Gaming de pandemie: Jocurile pe mobil ca spații de solidaritate la nivel global (original) (raw)

2021, Ipostaze și etnografii ale carantinei în pandemie

This chapter explores why games, especially interactive games, gained popularity during the global isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, a trend that specialists in the gaming industry have described as unprecedented. It looks at the relationship between physical isolation and changes in social interaction through mobile games, how “pandemic gamers” formed global solidarity communities and spent “pandemic dollars” to replace going out for a beer with friends. Using data collected over a year and a half, as part of an ethnography and autoethnography of the mobile game Emperor & Beauties developed by the Taiwanese company Heyyo, I argue that role-playing and strategy games (RPGs) constituted, for most players who started playing in 2020, a third digital space—what Ray Oldenburg (1989) referred to as a community hangout. Under the conditions of physical isolation imposed by authorities, relationships between players formed much faster than in a non-pandemic context, and groups coalesced more easily based on the solidarity born during the pandemic-induced isolation.

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