Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> Developing from David Sudnow's accounts of expertise, this article examines the gameplay of Counter-Strike, a popular online game. Although Counter-Strike at first may seem an unsophisticated pursuit, players display remarkable dexterity developed through many hours of play. Through participating in the game and analyzing videos of gameplay, we examine Counter-Strike as an example of expert technology use. As players move beyond the mere physical prowess of chaining their movements with the environment, they develop a sense of the terrain of play as a contingent tactically oriented understanding, rather than as static spatial knowledge. Relatedly, we provide the beginnings of an alternative account of both games and expertise which brings out something of what it is to play a specific game, as opposed to games in general. Moreover, rather than presenting a disengaged general model of skill, the article considers how we might access and describe the situated skills of gameplay. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article addresses gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) representation in video games from a cultural production perspective. It addresses how members of the video game industry account for the relative lack of GLBT representation in this medium. Previous studies have shown that certain stakeholders actively invest in GLBT representation in media. Factors in the inclusion of GLBT content include (a) the presence of motivated producers in the industry, those that are personally, politically, or commercially interested in GLBT content; (b) how the audience for a text or medium is constructed; (c) what the public backlash from both the GLBT community and conservative groups will be, as well as industry-based reprisals in the form of censorship or ratings; (d) the structure of the industry and how it is funded; and (e) how homosexuality, bisexuality, or transgender identities can be represented in the medium. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Sid Meier's Civilization allows players to build empires that span the earth and the ages. Complementing existing scholarship on ideologies, practices, and subject positions inculcated by the game, this article interrogates the very conception of subjectivity Civilization fosters in players. Building upon ludological and cybernetic principles, the author takes a formal approach to analyze the processes of human—computer interaction that emerge in the course of players' engagement with the game. Characteristics of the turn-based genre as well as Civilization's interface mechanics, representations of historical processes, and manual are considered for the ways in which they solicit player input. The author contends that player interaction with Civilization reifies a conception of himself or herself as a sovereign agent constituted of pure internality. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Throughout the community of game players, developers, and journalists, the term ``independent'' is used in a number of ways to describe a type of development next to, or juxtaposed with, the mainstream process of creating, marketing, distributing, and playing digital games. Yet, this ``independence'' is something quite different from what the literature on independent, alternative, oppositional, radical, or otherwise nonmainstream media tends to suggest or advocate. The contemporary context of game design and development practices throughout the industry forces us to rethink assumptions about independence and autonomy in creative labor, about the communicative practices between media companies across the entire business spectrum of the global media industry, and about diversity or homogeneity in the production of culture. In this article, we aim to articulate more precisely what it means to create, work in, and give meaning to independent computer and video game production. </jats:p>

<jats:p> World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG). The end-game consists of complex encounters requiring highly organized groups (raids). This complexity has caused the organizing of raiding guilds (self-governing player communities). Raiding guilds have hierarchical political structures in which leaders must legitimate their positions to demand participation. In a symbiotic relationship of political structure and individual desire, guilds must guarantee advancement in tandem with individuals' acquisition of items (loot); but game mechanics make this problematic. Each end-game encounter defeated offers less loot than players needed. To compensate for this raiding guilds use DKP (intra-guild economic systems). It is DKP, I argue, that generates the political cohesion necessary for guilds to successfully engage the end-game. DKP is guild specific, but important for its effects on value and reciprocity. It creates player obligation through a rationalized system measuring commitment. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The rise of virtual worlds and their demonstrated potential to generate new economies, forms of belonging, and learning—all within spaces that are deeply game-like—makes new demands of our thinking about games and society. A number of scholars have recently begun to forge an approach distinct from past efforts, shifting their attention toward broader, contextual understandings of games, communities, and play. Seeking to treat such spaces neither as wholly determined by outside factors nor as utterly sui generis, they aim to account for the contingent and emergent relationship that these spaces have with other domains of human experience. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article explores the notion of assemblage for computer game studies. Drawing on this framework, the author proposes a multifaceted methodological approach to the study of games and the play experience. Drawing on user-created mods (modifications) in the game World of Warcraft and an analysis of a raid encounter there, a discussion is undertaken about the relationship between technological artifacts, game experience, and sociality. Primary to the consideration is an argument for the centralizing the interrelation of a variety of actors and nodes when analyzing lived play in computer games. </jats:p>

<jats:p> In the following article, author argues that virtual worlds are characterized by a particular mode of governmentality. Rather than seeing virtual worlds as analogous to societies in the real world, he suggests regarding them as ‘‘social factories’’ in which the social fabric is inextricably shot through with economic production. While the governmentalization of the global economy and the concomitant economization of governments are processes that originate in the real world, they also result in a ‘‘naturalization’’ of virtual worlds, a tendency which also becomes obvious in the way virtual worlds are discussed in terms of ‘‘population’’ and ‘‘territory.’’ In virtual worlds, the suffusion of governance with economic production thus leads to the formation of precarious forms of governmentality, which are veiled by a pertinent ideology of play. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article discusses the origins and development of the player-innovated dragon kill point (DKP) system as an example for thinking about Foucauldian conceptions of disciplinary power and the production of gamer subjectivity in the contexts of massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) power gaming. The argument considers the generalized hyperrationalism of DKP-based gaming as both an ideal digital form of panoptic control as well as a kind of ironic form of play with the limits of the possibility of control within digital culture. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) constitute social jurisdictions governed by rules of play. When we consider the work of Johan Huizinga and subsequent theorists of human play activities, we find that ludic rules differ from legal rules in important ways. The goals of play also differ from the goals of law. In applying law to MMORPGs and other virtual worlds, it is important to recognize that jurisdictions of play are structured in ways that are fundamentally different from the ways traditional legal rules are structured. </jats:p>