Volume 14, Number 24, Fall 2021

EN:

This article examines the rich historical subtext in the future-focused storylines of Quantic Dream’s 2018 release Detroit: Become Human (PS4) and illuminates many of the thematic continuities in racial issues between the past and the future. Much of the subtle historical symbolism appears to have went unnoticed by many reviewers who maligned the videogame and its creator David Cage for relying on lazy tropes that clunkily connect the African American civil rights movement to the narrative of woke androids engaging in a struggle for greater equality in society. Following scholarship that has examined the development of racialized thought in the past, this essay recognizes “race” as a powerful, yet malleable social construct, that sometimes changes over time. Racial concepts in the game do not perfectly align with historical or contemporary understandings of “race” in the United States. Androids, in short, all belong to the same “race.” This article then contends that the storylines of all three playable characters in the game resonate with well-crafted historical parallels and that the narrative geography in the gameworld often closely tethers to the historical geography of Detroit. The characters Markus, Connor, and Kara have intertwining stories that represent different elements of minority life in the United States with the clearest parallels to the historical experience of African Americans. Detroit: Become Human, nonetheless, is a science fiction game about androids. Framing the struggle for equal rights in the future with a group of beings that do not yet exist has the potential to disarm gameplayers of latent biases that may otherwise color their view of contemporary racial issues. The article asserts that the wedding together of past and future through experiential gameplay nurtures an empathic understanding of minority concerns that may carry over to the present to impact understandings of contemporary racial issues.

EN:

This article examines issues encountered with Europa Universalis IV (EUIV) in terms of teaching history in adult learning. The article identifies the educational limitations of the game, as well as the types of history that can be learnt from it. The data collected from participant responses is examined in terms of an ongoing concern regarding the balancing of historical accuracy and gameplay in EUIV. In this discussion about balance, participants raise common concerns about the historical abstraction, historical misinformation and counterfactual elements within EUIV. Nonetheless, the article argues that despite these ahistorical elements, EUIV can still potentially portray many of history’s larger trends and influences. Given the portrayal of these trends in-game, the article examines the pedagogical utility of the game in terms of narrative engagements with history and the promotion of deeper forms of learning.

EN:

This article aims to investigate what are the internal and external marking traits of indie games. Building up on previous efforts from other scholars, we developed a mix method research approach relying on interviews with indie game developers and a quantitative survey. Rather than trying to “re-invent the wheel” by proposing a new definition for the term, we attempt to map out what are the significant distinctive factors present in contemporary indie game from the perspective of developers and non-developers alike, while also discussing the changes of meaning it might have been subject to over time. We found that the determiningtraits of what allows one to perceive a game as indie change over time,andthat,despite thecorefact thatcreative independence remainsthe central feature of all indie games, the conditions for achieving this independence appear to be rather flexible, especially when it comes to issues of funding and publishing agreements. Additionally, our findings point to the term "indie" as being highly mutable and reliant on temporal and contextual aspects, with the qualities that divideindie fromnon-indie games being more akin to a continuum than something rigidly binary.

EN:

While media studies have frequently assessed the importance of representation, research in this area has often been siloed by institutional and methodological norms that define academics as “gender”, “race”, or “class” scholars, rather than inclusive scholars of all these and more. This paper thus responds to recent calls for more intersectional work by simultaneously addressing the overlapping representations of race, gender, and gamer identity, and their relation to Lorde’s concept of the mythical norm, in the popular webseries, The Guild (YouTube, 2007-2013). Via a detailed, inductive thematic analysis of the show’s two characters of color, Zaboo and Tinkerballa, we find a doubly problematic intersection between standard “gamer identity” tropes and gendered Asian/American stereotypes. The show forecloses on its potential to be truly diverse and reinforces the oppressive, marginalizing practices it tries to mock, suggesting that gaming culture will not change until we address its intersecting axes of power and exclusion. This research also demonstrates how the constructed identity of media audiences-- in this case, stereotypical “gamer” identity-- can exacerbate and reaffirm existing power disparities in representation. We suggest that media scholars remain attentive to the intersecting articulations of media consumer and individual identities in considering how representation can influence systems of inclusion and exclusion, as well as viewers’ lived outcomes.

EN:

‘Loot boxes’ are a type of videogame monetization model that contains randomized rewards of varying rarities which emerged in recent years. The element of chance seeks to entice players into buying loot boxes in hopes of receiving a rare and desirable reward. The design of loot boxes has been identified to be addictive and to entice players to spend more money than they estimate they would. With links to addiction and gambling behaviours, loot boxes may cause social harm if unregulated. Singapore is not new to the videogaming scene and may seek to regulate loot boxes should it emerge as a social problem amongst Singaporeans. By acknowledging existing approaches towards regulating loot boxes and situating loot boxes in Singapore’s social context, this paper explores Lessig’s four modalities of constraint as a framework to hypothesize regulatory options for Singapore.

EN:

In this paper, I employ the concept of the palimpsest of meaning (Bailey, 2007) to illustrate how Pokémon Go shapes and produces relations to place. Using ethnographic data from student players at the University of Guelph, I demonstrate how augmented reality (AR) gaming constructs a curated layer of place meaning that influences players’ knowledge of, relationships to, and movement through space. In so doing, I argue that we should not ignore the potential of AR technology to influence how we come to know place, emphasizing the impacts that biases, which are coded into this technology, might have on subaltern narratives of place and on marginalized communities, particularly in the context of Canadian settler colonialism and the erasure of Indigenous knowledge.

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There is a wealth of research on the depiction and impact of mental health representations in traditional media; however, less is known about video games. As the dominant form of media in the 21st century, video games uniquely portray mental illness in traditional ways as well as in ways unique to video games, such as in-game mechanics (e.g., sanity meters) and player-driven decision making. This paper outlines the importance of cultural messages relating to mental illness as conveyed through video games in terms of content and influence and presents a multi-dimensional model of analysis for the representation of mental illness in digital games. The aim of this paper is to provide a foundation for understanding how mental illness is represented in digital games, provide a new perspective for thinking critically about representation of mental illness in games, and overview a new framework for assessing video game content in this area.

EN:

Baba Is You is a 2D electronic game in which the player-controlled character pushes word-blocks around in order to build sentences, which make up the rules governing the simulated environment. With Baba Is You as the case in point, we bring up parallels between video games and Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory, J.L. Austin’s pragmatics, and Gregory Bateson’s levels of learning. By considering self-reference paradoxes, metalanguage, and the map-territory distinction, Baba Is You becomes an intuitive philosophic playground by enticing players to question not only language and its uses, but some general conceptions about not just video games, but life itself.