Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> This position article outlines a personal perspective on the way that Horror games create affect in a complex play between representation and performance and that, in some cases, operate against the usual Vitruvian coordinates of games that are used in order to work with the types of affect associated with pleasure, agency and assuredness. The author argues that against the usual informative pleasures of self-affirmation and a clockwork universe, Horror games configured against normative game vocabularies have the potential to create a more complex form of ‘pleasure’ that is both complex and transformational. </jats:p>

<jats:p> With the advent of mass consumer virtual reality (VR) headsets and controllers in the second decade of the 20th century, some experts have predicted we are on a path toward losing the distinction between the real and the virtual. These predictions overstate the empirical evidence for the effects of VR; ignore its technical limitations; take for granted highly speculative claims about the nature of consciousness; and, most fundamentally, lose sight of the continuities between VR and other representational media. This article argues against thinking of VR as a magical technology for creating seamless illusions. Instead it situates VR as an emerging medium within an evolving community that is beginning to develop the media conventions to support sustained interaction and immersion. The future of VR is not an inevitable and delusional metaverse but a medium of representation that will always require our active creation of belief. </jats:p>

<jats:p> In this article, the author analyzes the ways in which the practices of virtual reality design are being standardized, focusing specifically on the Oculus Best Practices Guide (OBPG). Instructional writings like the OBPG are fruitful documents from which theories of practice can be extracted and, for companies like Oculus, they serve as alternative mission statements, articulating what Oculus wants and needs the standards and practices of its nascent product-medium to be. The author argues that the OBPG serves to create standards and practices that emphasize and maintain virtual reality (VR) user immersion in order to mitigate the weaknesses in the technology and better conform with VR’s idealized, hypothetical presentation in fiction and marketing rhetoric. The Guide plays a key role in Oculus’s larger attempts to mitigate market risk through the standardization of content across its distribution platforms in order to shape an inchoate technological object into a stable and lucrative entertainment medium. More broadly, the OBPG serves as an example of the specific ways in which market forces act on the development of new media practices, turning ‘standards’ into ‘industry standards’. </jats:p>