Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> Ludoarchaeology is a discipline that is methodologically rooted in archaeology with the aim of finding forgotten games—and texts on games. The discipline’s objective is to reinterpret the history of games and play via material objects from the past. This essay offers an example of one such case, revisions to Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens. In 2012, the author conducted an excavation in Gelderland, near Arnhem in the Netherlands, where Johan Huizinga spent his last years before his death on February 1, 1945. The excavation team found a document that was obviously a manuscript page of a major revision of Huizinga’s Homo Ludens. The text consists of an annotated version of page 41 from the 1938 edition of Homo Ludens with comments that completely change our view of how Huizinga thought about “free play,” rules, and order. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This study conducted analytical and semiexperimental research with the purpose of testing if art video games serve as a form of transmission of social representations and feelings. Accordingly, a free-association questionnaire was used after participants played the game The Graveyard. The associative method was paired with item hierarchization and clustering techniques using a structural approach. The data were analyzed using mixed methods (frequency analysis, semantic weight, and categorical clustering). Additionally, a cluster analysis was conducted to determine connections between representations. Afterward, categories were compared with the representations the game designers wanted to transmit to the players. The results of the research confirmed the possibility of accessing people’s social representations using a video game as stimulus. Cluster analyses depicted that these representations were emotionally linked and socially shared among the players without regard to age or gender. The relation with the designers’ representations about the game was found to be not significant. </jats:p>

<jats:p>Games borrow ceaselessly from the past to constitute themselves. This locates the medium at the heart of our contemporary obsession with how to engage the past and the “real.” In tethering digital hyperreality to the horizon of history, myth, and ritual, games generate a disavowed and subjunctive engagement with a sense of “real enough.” They thus resemble Victor Turner’s liminoids: autotelic, bounded experiences of leisure that cultivate accepting yet playful attitudes against the “real enough” on offer. This commercialized bricolage is not dismissible as inauthentic simulacrum. Rather, such games demonstrate the ways in which new media are recalibrating our modes of engagement with the real. This article analyzes three key aspects of liminoid games: (1) techniques of reappropriation during production, (2) rules and expectations of engagement with the past and the “real” that games offer, and (3) emergent ways in which player communities, discourses, and productions recalibrate those politics of engagement.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Digital technology users are growingly involved in what has been described as convergence culture or participatory cultures. In this context, a major role is played by user-generated content. This article focuses on the participatory practices related to Little Big Planet (LBP) 1, a PlayStation platform video game that encourages users to create and share their own gaming levels. Our theoretical framework refers both to convergence culture and to a specific perspective of game studies that focuses on the cultural and social dimensions that are to be found in gaming and modding practices. A total of 8,829 Italian PlayStation Network (PSN) users were surveyed regarding their gaming practices, their attitude toward digital technology, and their LBP usage experiences. The results show that familiarity with digital technology and a socially oriented attitude to digital technology are clearly related to “active LBP engagement.” Moreover, PSN users are more likely than other digital platforms users to create their own content.</jats:p>

<jats:p> In recent years, playful design environments and digital games have been offering increasingly accessible programming tools and integrated editors, significantly expanding opportunities for the creation and sharing of user-generated content. These practices have engendered the diffusion of participatory online environments in which users present, discuss, and critique their creations. This study analyzes one of these design-driven environments dedicated to game levels created with the popular series LittleBigPlanet. Findings suggest that participants interact guided by their desire to become skilled designers and be recognized as such by their peers. To do so, they enact situated discursive functions that entail a pervasive use of specialist language, the formation of shared design references, and the valorization of new forms of originality based on remixing and intertextuality. By engaging in multimodal practices in a competent community of peer designers, participants create a safe “discursive studio” that offers a multiplicity of trajectories for learning and creativity. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The current classification systems for video games are first attempts at protecting children from the real or imaginary influence of potentially harmful contents. These systems, however, are based on questionable principles, for two reasons. First, analyzing the Pan European Game Information (PEGI) and the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) from a pedagogical point of view, one cannot but notice that they are inherently flawed by contradictions and confusion of different perspectives. Second, these contradictions increase the difficulty for parents who buy video games to understand the rating. This is a considerable drawback, as parents and child caregivers should be the primary targets of such rating systems. This article offers a critical examination of the European PEGI and the North American ESRB rating systems, and, starting from this analysis, suggests improvements that could make video game rating systems more appropriate in terms of their function as parental guidance. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article discusses the role of historicity in the Mass Effect series of videogames. In a preliminary moment, I will attempt to identify the concepts that underline the franchise’s notion of history. Subsequently, I will discuss ways to analyze such a portrayal from the point of view of its audience’s response and its potential as a platform for historical reflection. Finally, I will compare Mass Effect’s approach to history with that of the retro-futuristic Bioshock games as well as with the discussions about historical strategy games made by historians to determine convergences and dissonance in their employments of historical discourses. It will be argued that Mass Effect’s choice-based narrative conditions its notion of history as an individually driven process whose changes are manifested in the short duration and that its hypothetical future is consonant with some of contemporaneity’s anxieties about its place in history </jats:p>

<jats:p> Serious games (SG) are innovative tools that are widely recognized as having considerable potential to foster and support active learning. This article addresses the question of whether and how SG can contribute to the development of the so-called “21st century skills” in education. This article starts by characterizing the current need for 21st century skills and the identification of these core skills. Thereafter, it reports on a literature review of studies analyzing SG impact on the development of one or more 21st century skills; and finally, it analyzes which, among the most relevant game characteristics, are those that could facilitate 21st century skills development. This study offers a multifold perspective on the use of SG to support 21st century skills development that may be helpful for both teachers and SG designers. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article (1) analyzes the computer game Braid with regard to the TIME IS SPACE/MOTION metaphor and the multimodal approach, (2) links the possibilities of such a study to the existing studies of temporality in video games, and (3) explores the link between the game’s narrative and its gameplay mechanics based on the TIME IS SPACE/MOTION metaphor. The theoretical section briefly overviews conceptual metaphor theory, the TIME IS SPACE/MOTION metaphor, multimodality, CMT in video games, time in video games, and several studies related to the game. The main section investigates Braid so as to evaluate the ways in which the TIME IS SPACE/MOTION metaphor operates within each of the game worlds and how this affects the narrative and the gameplay. The complex, unconventional relations existing among time, space, motion, and causality result in a unique coupling between the narrative and the use of the TIME IS SPACE/MOTION metaphor. </jats:p>

<jats:p>This article explores the shared game mechanics seen throughout BioWare games, especially their Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, as systems that invoke multiculturalist values and teach liberal tolerance. In both BioWare series, the player is set on a course to manage ethnic bodies into a racially determined division of labor (as military force), assuming the neutral position of a “multiculturalist umpire.” I investigate Mass Effect’s loyalty mechanic and its genre mixture of the role-playing game with the military shooter to consider how BioWare’s signature emphasis on team cooperation and supporting characters can express meanings that value American multiculturalism as exceptional, thus permitting forms of patriarchal and imperial violence to continue unabated. Finally, I consider how the player’s choice to play as female rather than male can shift the player’s experience from an imperialist attitude toward one of multiracial coalition that focuses on structures of patriarchal power and reproductive control.</jats:p>