Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> This article documents the brief history of cyber marriage on the Chinese Internet and shows how in-game marriage, with its game codes and marriage regulations, turns out to be the most visualized, institutionalized, and heteronormative form of cyber marriage, by exploring the game players’ gender performativity, especially the gender swapping of male gamers. This study sheds light on Chinese youth subculture under the influence of new media and the consumer digital network in postsocialist China. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Games have intruded into popular, academic, and policy-maker awareness to an unprecedented level, and this creates new opportunities for advancing our understanding of the relationship of games to society. The author offers a new approach to games that stresses them as characterized by process. Games, the author argues, are domains of contrived contingency, capable of generating emergent practices and interpretations, and are intimately connected with everyday life to a degree heretofore poorly understood. This approach is both consistent with a range of existing social theory and avoids many of the limitations that have characterized much games scholarship to date, in particular its tendency toward unsustainable formalism and exceptionalism. Rather than seeing gaming as a subset of play, and therefore as an activity that is inherently separable, safe, and pleasurable, the author offers a pragmatic rethinking of games as social artifacts in their own right that are always in the process of becoming. This view both better accords with the experience of games by participants cross-culturally and bears the weight of the new questions being asked about games and about society. </jats:p>

<jats:p> In this article, the authors consider emerging consumer practices in digital virtual spaces. Building on constructions of consumer behavior as both a sense-making activity and a resource for the construction of daydreams, as well as anthropological readings of performance, the authors speculate that many performances during digital play are products of consumer fantasy. The authors develop an interpretation of the relationship between the real and the virtual that is better equipped to understand the movement between consumer daydreams and those practices actualized in the material and now also in digital virtual reality. The authors argue that digital virtual performances present opportunities for liminoid transformations through inversions, speculations, and playfulness acted out in aesthetic dramas. To illustrate, the authors consider specific examples of the theatrical productions available to consumers in digital spaces, highlighting the consumer imagination that feeds them, the performances they produce, and the potential for transformation in consumer-players. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Authorial responsibility has been increasingly decentralized by the collective manipulation of media parameters. Whereas this encourages a sense of freedom for those exposed to such narratives, participation in narrative realization and a lack of interpretative dislocation can actually impair a reader. To demonstrate how excessive mediation can liberate or limit an audience, this article will compare how William Blake's “The Fly” and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas differently enable and disable the authority and agency of storytellers and readers. </jats:p>

<jats:p> As games, particularly virtual worlds, become increasingly popular and as they begin to approximate large scale social systems in size and nature, they have also become spaces where play and learning have merged in fundamental ways. More important is the idea that the kind of learning that happens in the spaces of these massively multiplayer online games is fundamentally different than what we have come to consider as standard pedagogical practice. The distinction the authors make is that traditional paradigms of instruction have addressed learning as “learning about,” while these new forms of learning deal with knowledge through the dynamic of “learning to be.”It is the authors' contention that the experiences offered within virtual worlds provide a fundamentally different way of thinking about learning that may provide some keys to the development of future pedagogical practice. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article explores the relationship between computer gamers and their machines in an effort to characterize cultural attitudes toward the materiality of information technology. Whereas dominant culture desires a world in which information technology performs seamlessly within the fabric of everyday life, case-modding gamers prefer to foreground both their computer machinery and their virtuosity in its manipulation. Instead of desiring the disappearance of machines into the background of a world that those machines produce, case modders revel in, and indeed identify with, the material guts of their computer systems. This machine aesthetic is explored further in the context of the LAN party, where the case modders' machines become as much of a spectacle as the games on the screen. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article deals with the popular simulation game SIMCITY by Will Wright. The main question of this article is whether or not the popular notion of SIMCITY as an endless and borderless playground is more than a contaminating marketing strategy. To analyze this question about SIMCITY as a borderless playground, the article will draw historical parallels with construction toys from yesteryear and differentiate between internal and external levels of playing and intended and unintended practices of play. The article claims that unintended practices of play, player “anarchy” through appropriation of the game, are difficult in a game like SIMCITY, thus frustrating the claims and the idea of SIMCITY as a borderless playground. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Many popular digital games have historical themes or settings. Taking its cue from recent research emphasizing the educational value of computer and video games, this article investigates the bias of the medium in presenting history. Although sharing an appreciation for the cultural value of history simulations and games, the author argues that the digital game medium currently tends to result in stereotypically masculine, mechanical, and spatially oriented interactive presentations of history. This article does not take a technological determinist stance nor a simplistic view of interpretation. Nevertheless, the author believes that the weight and momentum of the historical development of the digital game medium, its technological structure, and its institutional character have encouraged certain patterns in digital games that should be critically examined. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article proposes a conceptual model for understanding game involvement and immersion on a variety of experiential dimensions corresponding to six broad categories of game features. The article ends with a proposal to replace the metaphor of immersion with one of incorporation. This reconceptualization seeks to replace the unidirectional plunge of player into game space implied by the term immersion with one of simultaneous assimilation of the digital environment and presence to others within it. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article suggests a revisit of the New Games movement, formed by Stewart Brand and others in the early 1970s in the United States as a response to the Vietnam War, against a backdrop of dramatic social and economic change fueled by a looming energy crisis, civil rights, feminism, and unhealthy widespread drug abuse. Like-minded contemporaries R. Buckminster Fuller (World Game), Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty), and Christo and Jean-Claude (Valley Curtain) responded in kind to these environmental and sociopolitical quandaries with their “earthworks.” As digital game designers and theorists embark on developing new methods to address the creative crisis in mainstream game production, against a similar backdrop of global climate change, a controversial war, political upheaval, and complex gender issues, the authors propose a reexamination of the New Games movement and its methods as a means of constructing shared contexts for meaningful play in virtual and real-world spaces. </jats:p>