Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p>Resident Evil 5 is a zombie game made by Capcom, featuring a White American protagonist and set in Africa. This article argues that approaching this as a Japanese game reveals aspects of a Japanese racial and colonial social imaginary that are missed if this context of production is ignored. In terms of race, the game presents hybrid racial subjectivities that can be related to Japanese perspectives of Blackness and Whiteness, where these terms are two poles of difference and identity through which an essentialized Japanese identity is constructed in what Iwabuchi calls “strategic hybridism.” In terms of colonialism, the game echoes structures of Japanese colonialism through which Japanese colonialism is obliquely memorialized and a “normal” Japanese global subjectivity can be performed.</jats:p>

<jats:p> Released in 2011, the Nintendo 3DS is the next generation of portal consoles from Japanese gaming company Nintendo. Following the success of the Nintendo DS (Dual Screen), the new console brings with it three-dimensional stereoscopic graphics and the new social software Streetpass. This article adopts a situated approach in order to explore the significance of Streetpass in mediating social encounters within material environments. This article suggests that this software follows a history of mediating encounters through portal consoles, resulting in a training of players to view encounters within a software-sorted logic of value. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article critically evaluates and questions the growth and maturity of game studies as a scholarly set of related approaches to the study of games, by providing an account of studies of sexuality in (mostly digital) games from 1978 to present. The main goal of this article is to highlight overarching themes and patterns in the literature, with a focus on theories and methodologies commonly used and the way game studies is still risk aware, even awkward in its discussions of sexuality. In addition to a review of 37 years of literature, the article employs a chronological and thematic metaphor analysis of past research texts to analyze whether game studies is growing up or in perpetual puberty and whether it really is exploring sexual maturity alongside the games we study. It finds that while different periods of time can be identified in research as far as approaches to sexuality in games go, game studies is still to a large extent engaged in the management of the stigma that discussing sexuality may cause. Rather than a maturation process, the waves are shown to be manifestations of different types of environmentally influenced risk awareness, consecutive risk avoidance, and a resulting awkwardness. </jats:p>

<jats:p> According to various media and academic sources, the virtual worlds landscape underwent a profound transformation in 2008, with the arrival of numerous new titles designed and targeted specifically to young children. Although a growing body of research has explored some of the titles involved in this shift, little remains known of its overall scope and contents. This article provides a mapping of the initial “boom” in children’s virtual worlds development and identifies a number of significant patterns within the ensuing children’s virtual worlds landscape. The argument is made that while the reported boom in children’s virtual worlds has been exaggerated, a number of important shifts for online gaming culture did unfold during this period, some of which challenge accepted definitions of “virtual world” and “multiplayer online game.” The implications of these findings are discussed in light of contemporary developments and trends within children’s digital culture and within online gaming more broadly. </jats:p>

<jats:p>In this special issue on ludic economies, we argue that the study of digital games—their milieux of production, cultures and contexts of play, user-generated production, and spectatorship should be applied as a primary heuristic in understanding the cultural economy of neoliberal late capitalism—as well as vice versa. The articles here focus on a range of issues related to both mainstream profit models including digital distribution platforms and mobile games as well as peripheral game economies such as jams and indie production. Each of the studies share an attunement to the tensions and contradictions embedded within what are commonly approached as matter-of-fact within traditional economic analysis of games. Rather than framing industrial changes as necessarily either overdetermined exploitation (of workers in the mainstream games industry, players and their ‘free’ labour) or emancipatory and progressive (new forms of creative production, play, resistance), they address the specificity and peculiarity of game economies at both the micro- and macro-levels of industry, technology, and everyday play culture. And rather than simply countering a pessimistic picture with other, more progressive examples of contemporary game culture such as ‘games for change’, art practices and political interventions—as important as these are—the contributions to this special issue instead track the contradictions and tensions within game cultures and economies as reflections of those within the late capitalist and patriarchal cultural economy at large.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article examines the simultaneously acclaimed and vilified mobile celebrity game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood ( KK: H). Through an analysis of popular discourse about the game in dialogue with its play experience, this article showcases the ways in which this scrutiny is tied to value judgments about celebrity culture, affective labor, and emerging monetization strategies in games. By exploring the game’s content, mechanics, and economics, I argue that KK: H’s mixed reception is a product of how these make visible celebrity labor and the work of self-branding, intimacy, and engagement in the attentional economy of social media. Through its form and functioning, this game reveals the intensities of women’s work in low-status activities, across play and celebrity culture, and, through this, challenges their devaluation. It is via this simulation of invisible labor, I argue, that KK: H represents an exemplar of what new ludic economies can indicate about the future of digital play.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This essay draws on research undertaken as part of a research network project exploring the growth of independent game producers in recent years and the associated changes in the technological and economic conditions of the games industry in the UK, Europe, and the North American continent. It reflects on the possibilities of and challenges to a critical and creative maturing of video games as a cultural medium, evaluating these in the context of contemporary developments in global technoculture and the digital economy. Bernard Stiegler’s critical analysis of hyperindustrial consumer culture is mobilized in evaluating the dreams for an indie future of video games as a creative force in digital cultural transformation.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article is a chronicle and analysis of a community crisis in digital space that took place on Valve Corporation’s digital distribution platform, Steam. When Valve and Bethesda (publisher and developer of Skyrim) decided to allow mods to be sold by mod makers themselves, there ensued a community revolt against the commodification of leisure and play. I put this crisis of play and work in dialogue with Harvey’s concept of “accumulation by dispossession,” firmly placing it within a longer history of disruptive capital accumulation strategies. I then conduct a discourse analysis of community members on reddit, as they make sense of and come to terms with this process of dispossession. Arising in the discourse was not class consciousness per se, but instead a pervasive feeling of helplessness and frustration as games, play, and leisure began to feel like work.</jats:p>

<jats:p> This article examines the evidenced and the potential impact of all-female games jams as an element within a feminist interventionist approach to improving women’s equal participation within the ludic economies of the games industry. The article examines two specific projects—a single-site 24-hr event that took place in 2012 and a restaging of the format 4 years later across five different sites in the United Kingdom. These two case studies offer two critical contributions to the ongoing research regarding the wider challenges of diversifying games design, games development, and games culture more generally. The first is a consideration of the range of labors—free, hopeful, and affective—that underpins these endeavors and provides a significant contribution in general to the ludic economy. The second is valuable evidence of the impact and ongoing validity of these all-female initiatives as an effective and transformative methodology for feminist intervention. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The designation “gamer” is structurally bound to networked economies of digital play that are rewarded fiscally, socially, and publically, an order of play that is proving difficult to overturn. That girls and women have enjoyed at best marginal positions within video game cultures is by now well recognized, yet at the very same time is too easily dismissed in light of persuasively documented increases in the numbers of women who play. This article traces a large-scale transformation of ludic engagement from participation to spectatorship that parallels the professionalizing and commodifying of traditionally embodied sports, games, and play to demonstrate how new and emerging economies of gameplay, far from opening up the playing field, threaten a further entrenchment of gendered relations. </jats:p>