Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p>Although video game audiences have greatly diversified over recent years, players who are not the stereotypical straight, White, male “gamer” are still frequently viewed as outsiders to online gaming and face harassment because of this status. However, many choose to play games despite this and have developed specific coping strategies they employ to avoid or respond to harassment. Using grounded theory and in-depth interviews with female gamers, this gender-based case study explores women’s strategies for coping with online game-related harassment. It shows that women are first and foremost an active audience, carefully managing their media environment to help ensure positive experiences. At the same time, their strategies come with limitations, such as hiding their contributions to gaming or provoking further harassment. Although women are capable media managers, their continued status as “outsiders” deeply affects their gaming experiences and demonstrates a need for cultural change in online environments.</jats:p>

<jats:p> The present article develops the concept of selective realism to understand how design features and narrative frames of first- and third-person shooters (F/TPS) exclude attention to salient, yet unpleasant, features of warfare such as problematic forms of violence, long-term psychological impacts, or sociopolitical blowbacks. Identifying four specific filters that frame player experiences, I argue that the resulting selectivity is significant because it is characteristic of the F/TPS genre as a whole that, through its wide dissemination, impacts upon the cultural framing of actual warfare. The article illustrates features of selective realism before it conducts in-depth analysis of the titles Spec Ops: The Line and The Last of Us to show how critical game design can invite a conscious unraveling of the generic frames and the ideological positions these invite. The article concludes with a reassessment of arguments regarding alleged sociopolitical impacts of war- and violence-themed computer games. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This essay seeks to answer two questions raised by the success of video games where the player looks at the character she is playing rather than seeming to inhabit the same coordinates as the character within the game space. First, why is the experience of playing these games not innately inferior to that of playing games with a first-person point of view, given that the sense of being a character sensing and acting inside the game space could be expected to be much stronger when the character’s body seems to be one’s own rather than a separate entity in the game space? And second, if the first-person point of view is so “immersive” and provides such a sense of being “inside” the representational space as is sometimes claimed, why has it never been so prominent in other audiovisual entertainment media such as film and television? </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article recovers the popular imaginaries surrounding an obsolete video game platform, the Neo Geo Advanced Entertainment System (AES), through a thematic discourse analysis of British and North American gaming magazines from the 1990s. Released in Japan in 1990, the Neo Geo AES was marketed as a home video game system capable of bridging the gap between the public space of the gaming arcade and the domestic environment of the home. “Imaginaries” in this context refer to the dreams and fantasies that accompanied the Neo Geo AES’s negotiation of arcade and home spaces as well as the discourses, images, ideas, and beliefs that helped mold its identity as a cultural object. Gaming magazines, I argue, help articulate how the system’s failure was tied to its unsuccessful navigation of cultural tensions during a period when gaming culture underwent a rapid relocation from the arcade to the home. </jats:p>

<jats:p> As an introduction to our special issue focusing on the integration of game research and design, this article describes a 4-year, multiteam experimental research program designed to study the effectiveness of games as a training tool for teaching about and mitigating cognitive bias. Teams investigated the effects of a number of game mechanics (e.g., reward, feedback) on learning outcomes. Game designs were iterated over multiple development cycles, informed by the results of both playtesting and formal experiments. The research showed that it is possible to reduce biased decision-making both immediately and long term. The remaining articles in this special issue will describe the details of the games and the experiments, the independent validation that was done of the research, and the lessons learned. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Game-based training may have different characteristics than other forms of instruction. The independent validation of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) Sirius program evaluated game-based cognitive bias training across several games with a common set of control groups. Control groups included a professionally produced video that taught the same cognitive biases and an unrelated video that did not teach any biases. Knowledge was tested immediately after training and after a delay. This article presents the results from the two phases of the Sirius program. Game-based training showed advantages in teaching bias mitigation skills (procedural knowledge) but had no advantage over video instruction in teaching people to answer explicit questions about biases (declarative knowledge). Overall, training effects persisted over time, and games performed as well as and in some cases better than the video-based instruction for knowledge retention. Our results suggest that serious games can be an effective training tool, particularly for teaching procedural knowledge. </jats:p>

<jats:p> In this article, we report on a serious game development approach, characterized by combining theory-based design with an iterative development strategy guided by experimental test and evaluation. We describe two serious games that teach the mitigation of cognitive biases (human tendencies to commit systematic errors in thinking that lead to irrational judgments). Cognitive biases tend to be deeply ingrained and early attempts to reduce biases with training have met with little success. We address this training challenge using bias mitigation theory derived from the literature and an instructional framework to establish the educational content of each game. The mitigation effects of the games were measured through multiple experiment cycles, and multiple play-testing campaigns were conducted to inform instructional model and game design revisions. The final game versions achieved a medium-to-large training effect following a single play session. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article discusses the design and development of two serious games intended to train people to reduce their reliance on cognitive biases in their decision-making in less than an hour each. In our development process, we found a tension between rich and flexible experimentation and exploration experiences and robust learning experiences that ensured the lesson content was easily understood and recalled. In line with game-based learning research, initial designs were oriented toward exploration and discovery. Analyses of interviews, playtesting, logs, and surveys revealed that many players were frustrated or confused by the interface and content of the more complex games, even when consistent differences between levels of visual detail or narrative complexity were not present. We conclude that teaching complex topics such as cognitive biases to the widest range of learners required reducing the games’ playful and exploratory elements and balancing formal training content with simpler visuals and text. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The development of a serious game combines the skills of numerous disciplines, from subject matter experts on the topic being taught; to story developers, game designers, and software developers; to instructional designers, educational assessment scientists, and others. This section provides commentary on the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity’s unique game development program, Sirius, where multiple games with the same training goal were independently developed and tested by different teams. We compare the experience of two of these teams not only in game design but also in how skills of various disciplines were woven together to produce and validate their games. Lessons learned are reviewed to provide guidelines and takeaway points to assist game development practitioners in their future efforts to create effective serious games. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The legacy of the rich, stratified work of Roger Caillois, the multifaceted and complex French scholar and intellectual, seems to have almost solely impinged on game studies through his most popular work, Les Jeux et les Hommes. Translated in English as Man, Play and Games, this is the text which popularized Caillois’ ideas among those who do study and research on games and game cultures today, and which most often appears in publications that attempt to historicize and introduce to the study of games—perhaps on a par with Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens. The purpose of this article is to introduce the papers and general purposes of a collected edition that aims to shift the attention of game scholars toward a more nuanced and comprehensive view of Roger Caillois, beyond the textbook interpretations usually received in game studies over the last decade or so. </jats:p>