Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> The nascent growth of video games has led to great leaps in technical understanding in how to create a functional and entertaining play experience. However, the complex, mixed-affect, eudaimonic entertainment experience that is possible when playing a video game—how it is formed, how it is experienced, and how to design for it—has been investigated far less than hedonistic emotional experiences focusing on fun, challenge, and “enjoyment.” Participants volunteered to be interviewed about their mixed-affect emotional experiences of playing avant-garde video games. New conceptions of agency emerged (actual, interpretive, fictional, mechanical) from the analysis of transcripts and were used to produce a framework of four categories of agency. This new framework offers designers and researchers the extra nuance in conversations around agency and contributes to the discussion of how we can design video games that allow for complex, reflective, eudaimonic emotional experiences. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The article investigates how players of the incremental game AdVenture Capitalist write about the end of the game and the end of capitalism with it. The game visually and mechanically represents the economic imaginary of frictionless capitalism, characterized by endless and self-sufficient growth. AdVenture Capitalist has no end and does not require the player’s interaction. The analysis shows that players’ responses to their marginalization from an endless simulation are pataphysical: They privilege the particular over the general, the imaginary over the real, the exceptional over the ordinary, and the contradictory over the axiomatic. In so doing, players occasionally raise imaginary solutions to the end of capitalism. Examining the written traces of players’ disengagement from the simulation, the article intervenes in broader debates regarding the effects of games. It concludes that exceptional cases of overinterpretation reveal a complex transformative approach toward video games and the political and economic ideology represented therein. </jats:p>

<jats:p> In this article, I investigate the ethics of freemium games, microtransactions, and loot boxes. Three distinctions are relevant. First, there is a difference between a fixed-reward microtransaction and a random one, such as a loot box. Second, there is a difference between cosmetic items and those which affect gameplay; this is particularly pronounced in multiplayer games, where a player might have an advantage over another through the expenditure of real money. Third, there is a difference between items which are obtainable both for real money and for in-game effort and items which are only obtainable for real money. Ultimately, all three of these distinctions will prove necessary to show that fixed cosmetic rewards are ethically permissible, random rewards of all types are ethically problematic, and fixed functional rewards can be acceptable, but only under certain conditions. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article provides an analysis of the “dating app” Tinder as an aesthetic ludic artifact. By scrutinizing the title’s features of gameplay and expressive–interpretive social interaction, Tinder usage is set into a frame theory context and shown to operate by multiple overlapping frames that allow romantic engagement to be entered as play and vice versa. </jats:p>

<jats:p> It is increasingly recognized that there are many players of mainstream digital games who have some form of disability. It is not known which aspects of games are valued by players, regardless of whether they have a disability. We report on a survey of 71 players from the general game community and 123 players with disabilities asking what makes games important to them. We found established motivations to play such as social connection and escapism but additionally that players find games beneficial and provide artistic experiences. Players with disabilities explicitly referred to games helping them to feel enabled or being on a level footing with nondisabled players. The value of accessible games is not just mere play but playing the same games as everyone else. This implies that achieving accessibility through adapting games is an important approach to provide the valued connection and enablement that games provide. </jats:p>

<jats:p> 2019 marked ten years since the publication of Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter’s Games of Empire, which has become a seminal book in videogame cultural criticism. Ten years later, there is still a pressing need for cultural and materialist criticism of the politics of production within game studies. In putting together this special issue, our hope is to identify new developments in the game industry and academia that are emblematic of 21st-century capitalism. Just as Games of Empire popularised critical political-economic perspectives ten years ago, we encourage others, as the authors in this issue did, to continue and maintain investigations into questions of ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations and radical struggle. Such analyses are necessary not only to trace but also to open up new directions in game culture and academia for decades to come. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The worlds of games are important places for us to think about time, as demonstrated by historical game studies in evaluating the past, but there is a role for games to help us consider the future as well. Because games are, to some extent, systems, they facilitate a systems thinking approach that connects the material to the immaterial. Because games also tend to be action-based, they allow thinking through of acts as well as representations. Games allow us to think about a time and place that is different from the present and how it might operate as a system that we could live in. I argue that a post-autonomist method of game analysis requires an explicitly political interpretation that is focused on trying to imagine a political future through experiments in gaming. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article interrogates Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter’s Games of Empire. Since its publication in 2009, the game industry evolved significantly, adding billions of players, dollars, and devices. One of the driving forces of this transformation has been the global diffusion of mobile media. This raises the question: Do mobile platforms and the app stores operated by Apple and Google allow for a radical departure from global hypercapitalism? This question will be explored by taking on three themes: shifts in labor, the political economy of platformization, and the capital-intensive mode of app production and circulation. Doing so addresses two gaps in Games of Empire’ s approach: a dearth of empirical economic analysis and the acknowledgment of work in critical platform studies and mainstream economics. It is concluded that rather than providing a staging ground for dissent or collective action, apps of empire signal the foreclosure of an exodus from global hypercapitalism. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article investigates some of the key debates that have emerged within the nascent union organising project Game Workers Unite, with a specific focus on its UK branch (GWU UK). The analysis is based on a period of participatory observation and a series of interviews with board members of GWU UK. This article evaluates Game Workers Unite (GWU) in relation to other recent attempts at unionising the game industry. It concludes that the strategies adopted to counter the hyper-visibility and individualisation of the game worker are key contributions of GWU in contemporary video game labour. This article draws on the work of Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2009) Games of empire: Global capitalism and video games to evaluate the historical specificity of GWU and the importance of the organisation for the contemporary video game industry. </jats:p>