Introduction: A Game's Study Manifesto (original) (raw)

Editorial: American Culture in Games and Game Studies

Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis, 2024

Popular culture comes up with a variety of ways to navigate the exchanges between the transcultural platforms it provides for people from diff erent parts of the world to share interests, emotions or codes of communication; the glocalized phenomena that adapt those platforms to particular societies; and the local contributions that, having originated from specifi c contexts, get embraced by global audiences. As a pop-cultural medium whose impact has signifi cantly grown over decades, digital games add to the complexity of such oscillation between the global and the local by combining narrative and visual dimensions with gameplay architectures, and therefore by expanding the spectrum of processes or phenomena in which such dynamics may manifest themselves. This issue of Anglica Wratislaviensia is devoted mainly to exploring the said potential in the context of broadly understood connections between digital gamesplus one tabletop role-playing game which, however, has exerted a prominent infl uence on the development of the digital medium-and the United States. As put by Carly A. Kocurek, "[a]s the video gaming industry exploded in the United States during the 1970s and early 1980s, the medium became a point of articulation for anxieties surrounding broader cultural and economic changes". Since that time, the scope of those changes may have been shifting and expanding-from pedagogical or psychological concerns about games' impact on young people, to more recent insights into the issues of diversity, representation and intersectionality in game content as well as game development-yet games have remained a prominent element of the American economic, social and cultural landscape. Simultaneously, with the United States' remarkable formative power with regard to globalized cultural and media discourses, American locality has also been infl uencing the international gaming culture, as well as the medium itself. Examples of that infl uence include, among others, the signifi cance of producers such as Electronic Arts or Microsoft; the recognizability of America-inspired settings, for example, Night City, originating from the tabletop Cyberpunk 2020 and digitalized in the Polish Cyberpunk 2077; or the visibility of American narrative formulas, such as

‘Is that my score?’: Between literature and digital games

Antae, 1.2 , 2014

It is on the margins of what Katherine Hayles calls the ‘shifty’ boundaries between computer games and electronic literature as well as between digital art and electronic literature that I set the focus of this paper. I argue that electronic literature, with its cohabitation of strong elements of play and claims to ‘literariness’, allows for a discussion of the interface between literary theory and digital games by exposing points of contact as well as divergence through the respective claims of the two discourses.

GLOBALIZATION IN THE WORLD OF VIDEO GAMES (Atena Editora)

GLOBALIZATION IN THE WORLD OF VIDEO GAMES (Atena Editora), 2023

This article presents a brief discussion about the context of video games in contemporary society. This scenario takes place in an increasingly globalized and modern world of technology, as not only physical products began to be sold through all materialized networks, but also digital products. It is worth noting that video games are an important factor in the world economy, while more than half of all profits in the entertainment industry today come from the video games sector. Furthermore, from a phenomenological perspective, video games can represent the culture of both the place of origin in which the game was developed, and the place where it was set, functioning as vehicles of social particularities. In general, the player can “virtually” experience different geographic spaces without knowing them physically. To prepare this article, a methodology based on bibliographical research was used, which made use of several scientific articles and reports. The article ends by highlighting the idea that due to the strong influence of electronic games on society and the economy, it is necessary to carry out studies like these to better understand the new generations and dynamics of a globalized world. It also considers that the concentration of income presented by each country in the world economic system is directly linked to its profit role in this economic sector.

Global Gamers, Transnational Play, Imaginary Battlefield

During the post-9/11 era we have witnessed the rise of war-themed digital games, which are increasingly produced and distributed on a massive global scale. This new form of 'militainment' re-formulates ‘the military-entertainment complex’ industrial model, and by repeatedly simulating historical/present/fictional war events and adopting militaristic stories, creates an adrenaline-pumping interactive gaming experience that the global gamers find very difficult to resist. Before 2011 the most iconic war-themed first-person-shooter (FPS) digital game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, achieved a new milestone of more than 20 million copies sold globally. After the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops, the Facebook COD group became one of the top 20 fastest growing Facebook communities in 2010. At the time of writing this thesis, this network community had already attracted more than 10 million fans worldwide. Besides the well-known Call of Duty series, other FPS titles like Medal of Honor, Fallout, and Battlefield series are all fed into the global gamers’ growing appetite for this so-called ‘shoot’em’all’ genre. Within academia, scholars from different research disciplines also realized the importance of gaming and have been trying to approach this conflict-based digital game culture from various angles. The war-themed genre FPS is frequently challenged by people’s negative impression towards its unpleasant essence and content; questioning its embedded political ideologies, the violent sequences involved in the gameplay and its socio-cultural influences/effects to individual and community etc. However, the wide range of critical debates in this field has reflected the growing interest of scholars in the complex political relationship between military and entertainment sectors and industries, and the embedded P.R. network that is running behind the games’ industrial structure and cultural production (see Wark 1996, Herz 1997, Derian 2001, Stockwell and Muir 2003, Lenoir and Lowood 2005, Leonard 2007, Turse 2008, Ottosen 2009). Despite widespread academic interests in the subject, few researchers have paid attention to the gamers who are the ones truly engaged themselves to this genre. If we look at the research within game studies today, less analysis is primarily focused on this unique shooter-gamer culture. In this regard, this research adopts qualitative research methods to explore the gamers’ feelings, attitudes, and their experiences in the war-themed FPS genre. In terms of the research methods used, an online questionnaire was launched to collect responses from 433 gamers across different countries, and 11 in-depth face-to-face interviews with a community of COD gamers were also conducted in Taiwan between 2010 and 2011. The data which has emerged from the two research methods reveals gamers’ perceptions about war games’ time narrative and realism. Based on the interviews, the research analyses East Asian gamers’ construction of meanings in this ‘western genre’ and provides some theoretical reflections about their transnational FPS gameplay experience.

