Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> To explore what helps and hinders long-term online community cohesion, a once strong but now withered 7-year-old guild in the online game EverQuest 2 was studied using mixed methods. It was found that the guild faced stresses on five distinct yet interrelated levels: personal, subgroup, guild, game, and company level. Strong intragroup ties can aid group cohesion but can also cause fragmenting along weaker ties if a strong subgroup leaves the guild. Continual leadership is vital, in part due to the game mechanics that give guild leaders most of the structural power over the guild. Communities may leave their space of origin but maintain ties across several other mediated spaces simultaneously. Game companies and guild leaders can control or influence some, but not all, of the stresses guilds face. </jats:p>

<jats:p>This study examines, specifically, the production and destruction of the massively multiplayer online Star Wars Galaxies and, generally, the translation of old media brands into new media formats to demonstrate the nature of creative labor under the constraints of branded content. Using the evidence of gameplay and industrial context, the article argues that workers on Galaxies often occupied three ideal-typical roles as worldmakers, curators, and toy keepers in an effort not simply to repurpose content but to establish relationships between branded objects, to foment their circulation, and to maintain their longevity. Understanding these tasks and how they manifested themselves in both the work of Galaxies’s makers and their unfinished project, provides a vital case study to examine and develop new models to understand contemporary creative work and the intermediaries that labor within this regime as popular culture increasingly is subsumed under the organizational and textual mechanisms of branding through sequels and transmedia.</jats:p>

<jats:p> This study investigated certain social aspects of young massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) players’ lives in the context of pathological gameplay while distinguishing addiction from high engagement. Online gameplay frequency and demographic information were also examined. Of the 1,332 sampled, those classified as addicted self-reported the largest percentage of (a) playing online games, (b) scheduling their lives around their gameplay, (c) playing games instead of spending time with family and friends, (d) getting into verbal and physical altercations, and (e) playing to interact with friends and strangers. Statistical analysis, however, revealed no significant differences between the groups, perhaps supporting the idea that players progress through a phase of high engagement before reaching the stage of addiction and that those highly engaged might already show traits or behaviors very similar to, if not the same as, those addicted with regard to certain aspects of their social lives. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The role of political persuasion in Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) affirms the serious nature and even educational value possible in video games designed with entertainment as their primary motivation. Within SWTOR, players wrestle with political conflicts first posited centuries ago by Enlightenment thinkers and have an opportunity to use the game as a springboard for political reflection in the contemporary world. Based upon surveys and interviews, this study reveals that politics can inform the cultural experience of entertainment games; SWTOR offers valuable lessons in civics by providing opportunities to explore and engage with the political philosophies of our Enlightenment heritage. </jats:p>

<jats:p>Every day we are vicariously presented with situations based on various sensory realms in which decisions must be made and actions taken. This occurs in interactive, video, audio, and textual media alike. Immersive game environments intensify this process, as James Gee states in 2003, but intrinsic learning has taken place in board games, and according to Mary Flanagan this dates back at least to 1250. On top of this, games are currently beginning to assert themselves as works of art. Considering game designers as artists raises the bar for creative responsibility. The goal of this article is to further an understanding of the role of the game designer as moral teacher and artist by studying an intersection of ethics and games. Our methodology for this study is to play through the “Tranquility Lane” quest in the video game Fallout 3 using Kant’s theory and discuss creative choices in its design using the Categorical Imperative.</jats:p>

<jats:p> This article explores the capacity of video games and virtual worlds to function as critical utopias or dystopias. A theme of utopian thinking over the past century has been that utopian fantasies offer a critical perspective on the real world. I argue that video games and virtual worlds have generally failed to offer utopian fantasies that can perform a critical function because of their tendency of mirroring the real world, but I show that dystopian video games tend to be very effective in presenting critical themes. Moreover, I argue that video games create critical dystopias in ways that display the unique strengths of the medium. Virtual dystopias rely on a combination of engaging narrative elements and gameplay mechanics, which come together to create dynamic worlds in which players are active participants. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Rules are often cited as one of the defining features of games; however, few precise definitions of rules exist and those that do are often self-contradictory and/or reductive. This article seeks to reconceptualize rules for both traditional and digital games, not as a series of restrictions to which the player must submit but rather as a relationship of power that functions through the player and through processes of construction. I argue that the restrictive model of rules is embedded within the liberal humanist paradigm, where power is understood as an external force operating on the subject. Building upon poststructuralist theorizations of power, I demonstrate that rather than operating through restriction, rules construct the possibility of the game, producing the game world and norms of play practice. Through this, I show that rules should not be understood in opposition to player agency, but rather as a contributor to, and product of it. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Portal and Portal 2 are quests for narrative identity, whereby players attempt to understand who exactly the player is playing the game as—a woman who can outsmart a supercomputer and survive chambers full of deadly neurotoxin. Valve provides this answer gradually but does not do so explicitly—rather, as they play the games, the players must come to a conclusion on their own as to who Chell really is. By using this very complex form of procedural rhetoric as the core narrative heart of their games, Valve has created a story that relies upon procedural rhetoric, psychological models of identity, identification, and sociological bond formation in the player in order to rhetorically craft a narrative that is cocreated by the player during gameplay. Such rhetorical narrative cocreation has been a longtime goal of game designers, and Valve’s achievement in Portal and Portal 2 illustrate the rhetorical power of a procedurally generated narrative. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Since its release, Visceral Games Inferno has received much criticism in the popular press but little critical attention from game studies. The game’s transformation of the medieval poet into a crusader not only raises concerns about the intersections between video games and war, as Patrick Crogan has observed using other examples, but also asks us to consider the implications of remediating a canonical textual form into an interactive one. I examine the specific textual uses of violence in the game to argue that the appropriation of Inferno presents the mortification of the cross on the hero’s flesh as an emblem for the narrative’s critique of the modern War on Terror as a crusade. Furthermore, I suggest that, simultaneously, the cross emblematizes the remediation of the 14th-century poem into the video game, accounting for a paratextual “war” between the original poem and the appropriated video game. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This essay fosters a dialogue between game studies and critical media studies. By taking Slender Man as its object of study, it argues that play should be understood as a disposition toward media. It suggests a new critical vocabulary for this approach, wherein the moods set by play can be understood as schemes, latitude, or slack. These terms help us to understand the way play is productive of particular affects that set our bodies to motion. </jats:p>