Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p>This article addresses the proliferation of images and appearances in the realm of e-sports culture in urban China. The author’s findings are based upon ethnographic research and participant observation of e-sports audience members, teams, and tournaments, including the 2010 E-sports Champion League tournament in Beijing, the 2012 and 2013 World Cyber Games Festivals in Kunshan, and a 2014 Starcraft II tournament in Shanghai. A comparison of these events leads the author to argue that live e-sports events in China are less about spectatorship than they are about creating a spectacle that presents a carefully crafted vision of Chinese politics, nationalism, and capitalist consumer culture. In these cases, the participants and audience members are not only commodities to be sold but also a means of masking contradictory and highly ambivalent discourses about China’s role in technological production, digital game culture, and the promotion of the discourse of Internet addiction.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article attempts to explore the popularization of Japanese console games in China in the past two decades, which reveals the tripartite relationship of the nation-state, transnational cultural power, and local agents.<jats:sup>1</jats:sup>This study focuses on the formation and development of the console game industry in a non-Western context, where the society has undergone dramatic transformations and has been largely influenced by the globalization process. Encountering social anti-gaming discourse and cultural protectionism, the importation and distribution of Japanese console games did not get support from the state. However, it found its way to the audience and gained popularity through piracy, the black market, and the local agents’ appropriation, becoming an integrated part of many Chinese early gamers’ lives. This article draws upon the intersection of cultural globalization with game studies, calling for an investigation into the complexity of the game industry through its sociohistorical, political, and cultural environment.</jats:p>

<jats:p> From gold farmers and ‘100 million brain-damaged online gamers’ to the world’s biggest game company and more players than US citizens, China seems like the cabinet of curiosities for the whole world of digital gaming. This article focuses on news coverage around Chinese gaming and presents three phases of such journalism. China’s emerging games market was most prominently featured between 1999 and 2005, while 2006-2011 focused on extreme play behavior in China. Most recently, a discourse of vast business opportunities and stabilizing markets has been presented by Western news media. In total more than 853 news articles are explored in parallel to the theoretical concept of Sinological-orientalism. This article suggests significant historical changes in the ways in which knowledge of Chinese gaming has been produced in English language news media. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Informed by a mix of theoretical sources and interviews with middle-class Chinese amateur gold farmers, this article argues that within China, the figure of the Chinese gold farmer might function as focus for reflection on Chineseness and China’s role in an increasingly interconnected world, rather than as a carrier of third-world stereotype as it tends to do in the West. The concept of shanzhai—often associated with sometimes comical, sometimes innovative Chinese copying of foreign consumer goods—is employed as a key analytical tool and helps highlight the themes of “Chinese ingenuity,” independence (from game operators and to some extent also parents), and critique (of games). </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article explores the ways game adaptations engage with existing popular culture constructions of race within the framework of commercial franchises. Its focus is on games which are part of the so-called “Frodo Franchise” based on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films. It considers the role played by licensing agreements, the conventions, and ludic elements of different game genres, the need for new characters and narratives to keep audiences engaged with an existing world, and the opportunity games offer for interactive exploration of a digital world, to illuminate both the challenges to and the opportunities for disrupting conventional representations of race and difference. </jats:p>

<jats:p>Medical simulation has historically been studied in terms of the delivery of learning outcomes or the social construction of knowledge. Consequently, simulation-based medical education has been researched primarily in terms of the transfer of skills or the reproduction of professional communities of practice. We make a case for studying simulation-based medical education as a cultural practice, situating it within a history of gaming and simulation, and which, by virtue of distinctive aesthetics, does not simply teach skills or reproduce professional practices but rather transforms how medicine can be made sense of. Three concepts from the field of game studies—play, narrative, and simulation—are deployed to interpret an ethnographic study of hospital-based simulation centers and describe underreported phenomena, including the cooperative work involved in maintaining a fictional world, the narrative conventions by which medical intervention are portrayed, and the political consequences of simulating the division of labor.</jats:p>

<jats:p> This article analyzes learning games that enhance the learning context through authentic experiences in real spaces related to the context of learning. However, the concept of learning in context has not yet been fully activated, which is attributed to the limitation in the use of learning games in spaces related to the learning context. To present solutions for this problem, the author proposed a digital-physical reality game (DPRG), a new conceptual framework to enhance the context by mapping fantasy in any ordinary space, such as the inside of a school through speculative research. The learning game was implemented based on the framework of DPRG, and the experiment verified that students became immersed in the story of the actual game through fantasy. They recognized a random space in which the game was played as the space set in the game and cognitively connected the current learning context with the random space. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This research uses a 2 × 2 factorial experiment to further investigate the Proteus effect for avatar race observed in previous research by measuring in-game behavior, the use of stereotypes to describe the avatar, and perceived embodiment of the avatar. Participants played a boxing video game as White or Black avatar against a White or Black avatar. Results revealed no main effects for avatar race, but embodiment was found to moderate the relationship between avatar race and in-game behavior. Subsequent probing of this interaction revealed that the Proteus effect was demonstrated for those who experienced greater embodiment. Avatar race was unrelated to the use of stereotypes, but main effects for aggressive cognition and affect were found. Also, same-race conditions demonstrated increased aggressive behavior compared to opposite-race conditions. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s nonrepresentational philosophy can be deployed for thinking about video game aesthetics as forces that are composed to produce affects of varying intensities. Through the concept becoming-animal and associated concepts such as rhizome and machinic assemblages, the article describes the video game through the affective, nonrepresentational, compositions of players, characters, and diegetic objects of different kinds. Variations they explain emanate from a single plane of pure multiplicity, a plane of immanence, differing by their intensities and how those intensities are assembled and diagrammed. The article begins by asking questions specific to the video game plane from which concepts are invented, or here borrowed and adapted from Deleuze and Guattari, to analyze the form in an open-ended manner. By putting the theory in motion, the article demonstrates the value of a Deleuzian approach to the study of video games. </jats:p>