Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> This article focuses on questioning and theorizing the visual and discursive disappearance of blackness from virtual fantasy worlds. Using EverQuest, EverQuest II, and World of Warcraft as illustrative of a timeline of character creation design trends, this article argues that the disappearance of blackness is a gradual erasure facilitated by multicultural design strategies and regressive racial logics. Contemporary fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) privilege whiteness and contextualize it as the default selection, rendering any alterations in coloration or racial selection exotic stylistic deviations. Given the Eurocentrism inherent in the fantasy genre and embraced by MMORPGs, in conjunction with commonsense conceptions of Blacks as hyper-masculine and ghettoized in the gamer imaginary, players and designers do not see blackness as appropriate for the discourse of heroic fantasy. As a result, reductive racial stereotypes and representations proliferate while productive and politically disruptive racial differences are ejected or neutralized through fantastical proxies. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The market for adult computer gamers is growing considerably. However, there are nearly no empirical works that are primarily focusing this age group. Therefore, there is an urgent need for explorative studies on these gamers. In a qualitative in-depth interview study with 21 gamers aged between 35 and 73 years, this article describes their gaming careers, the integration of gaming into their everyday life, and aspects of social interaction within real and virtual life. Overall, the findings of this study sketch a lively picture of adult players. Many of the interviewees show a very strong interest in the social aspects of gaming. However, gaming can put some strain on their family life, and many older gamers feel that their partners and peers regard their hobby as being inappropriate for their age. Still, most of the interview partners successfully manage to combine occupational and private duties with their gaming activities. </jats:p>

<jats:p> In applying traditional game theory to multiplayer computer games, not enough attention has been given to actual player practice in local settings. To do this, the author describes a team of players in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. This motley group learned how to defeat an end-game dungeon through collaborative improvements on communication and coordination. It focused on sustaining and building player relationships and learning together rather than the accepted norm of obtaining magical items. Trust was forged through a desire to ``hang out and have fun'' and was evidenced by the joviality of their communication. The group's ability to reflect and be consistent about its desires for camaraderie allowed it to recover from a poor performing night, which threatened to disband the group. The team's success depended on its ability to define and retain a coherent group identity and establish shared social incentives rather than individual incentives for participation. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This 3-year study used a mixed-method design beginning with content analysis of games envisioned by 5th and 8th graders, followed by a survey of students in the same age range reacting to video promos representing these games. Results show that the designer's gender influences the design outcome of games and that girls expected that they would find the girl-designed games significantly more fun to play than the boy-designed games, whereas boys imagined that the boy-designed games would be significantly more fun to play than the girl-designed games. Boys overwhelmingly picked games based entirely on fighting as their top ranked games. Girls overwhelmingly ranked those same fighting games as their least preferred. Girls as designers consciously envisioned games with both male and female players in mind, whereas boys designed only for other boys. Both 8th-grade boy game ideas were liberally ``borrowed'' from a successful commercial game. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article introduces and situates the ensuing collection of four essays on the theme of games and technology. It argues the need for videogame studies to develop a more rigorous and focused perspective on the theorization of technology as it relates to research into games and culture. The ``and'' in games and culture cannot begin to be understood comprehensively without a thinking of the profound reliance of both terms on technology. Players and their cultural and collective involvements should be taken not as stable categories of research and development but as processes of becoming intertwined with lineages of technological development and disjunction which are the condition of these processes. Video games are not the least component and proponent of these technological lineages today. The essays collected in this section of the journal issue are described and characterized as offering such a focus on ludic technicity through their diverse but intersecting considerations of game hardware, software, game play, and other practices appropriating game technologies. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article uses Bolter and Grusin's notion of remediation to explore analog media technologies—cinema, photography, cartography, television, and radio—in digital horror videogames. Such moments illustrate what Lister et al. term the “technological imaginary” of both old and new media technological imaginary of both old and new media. Old media technologies contribute a sense of the real perceived as lacking in digital media, yet central to a generically-significant impression of embodiment. Critical theorization of these forms within media studies illuminate their function within digital video game texts; such processes illustrating the cultural, institutional, and aesthetic meanings and mythologies of both analog and digital media, while continuing traditional use of media technologies within discourses of horror and the supernatural. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This paper tries to clarify the place of the handheld controller in computer game aesthetics. It starts from the premise that aesthetic form, perhaps the central category of modernist critical theory, is present in our play with computer games. The central argument is that controllers and our use of them are repressed in gameplay and that this repression facilitates a diversion of the player's energy that helps explain the compulsive nature of good games. Our sense of participation in events in game fiction is bought at the price of a loss of interest in our hands. The smooth integration of players into the rough, faltering world of gameplay is made possible by an excess of energy that passes from the unacknowledged tension in the hand into the imaginary relation we have with on-screen action. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This essay draws on a number of recent research projects that record and analyze video game play. The ``microethnographic'' approach that they develop suggests methodological strategies, both for analyzing gameplay and for identifying and conceptualizing relationships between technology, agency, and aesthetics in everyday technoculture across and between the virtual and the actual. It suggests a new model of technoculture in everyday life, shifting analytical and critical attention away from established research objects and notions (the ``impact'' of technologies, consumption, identities and subjectivity, interactivity) and toward the ``event'' of gameplay as one with nonhuman as well as human participants, and brought into being by relationships, and translations, of human and nonhuman agency. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article is an attempt to understand cheating in digital games as a practice that highlights the machinicity of the process of digital gameplay. The significance of this endeavor lies in the fact that digital gameplay is often naturalized—by the digital games industry, by players, and by scholars in the burgeoning field of digital game studies—which leads to an obfuscation of the inherently cybernetic character of videogames. Cheating and other ``de-ludic'' practices can counteract this naturalization and reveal the process of ``becoming-machine'' that lies at the heart of digital gameplay. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Game time is a core feature of game design and study, and forms part of the gaming experience on a variety of levels. It can be viewed from multiple perspectives, for example, the time of the playing of the game or the flow of time in a game world. In this article, a comprehensive game time model based on empirical research as well as recent theory is presented. It proposes various perspectives on game time and integrates them to allow coherent representation of the same events in the different perspectives. The model has been tested across tabletop and digital formats, and its applicability across game formats is demonstrated. Emphasis is placed on multiplayer and massively multiplayer role-playing games because these feature complex game time behavior not previously evaluated. The model considers game time as an interactively created and nonlinear feature of games and game play. </jats:p>