Games and Culture Games and Culture The Play of Imagination: Extending the Literary Mind

Games and Culture, 2007

As games, particularly virtual worlds, become increasingly popular and as they begin to approximate large scale social systems in size and nature, they have also become spaces where play and learning have merged in fundamental ways. More important is the idea that the kind of learning that happens in the spaces of these massively multiplayer online games is fundamentally different than what we have come to consider as standard pedagogical practice. The distinction the authors make is that traditional paradigms of instruction have addressed learning as “learning about,” while these new forms of learning deal with knowl¬edge through the dynamic of “learning to be.” It is the authors’ contention that the experi¬ences offered within virtual worlds provide a fundamentally different way of thinking about learning that may provide some keys to the development of future pedagogical practice. Keywords: learning; World of Warcraft; conceptual blending; pedagogy; imagination

Narrative Videogames: The Literary Genre of the Digital Age

2018

This dissertation deals with the stigma-ridden medium that is the videogame and how it relates to the highly-regarded art of literature. While there is a growing body of literature that recognizes the importance of videogames as major cultural artefacts of our time, they continue to be studied essentially for their behavioral effects or in terms of their ludic aspects and little else. Recently, there has been renewed interest in videogames in the academia prompted by the rapid evolution of the medium especially in its story telling function, increasingly at the core of its design purposes. However, proper examination of its narrative and literary aspects is still lacking relevant substance. Thus, this interdisciplinary research compares the narrative elements of videogames to those of another established art, literature, with the narrative fiction prototype, the novel genre in particular. The central thesis being that the story-driven or narrative videogame can be considered as part of literature for its potential as an interactive, audiovisual as well as literary storytelling medium that effectively tells book-worthy stories. The work is divided into two chapters, the first covers the major theoretical dimensions necessary for the analysis that will be carried on in the second chapter which is as a practical application of literary and narrative theory on videogame narratives, precisely that of the arguably postmodern story of Dear Esther to reach the conclusion that videogames and literature, though seemingly unrelated, are closely linked in both narrative and literariness.

Thesis: Rendering the Other: Ideologies of the Neo-Oriental in World of Warcraft

2013

Considering video games as sites of semiotic play, I argue that video games are a commodity that inscribes the consumer into various subject positions that often participate in the replication of ideology in simulated spaces. Applying Louis Althusser, Edward Said, and many other pertinent scholars, I consider World of Warcraft, the world’s largest online video game, and what our digital production and consumption of this gamic space says about our identities and place in a larger cultural ideological framework. It is with this understanding that I see ideology in video games as both an illusion that informs our understanding of the world, as well as an allusion to our very real subject positionings within the real world. Focusing first on the capitalist fairytale that is recreated in the virtual economy and gaming ludology, I briefly discuss “gold farming” and how this real world aspect of WoW bridges the Oriental ideology in both real and virtual spaces, as both spaces benefit from this process. Focusing specifically on the recent World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria, I argue that by making Pandaria and the Pandaren race so stereotypically Asian, so bluntly Othered, and so vividly exotic merely encapsulates the idea that diversity, difference and especially the East are all now more easily consumed by a world entrenched in such a clash of ideology and clash of cultures, where all facets of identity and play have been transformed into consumable products in the virtual world as potently as they also have in the real world. Ultimately I argue that through digital reinscription, video games render the region, the geographies and the people of the Orient as meaningful only through the subjective Western gaze that comes to understand these geographical, material, and human spaces through a stereotyped and Western-centric cultural lens. Further, I show how video games have the capacity to reinscribe dominant Western ideological trends that through the art of immersion and play become more than abstract paradigms reserved for academia, and instead are inscribed as common consumer understandings of foreign territories, peoples and histories through a new subject-positioning of the player.