Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> Simplistic by today’s standards, the graphical adventure genre has been overlooked in favor of the vast narratives unfolding across more recent three-dimensional virtual worlds and the complex social relationships within online environments. Yet this genre established practices in game construction that allow developers to foreground narrative experiences. Graphical adventure games made with the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion (SCUMM) engine like Ron Gilbert’s The Secret of Monkey Island were among the earliest to produce a sense of a temporal narrativity across the game’s many spaces that is not inscribed explicitly at the level of code. These games are therefore key to understanding the origins of video games as a narrative medium. This essay examines the source code to the SCUMM engine in order to show both how its spatialized data structures were used to produce temporal effects similar to those found in more familiar narrative media and how Monkey Island parodies the engine’s mechanisms. </jats:p>

<jats:p> A common way theorists look at virtual worlds is to see them as spaces separated from the real world; other theorists challenge this position by arguing that life online often crosses the threshold between the real and the virtual. Here, the author argues that the problem of the division between the real and the virtual has its roots in a philosophical distinction between the transcendent and the immanent. This article examines ethical controversies in the Chinese massively multiplayer online game Zhengtu, a popular “freemium” game in which the players who spend the most real-world money become the most powerful. Drawing on player’s ethical judgments and classical Chinese philosophy, the author sees how Chinese gamers do not see the game world as an opportunity to create an alternative self, but instead are encouraged to use the game to improve their holistic selves, a project which is inevitably connected to Beijing’s neoliberal goals. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Faith, the protagonist of Mirror’s Edge, marks an empowered female character that is not hypersexualized, and the decision to employ a first-person perspective (thereby subverting any gaze offered by a third-person view) supports this design objective through gameplay. But despite Faith’s welcome debut on the main stage of commercial gaming, the game raises more significant questions through its engagement with the multifarious concept of “fluidity” or “flow,” which is integral to both the gameplay of Mirror’s Edge and the themes in it. Is Faith’s flow—in line with radical critical moves in literary history and cultural theory of the late 20th century to gender this trope—essentially or inevitably feminine, or for that matter, feminist? Does the game ultimately avoid, perpetuate, or contest the gendered discourses that it evokes? What can its simulations of a fictional mind in action tell us about our own? This article draws on cognitive, feminist, and narrative theoretical frameworks to question what the concept of fluidity means for a video game that mobilizes it through both narrative design and gameplay. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Few studies have examined gender and game play from the perspective of boys' participation. In this article we investigate boys' play in a tween-centric virtual world called Whyville.net, which had 1.5 million registered players at the time of study. Drawing primarily upon logfile data, we developed participation profiles and case studies of three boy players who ranged in engagement from casual to core players. In the case studies of boy players and their everyday activities in Whyville, we found that initial routines were remarkably similar but over time more nuanced differences emerged in players' identity and boundary play. Furthermore, Whyville provided the boys with relatively low consequence opportunities to experiment with different masculine identities. In comparing our findings with other work, we found that while virtual worlds offer space for the expression of boys' culture, they are qualitatively distinct from other gaming environments and thus need to be studied on their own terms. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This essay investigates the challenges that video game marketing encounters when selling the pleasures of playing virtual war. While marketing paratexts are crucial to video games because of the vagaries of their industry, they are especially important for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, as it is the first of the franchise to be set in the 21st century and immerse players in contemporary theaters of war. These marketing paratexts not only generate hype for the game and work to drive sales, but as importantly, they also suggest particular textual readings over others with the goal of insulating Call of Duty’s virtual war play from interpretations and criticisms that might link the violent play on-screen to the worldly violence unfolding in Iraq and Afghanistan. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article has two goals: one is to establish techniques for content analysis of a virtual environment, Liberty City, as part of a dynamic textual object, Grand Theft Auto IV ( GTA IV). The second is to demonstrate these techniques with an analysis in the narrative of GTA IV as a very modernist, dystopian version of the American Dream. Further, the suitability of the video game as a medium for modernist themes and concerns as exemplified by the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot will be explored. Liberty City is an interactive city which a player can experience, rather than read about, answering many of the questions modernist writers posed to their frustrating, linear medium. </jats:p>

<jats:p> In the following article, the author explores the notion of playing computer games as sports by sketching out the labors and sensations of Counter-Strike teams playing at pro/am e-sports local area network (LAN) tournaments. How players are engaged physically in practice and play is described in this qualitative study through the core themes of movement, haptic engagement, and the balanced body. Furthermore, the research describes how technologies in play are laboring actors too; the players and technologies in this study are rendered as networked, extended, and acting in and on the same fields of play. In asking is there a “sport” in e-sports, this study questions the legitimacy of a traditional sports ontology and simultaneously tackles the notion of engagement with computer game play as a legitimate sporting endeavor. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Elves are a long-standing cultural trope in the West, where they have often represented the other and fears associated with otherness. Elves continue to do the same cultural work today and are a fixture of fantasy settings. Fantasy-based video games portray elves in a variety of ways across a few types of elves (high elves, half-elves, and dark elves), but there are consistencies to their portrayal across such spaces. Given the dearth of work on elves in modern narratives, the cultural work of elves as the other in video games is analyzed here. World of Warcraft (WoW), EverQuest II, The Elder Scrolls series, and the Dragon Age series were studied, with Tolkien and Dungeons &amp; Dragons (D&amp;D) as background. Although WoW is somewhat exceptional in its portrayal of elves, digital elves are mostly portrayed similarly to a historically idealized real-world Western minority. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Despite the fact that most players of video games are now adults, the medium continues to shy away from the question of sex. This article considers some of the reasons for this reticence, offering close readings of a number of games in which sex’s absence seems especially significant. Attending to these absences can, I argue, throw light on some prevalent misconceptions regarding the nature of video games and the appeal of play. Debates concerning games and sex reveal that commentators, critics, and game developers alike are, by and large, still too ready to judge games using standards developed in relation to other media forms. In doing so they tend both to ignore games’ unique characteristics and to misrepresent their potential as vehicles for creative expression—a potential suggested by the ways in which the medium has already begun to explore how technology is altering our understanding of sex. </jats:p>

<jats:p> I argue that videogames are structured by conscious fantasy. This project traces two fantasies (tether and accretions) that combine into the genre of the role-playing game, providing a rough timeline for the evolution of these fantasies in videogames. It also engages in close readings of individual works that highlight important aspects of each fantasy. This study can serve as the basis for a formal analysis of games that is reinforced by their divided nature (game and story). Fantasy can serve as an intermediate term between game and story, and as such can incorporate the player into a game’s formal analysis. I also argue that videogames teach us that fantasy is a better term for describing media convergence than story. Note that “fantasy” here does not refer to the literary genre but rather to a dynamic psychological concept related to play. </jats:p>