RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 Within the mainstream: an ecocritical framework for digital game history
T2 Dentro del canon: un marco ecocrítico para la historia del videojuego digital
A1 Backe, Hans-Joachim
K1 Historiography
K1 Popular culture
K1 Entertainment
K1 Anthropomorphism
K1 Methodology
K1 Ethics
K1 "Red Dead Redemption"
K1 "Dishonored"
K1 Historiografía
K1 Cultura popular
K1 Entretenimiento
K1 Antropomorfismo
K1 Metodología
K1 Ética
K1 Literatura
K1 Literature
K1 Medio ambiente
K1 Environmental science
AB Ecocriticism of digital games has so far engaged with a rather small corpus of examples, often prescriptively and with a quite limited methodological toolkit. This essay systematizes and historicizes some of these commonly found limitations of past research and proposes methods for a more historically and generically diverse exploration of ecological thinking vis-à-vis digital games. The majority of discussions of games from an ecocritical perspective has applied concepts and frameworks borrowed from literature and film studies, thus privileging surface semiotics over game mechanics. More methodically aware studies have oriented themselves toward the popular framework of procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2007), resulting both in a selection bias towards serious games and an author-centric, intentionalist slant inherent in the approach. In general, the discussion revolves around a small number of games with apparent ecocritical potential, such as “Myst” (Cyan 1993) or “Farmville” (Zynga 2009), resulting in a selective, a-historic and therefore distorted discussion of ecology in the diverse medium of digital games. This essay discusses strategies for dealing with a larger corpus of digital games through a descriptive matrix for identifying and analyzing the ecological dimension of digital games. It proposes an extension of the ecocritical toolkit by including a more user-centered, ethics-based theoretical framework based on Sicart’s “Ethics of Computer Games” (2009). The gain of engaging with representation and simulation of the natural environment in mainstream computer game history will be demonstrated in an analysis of two paradigmatic games. In both “Red Dead Redemption” (Rockstar San Diego 2010) and “Dishonored” (Arkane Studios 2013), we encounter game design geared toward producing ludo-narrative dissonances which are highly inductive of critical engagement with the ecosphere.
PB Universidad de Alcalá
SN 2171-9594
YR 2017
FD 2017
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10017/31325
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10017/31325
LA spa
DS MINDS@UW
RD 29-abr-2024