Editorial: American Culture in Games and Game Studies (original) (raw)

2024, Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis

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