Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> This article considers LEGO’s fans and how their labor was mobilized to create The LEGO Movie. Many aspects of this film make it a compelling case study for ludic economies, such as the film’s self-conscious humor that suggests an awareness on of the company’s brand-growing strategies. My argument will address fans’ response to how LEGO has farmed their labor and the lack of resistance encountered in the extraction thereof. I will suggest explanations as to why this is the case, including the kinds of affect generated by LEGO and LEGO narratives as they are transmediated across platforms, from bricks, to animation shorts, to The LEGO Movie. This investigation will include a discussion of LEGO’s staying power in light of one particular aesthetic—cuteness—that contributes to the affective bonds people form with the bricks and the impact of this bond on consumer subjectivities. </jats:p>

<jats:p>Revisiting early critical responses to computer and video games as a cultural form—before the establishment of games studies as an academic field in the early 2000s—reveals a consistent fascination with games as economic phenomena. Not just as a new commercial competitor in the established popular media marketplace but as models of economies in their own right, models that mesh with player’s everyday lives, constraining, facilitating, and forming gameplay. This article will identify and explore some of the most salient themes and phenomena in this early games scholarship and will follow them through subsequent enquiry into games as economies either isomorphic with the systems of consumer capitalism and neoliberalism from which they issue or metamorphic—phantasmagorical or ironic inversions of prevailing social and industrial conditions.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The event known as #GamerGate (GG) emphasized the need to take the study of game culture seriously and pursue it across several platforms. It demonstrated how seemingly ephemeral media created echo chambers of anger, and how the outbursts of hypermasculine aggression exemplified by hooligans also can connect to games and play. Starting from how GG gained popular attention, this article outlines and discusses the nature of GG, the relation to the victims, the sense of victimization among the participants, and how it may have been provoked by the long-standing, general disregard of games as a culture and a cultural artifact of value. It discusses GG as a swarm using this metaphor to describe its self-organizing nature. Further comparing GG to hooligans, this article also introduces a class and marginalization aspect to understanding the event, opening up for discourses that complicates the image of game culture as mainly a culture of isolated consumption.</jats:p>

<jats:p> This article investigates the impact that the rhythms of game interactions can have on a player’s experience of a computer game. Using a phenomenological approach, the research focuses on rhythmic experience within games and, in particular, on the rhythm of tree chopping within the games Minecraft and Don’t Starve. Graphic, aural, and embodied representations are used to closely analyze and compare a single-player experience within the two games. The analysis reflects on the efficacy of these methods and suggests some possible key factors for designing rhythmically expressive play experiences. It is suggested that combining real-time control with perceivable and performable repetition and variety can give the player expressive creative control over the rhythms of their performed interactions, potentially enriching their experience of repetitive tasks and extending the play life of a game. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The multiple-choice video game Life is Strange was described by its French developers as a metaphor for the inner conflicts experienced by a teenager in trying to become an adult. In psychological work with adolescents, there is a stark similarity between what they experience and some concepts of existentialist philosophy. Sartre’s script for the movie Les Jeux Sont Faits (literally “games are made”) uses the same narrative strategy as Life is Strange—the capacity for the main characters to travel back in time to change their own existence—in order to stimulate philosophical, ethical, and political thinking and also to effectively simulate existential “limit situations.” This article is a dialogue between Sartre’s views and Life is Strange in order to examine to what extent questions such as what is freedom? what is choice? what is autonomy and responsibility? can be interpreted anew in hybrid digital–human—“anthrobotic”—environments. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Digital games historically hold a spotty record on gender depictions. The lack of depth in female characters has long been the norm; however, an increasing number of female protagonists are headlining games. This study used narrative theory to examine depictions of four female protagonists in four 2013 Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain Award-Winning Digital Games: The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite, Tomb Raider, and Beyond: Two Souls. Studying these media depictions provides context for how women’s stories are recorded in society. Stereotype subversions largely occur within familiar game narratives, and the female protagonists were still largely limited and defined by male figures in the games. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The present article brings game studies into dialogue with cultural memory studies and argues for the significance of computer games for historical discourse and memory politics. Drawing upon the works of Robert Rosenstone and Astrid Erll, we develop concepts and theories from film studies and adapt them to respond to the media specificity of computer games. Through a critical reading of the first chapter of the history-based first-person shooter Call of Duty: Black Ops, the article demonstrates how the game’s formal properties frame in-game experiences and performances, and this way predisposes the emergence of certain memory-making potentials in and through constrained practices of play. Subsequently, an analysis of the serious game Czechoslovakia 38-89: Assassination shows the potentials of game design to facilitate meta-historical reflections and critical inquiries. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Through a textual analysis of three noted examples— Bioshock, Spec Ops: The Line, and Grand Theft Auto V—This article explores the capacity for ambivalence in violent video games. The analyses bring into dialogue film scholarship which has sought to understand a comparable trend in cinema with games scholarship, most notably Darley’s discussion of narrative “decentering” and Bogost’s notion of “procedural rhetoric.” In all three games, the core gameplay in which players are rewarded for repetition of violent behaviors is juxtaposed with ambivalent narrative-contextual aspects. However, in the more overtly “multidimensional” video games medium, this juxtaposition plays out in a more fractured manner than in the flatter visual space of cinema. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Previous studies have examined media portrayals of total control and institutionalization in prison, and a few studies have considered the connection between media portrayals and depictions of prison escape attempts. The current inquiry seeks to fill this gap in the literature through an autoethnographic case study of the video game The Escapists, in which players assume the role of an inmate whose ultimate goal is to escape prison amid an environment populated by other nonplayer character inmates and guards. In this inquiry, specific attention is paid to the player’s experiences as a subject of control from guards, inmates, surveillance systems, and the prison construct, and how these interactions contextualize and potentially motivate the player to attempt escape. Connections between virtual and real-world escape attempts are discussed. Conceptual and theoretical links between total control and interactive experiences of simulated prison life, as well as implications of this study, are examined. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The widespread popularity of sandbox games, and Minecraft in particular, may be a recent phenomenon, but their appeal may be much older. Rather than representing a wholly new development in gaming, these games may participate in a larger media ecology that flatters a neoliberal worldview. This research calls for greater attention to the coercive economic assumptions encoded in game mechanics. Drawing on scholarship in ludology, postcolonial studies, and phenomenology, it suggests that sandbox games like Minecraft habituate players to myths of empire and capital that rationalize political and economic inequality. More than simply offering a blank slate for player creation, Minecraft rewards players for assuming their entitlement to the world’s resources and thus their superiority over other inhabitants of the game world. </jats:p>