, White privilege as bounded by conceptions of ‘‘other,’’ and relationships organized by coercion and domination. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Games are woven into webs of cultural meaning, social connection, politics, and economic change. This article builds on previous work in cultural, new media, and game studies to introduce a new approach to productive play, the promise of play. This approach analyzes games as sites of cultural production in times of increased transnational mediation and speaks to the formation of identity across places. The authors ground their explorations in findings from ethnographic research on gaming in urban China. The spread of Internet access and increasing popularity of digital entertainment in China has been used as an indicator of social change and economic progress shaped by global flows. It has also been described as being limited by local forces such as tight information control. As such, gaming technologies in China are ideal to ask broader questions about digital media as sites of production at the intersection of local contingencies and transnational developments. </jats:p>

<jats:p> For all the critical attention paid to dystopian landscapes in recent literature and film, a similar dystopian turn within gamespace has been largely overlooked. The authors contend that post-apocalyptic digital games merit the same critical examination as their literary and cinematic counterparts, arguing that such games can provide a meaningful site in which questions about the future of technology play out against the dialectic of utopian and dystopian alternatives. Specifically, this article argues that the popular console game BioShock simultaneously celebrates and interrogates utopian notions of technological progress and free will embedded within prevailing industrial and academic conceptions of convergence. The authors explore the differing, yet complementary, conceptions of utopia put forth by critical theorists and the games industry in order to examine how BioShock’s ambivalence toward technology—and technologies and practices of media consumption in particular—complicates more idealistic and totalizing forecasts for the future of media convergence. Building upon Alexander Galloway’s treatment of gamic action as an ‘‘allegorithm’’ that permits procedural exploration and mastery of dominant control protocols in the information age, the authors analyze the way in which BioShock operationalizes the ‘‘control’’ logic of convergence. By performing a close reading of the game’s ideological content as well as its procedural strategies of transmediation, they link BioShock’s ambivalence to the multifaceted, often conflicting nature of convergence discourse and practice within the digital games industry. </jats:p>

<jats:p> By moving away from a model of ritual that focuses on magic and fantasy worlds, this article seeks to broaden the discussion of ritual actions, performances, and objects in first- and third-person video games. Ritual will be understood through the idea of a “ritual logic” that enables the wider associations of ritual in the virtual as opposed to the real world to be analyzed, and through the key element of repetition in game play. In part derived from the intertextuality of video game genres and associated popular culture artifacts such as films and novels, ritual logic contributes to the players’ knowledge and understanding of what ritual is and what ritual does in the game, and how ritual can be used to progress its narrative and play trajectories. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The use of computer games and virtual environments has been shown to engage and motivate students and can provide opportunities to visualize the historical period and make sense of complex visual information. This article presents the results of a study in which university students were asked to collaboratively solve inquiry-based problems related to historical disease epidemics using game-based learning. A multimethod approach to the data collection was used. Initial results indicated that students attended to visual information with more specificity than text-based information when using a virtual environment. Models of student’s decision-making processes when interacting with the world confirmed that students were making decisions related to these visual elements, and not the inquiry process. Building on theories from the learning sciences, such as learning from animations/visualizations and computer-supported collaborative learning, in this article, the authors begin to answer the question of why students learned what they did about historical disease epidemics. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Virtual reality (VR) transports the mind beyond the two-dimensional bounds of text and photographs; it engages the imagination and forms visual and cognitive links. VR can free participants from stereotyped bounds projected by society. Interconnections: Revisiting the Future applies these innate qualities of virtual worlds to weave together individual threads of singular disciplines into a multidisciplinary tapestry of exploration. The authors are creating an accurately modeled 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair where users can freely explore 140+ pavilions set on 660 virtual square acres. The myriad of pavilions offer links to multiple disciplines—science, engineering, technology, national and international political/cultural affairs, art, history, and architecture. The project provides on-site museum experiences with its partners, the New York Hall of Science and Queens Museum of Art. The three-dimensional virtual Fair environment serves as a central portal that links together not only subjects within that environment but also experiences at these partnering institutions. </jats:p>