Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p>This article examines the transmedial theme and narrative genre of Bildung (life formation) in relation to video games. It revisits key tenets of life formation theory insofar as they can be applied to a small but growing corpus of games that emphasize spiritual and philosophical maturation and advancement. We argue that Joseph Campbell’s monomyth is an oversimplified and ultimately unsuitable lens through which to analyze character development in games, which restrains rather than stimulates the kind of complexities, diversity, and fluidity of character psychology needed in contemporary video game ecology. The main part of this study is dedicated to a comparative analysis of three indie games that address the life formation theme through allegories of space-in-time. The main focal areas will be character and story patterns; chronotopic mappings onto developmental trajectories; the treatment of mastery, mentorship, and choice; and the spiritual and metacognitive alignment of extra and intradiegetic education.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Unpredictable social dynamics can dominate social outcomes even in carefully designed societies like online multiplayer games. According to theories from economic game theory and evolutionary anthropology, communities that are otherwise identical can spontaneously develop emergent cultural differences. We demonstrate the emergence of norm diversity in comparable populations distributed across identical copies of a single multiplayer game world. We use 2006 data from several servers of World of Warcraft to analyze how social contracts about resource distribution converge within independent communities, while varying across them. We find wide-ranging diversity in the norms that communities consider standard, fair, and common, even where these norms are unenforcable and players face large incentives to deviate from them. By documenting how designed societies come to differ in undesigned ways, we present emergent cultural diversity as a distinguishing feature of human sociality and a major challenge for game designers.</jats:p>

<jats:p> Operational rules and “hacking” detection is implemented across online professional competitive gaming contexts in effort to thwart manipulation and encourage fair play. Violation of “unwritten” rules and implicit local norms, however, are harder to track. Using boundary-work theory, this article demonstrates how different perspectives of unsportsmanlike behavior are defended and disputed by spectators within the esports mode of Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO). Triangulating data drawn from 50 hr of online observation followed by spectator interviews, this article examines how boundaries of (un)acceptability are drawn and/or redrawn around specific and ostensibly unsportsmanlike behaviors associated with “bad mannering,” “throwing,” and “bug exploiting” in CS:GO. These broad spectra of behavior imply a degree of complexity in local esport gaming contexts, engendering a protean boundary that sets it apart from more traditional views of sportsmanship and would benefit from further critical scholarship. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The U.S. televised game Survivor is fascinating for the study of multiplayer games because the winner of a season of Survivor is not dictated by the rules. Instead, a “jury” of eliminated players vote for which of the remaining two to three contestants deserve to win the US$1,000,000 prize, based entirely on their personal opinion. In this article, I present an analysis of Final Tribal Council, where this decision is made, revealing the key themes that influence this decision. I subsequently propose a social constructionist approach to understanding and researching multiplayer games as moral economies, where diverse types of play are given different values by players. I argue that this approach provides a useful theoretical framework for an integrated understanding of how both game and nongame elements work to influence player behavior and experience. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Fortnite is a massively multiplayer online “battle royale” game that rapidly grew in 2018 to become one of the most popular digital games in the world, with a reported peak of 10.8 million concurrent players and 250 million registered players in March 2019. Based on 24 interviews with young people aged 9–14 (17 boys and 7 girls), this article sets out to provide an account of the appeal and experience of Fortnite. While it is impossible to pinpoint exactly why Fortnite has been such a phenomenal, global success, in this article, we argue that its appeal can be better explained by its intersections with YouTube and game livestreaming, the way the game acts as a vehicle for social capital and the performance of identity, and the rich sociality of play. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The purpose of this mixed-methods case study is to examine the performance of the Nintendo brand during the eighth generation of home video game consoles and to assess whether the low sales of the Wii U can be attributed to a paradox in the relationship between the brand image of Nintendo’s first-party software and the perceived quality of Nintendo consoles. The results demonstrated that while the brand image of Nintendo’s first-party software does have a positive relationship with the perceived quality of Nintendo’s consoles, this relationship did not lead to a higher degree of consumer utility for the Wii U console. Despite this, Nintendo’s perceived quality and brand image remained higher than their competitors, reinforcing that positive brand equity can act as a defense mechanism from underperforming products. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers are increasingly vital for countries, such as the United States and United Kingdom, to remain innovative and productive in the 21st century. Despite the growing demand and lucrative nature of STEM fields, minorities have remained traditionally underrepresented in STEM careers, possibly due to digital divide factors. In this study, we use social cognitive theory to explore the potential of video gameplay to provide a means of increasing minority students’ comfort with information and communication technologies, thereby increasing their positive STEM attitudes. Data were gathered during a large-scale computing intervention in an elementary school district in the southeastern United States. The results indicate that video game experiences may influence STEM attitudes via the mediating role of computer self-efficacy and emotional costs. Video gameplay, including games for entertainment, may be beneficial for young digitally divided populations as it may provide them with positive enactive experiences with technology. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article interrogates Portal’s monstrous antagonist GLaDOS through a psychoanalytical lens, granting specific attention to her maternal coding. The process of presenting maternal authority as monstrous and in need of containment is a patriarchal practice that reinforces the mother gamer’s unwelcome presence within video game culture, outlined through a brief examination of various representational trends regarding the maternal figure in games. These patriarchal signifying practices also operate to preserve broader domestic and societal gendered ideologies. Portal’s projections of maternal monstrousness are located within its villain’s taunting dialogue and her all-pervasive presence within the unsettling game space, representative of the reabsorbing maternal body. The application of Julia Kristeva’s abjection theory and Barbara Creed’s faces of the “monstrous-feminine” inform these observations and the construction of GLaDOS as an abject, abusive, and archaic mother. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Distinctive narrative conditions arise when “speedrunning” the zombie narrative in Valve Corporation’s cooperative first-person shooter games Left 4 Dead (2008) and Left 4 Dead 2 (2009). Close analyses of two live speedruns recorded at the biannual Games Done Quick charity marathon, guided by concepts from Deleuze and Guattari, explain how the player’s narrative body, space, and time are impacted by the optimizations and exploits of the Left 4 Dead series’ zombie narrative. While the zombie story preprogrammed for players is largely bypassed, speedrunning through the Left 4 Dead series’ environments is a generative act of rupture that activates and deepens storytelling tendencies within zombie media that embrace chaos and decay. The speedrun is itself a form of collapse, where scripted meaning and intentionality fall away, replaced by the chance and ephemeral story of an emergent, optimized engagement. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Despite a steady increase in the social visibility of video games in all spheres of daily life, persistent preconceived ideas about video games reveal a tendency to focus on either their positive or negative values, especially concerning the place of the player’s body. First, this article questions the different degrees of bodily involvement in the practice of video games according to the different types of games and the mechanisms that allow the player to learn the games’ gesture patterns. Then, the objective is to study the effects of video gaming on the physical, psychological, and social dimensions of the player and to identify potential correlations between bodily involvement and health benefit. Indeed, bodily involvement translates into physical engagement, and sometimes motor expertise as required by the game, but also into the mobilization of the player’s cognitive and interactive resources with the video game devices. </jats:p>