Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> The monetization of the modern Triple-A game has undergone severe changes, as free-to-play revenue models and game as a service distribution strategy have become standard for game developers. To date, the established tradition of the industry’s political–economic analysis focused on the value extraction and user exploitation of video game as a cultural commodity, centered on the video game as generating value through the selling of boxed or digital units. In this article, we present a new analytical framework grounded in understanding the modern video game as an asset that continuously generates revenue for its owners. This theoretical lens encapsulates the changes in contemporary game development, distribution, and value generation. To demonstrate, we apply it to the analysis of the monetization strategies of three recent free-to-play Triple-A titles: Fortnite (2017), Apex Legends (2019), and Call of Duty: Warzone (2020). </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article explores tensions between producers and audiences over the growing trend of broken games as developers rush error-ridden titles to market and update them after their release. Through the lens of software studies, it examines development norms among major game companies, noting important connections with contingent commodities and perpetual beta development. Focusing on the discourse surrounding Ubisoft’s notoriously broken Assassin’s Creed Unity (2014), it highlights how digital producers and audiences negotiate failure in a digital environment that increasingly relies on updates, revisions, and patches. It argues that digital industry producers foster an indefinite beta atmosphere within the context of a purchase and recontextualizes audience outrage as free labor by encouraging customers to report on faulty code. Ultimately, industry producers then engender a perpetual update culture in which digital commodities mediate failure through the rhetoric of constant improvement, and producers leverage the instability of digital distribution against its audience. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Morality meters are a commonly used mechanic in many ethically notable video games. However, there have been several theoretical critiques of such meters, including that people can find them alienating, they can instrumentalise morality, and they reduce morality to a binary of good and evil with no room for complexity. While there has been much theoretical discussion of these issues, there has been far less empirical investigation. We address this gap through a qualitative study that involved participants playing a custom-built visual novel game ( The Great Fire) with different intuitive and counter-intuitive morality meter settings. Overall, we found that players’ attitudes towards the morality meter in this game was complex, context sensitive and variable throughout gameplay and that the intuitiveness of the meter encouraged participants to treat the meter more ‘as a moral guide’ that prompts reflection and less ‘as a score’ to be engaged with reactively. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The COVID-19 pandemic has affected our lives in many ways, including how we choose to spend our time and deal with unprecedented circumstances. Anecdotal reports suggest that many have turned to playing video games during the pandemic. To better understand how games are being used during the lockdown, we conducted an online survey ( N = 781) that focused on gameplay habits and effects on players’ well-being. We find that time spent playing games has increased for 71% of respondents, while 58% of respondents reported that playing games has impacted their well-being, with the overwhelming majority of responses indicating a positive impact. We identify seven ways that games have affected players, such as providing cognitive stimulation and opportunities to socialise, and a variety of benefits related to mental health, including reduced anxiety and stress. Our findings highlight the sociocultural significance of video games and the potentially positive nature of games’ effects on well-being. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article proposes the concept of “plaything” as an instrument to inquire on the ontology and epistemology of the things we play with. Extending Barad’s (2007) onto-epistemology and Ingold’s (2012) concepts of “things” and “objects,” this article intends to provide a theoretical contribution to the materialist turn in game studies (Apperley, T. H., &amp; Jayemane, D. (2012). The main argument of the article is as follows: the ontology of the things we play with is separate from its epistemology. The concept of playthings provides a materialistic ontology that accounts for the technologies we play with. At the same time, concepts like video games, toys, or games are understood as being epistemological concepts, used to create situated knowledge (Haraway, D. (1987) about playthings. Playthings help describe how a technology is shaped for and through play, while other concepts place the experience of playthings in culture and society. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This paper describes the appropriation of video game culture for discursive use during the 2019–20 Hong Kong anti-extradition movement, with participants relying on game argot for mass protest communication and mobilization purposes, and employing game frameworks (especially from MMORPGs) for organizing protest actions. Data from online forums are used to present examples of video game rhetoric and narratives in protest-related online discourses, to speculate on their symbolic meanings, and to examine ways that borrowed aspects of game culture influenced movement activities. After describing ways that game culture spilled over into social movements, we highlight examples of gaming literacy during dynamic protest situations. Our evidence indicates that the combination of game culture and online gaming literacy strengthened activist toolkits and intensified the “be water” nature of a social movement that many describe as leaderless. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article examines Rievssat (2018), one of the six games developed during the 2018 Sami Game Jam, as a case study to demonstrate how digital games on Indigenous issues afford opportunities to embed Indigenous ways of knowing into the core of game design. In particular, by exploring Rievssat’s themes and game mechanics, this article identifies the way its procedural rhetoric models an understanding of and relationship to the game environment that reflects the dialogic connection with nature and animistic worldview unique to the Sámi people. This article thereby demonstrates the value of new media in recentering Indigenous systems of knowledge and cultural practices by engaging with and incorporating Indigenous epistemologies into the foundation of game design, revealing how Sámi digital games can offer insight into Sámi ways of knowing and experiencing the world to Indigenous and non-Indigenous players alike. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Honor of Kings (HOK) is currently the most popular yet controversial mobile game in China. It is deeply inspired by Chinese history and culture, while its heroic backstories have been criticized for potential distortion of historical views. Drawing upon Systemic Functional Linguistics, this study explores the reconstruction in ideational and interpersonal meanings through comparing heroic stories with historical accounts. It reveals that HOK game stories have (1) significantly reconstructed activity processes while largely preserved spatial circumstances; (2) partly fabricated social relationships among characters, which result in the distortion of historical timeline; (3) retained core judgements on characters. It further explains how the reconstruction of heroic stories is embedded in the social context of game discourse, as far as entertainment, sociality, and cultural identity are concerned. The findings may shed light on discourse semantic interpretation in game studies and provide pertinent suggestions for future in-game story writing. </jats:p>

<jats:p> In debates concerning videogames and the freedom of expression, two lines of argumentation have traditionally been put forward: That games express ideas and for this reason are entitled to the same protection as other expressive media or that their interactive nature makes them different in how they reflect the world compared to other media. This paper adds nuance to this discussion through two arguments. First, we argue that videogames cannot be understood as mainly expressive or interactive, but that these characteristics must be understood in tandem if we are to understand the role of videogames in culture and society, connected by the player. Second, we argue that play and playfulness are ignored in debates about videogames and the freedom of expression, and that attention towards the playful aspects offers a better view of how videogames differ from other media and what this means for the status of expressions in videogames. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Videogame memories are not simply mental records of what happened in the past; they are also texts to be interpreted. Taking a psychoanalytic approach, this article conducts a textual analysis of 115 recorded acts of videogame memory from Checkpoints, a podcast that ran from 2015 to 2018. Analysing subjects’ responses to the question ‘what was your first experience of a videogame?’, it argues that what is absent from videogame memory – what cannot be remembered – has unconscious significance. What cannot be remembered gives rise to the fantasmatic structure of videogame memory. By mapping this fantasmatic structure across memories of the first videogame experience, authority figures, separation and individuation, and childhood fears and phobias, the article argues for the necessity of a psychoanalytic approach to videogame memory. Psychoanalysis pays close attention to the subjective dimension of our recollections – in this case, that which speaks beyond the historical content of videogame memory. </jats:p>