From Silent NPC to Active Consumer : Representing Female in Chinese Video Game Culture

War Ethics: A Framework for Analyzing Videogames

While much has been done exploring how ethics and videogames can overlap in interesting ways, there is little work examining the philosophy of war and its relation to videogames. This seems unusual since videogames have a long tradition of engaging with war as its subject matter. We provide a framework for analyzing and articulating ethical issues and concerns in videogames that feature representations of war. This framework is based in traditional war ethics, more specifically the notion of the “just war” and considers the ethical concerns that include when engaging in a war is morally justified (jus ad bellum), how to wage a war ethically (jus in bello) and the ethical responsibilities of the aftermath of a war (jus post bellum). Our framework consists of five lenses consisting of the perspective offered to players, the scale and scope of war represented, the centrality of war to the game experience, the type of military that appear in the game, and the authenticity of a game’s representation. For each lens we also provide a list of questions that can be used to examine the subtleties and nuances of how war is represented in the game that hopefully lead to deeper and more insightful analyses. We conclude with thoughts on how this approach could be productive as well as outline some additional areas worth considering for future work.

Lineages: Historicising the Videogame

I Wasn´t Looking at His Nice Ass: Female Gaze and Video Games

Delicate Subjects: Vulnerability and validation in action adventure games

How gaming achieves popularity: The case of The Smash Brothers

Using a case example of the crowd-funded YouTube documentary The Smash Brothers, the study explores how digital game culture is represented in media. The units for a qualitative content analysis, as described by Krippendorf (2004), are defined through thematic distinction. The results refer to four major categories and compose digital game culture as a whole: game, gamer, gameplay and game community. The interaction between gamer and game (gameplay) is the most featured element in the documentary. Gamers were shown to be individuals, athletes, celebrities and artists. Gameplay was also depicted to be of varying nature and in opposition, considered both a sport and an art. The specific game community is portrayed as being a large, friendly and sociable community. Based on the findings, further research can be facilitated in order to study the representations of digital game cultures in other forms of social media, as well as mass media and public discourse.

Ethical Recognition of Marginalized Groups in Digital Games Culture

In this paper I argue that moral agents are obligated to include and pay respect to the equal treatment, equal opportunities and justice of groups and identities usually marked by marginalization, discrimination and/or oppression in the domain of digital games. As a result, I point towards how individual and collective moral agents in digital games culture can pay respect through recognition and affirmation of different groups and identities. At first I establish what constitutes a group and my definition of marginalization. This allows me to identify which specific groups are marginalized in digital games through a literature overview of different research into the representation and inclusion of said group identities. This demarcation and identification of marginalized groups allow me to further propose the ways in which marginalization and discrimination occurs and is reproduced in the domain of digital games. In turn, I propose the ways in which this marginalization and discrimination can be curbed through recognition and affirmation of marginalized groups. As such, I provide and identify the ethical aspects and general actions that moral agents are confronted with and called to act upon. This results in specific suggestions on how moral agents within the domain of digital games are morally obligated to include and pay respect to groups and identities usually marked by marginalization, discrimination, and oppression.

Spec Ops: The Line’s Conventional Subversion of the Military Shooter

The contemporary videogame genre of the military shooter, exemplified by blockbuster franchises like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, is often criticised for its romantic and jingoistic depictions of the modern, high-tech battlefield. This entanglement of military shooters and the rhetoric of technologically advanced warfare in a “militaryentertainment complex” is scrutinised by Yager’s Spec Ops: The Line. The game’s critique of military shooters is as complex and messy as the battlefields the genre typically works to obscure. Initially presented to the player as a generic military shooter, The Line gradually subverts the genre’s mechanics, aesthetics, and conventions to devalue claims of the West’s technological and ethical superiority that the genre typically perpetuates. This paper brings together close, textual analysis; comments made by the game’s developers; and the analytical work of videogame critics to examine how The Line relies on the conventions of its own genre to ask its player to think critically about the cultural function of military shooters.

Liberal Sims?: Simulated Difference and the Commodity of Social Diversity

This paper outlines how representations of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity intersect with strategies of late capitalism in The Sims, arguably the most popular video game of all time. Within an industry known for its social stereotyping, The Sims has been praised as socially progressive for its liberal views towards same-sex relationships, racial equality, and non-sexualized presentation of women. However, I will argue, using the theory of Stuart Hall, Naomi Klein, Henry Jenkins and others, that below its progressive façade The Sims amounts to an exploitation of diversity initiated by targeting untraditional markets to better tap into the consuming potential of millions of non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual people – what Hall sees as the commercial appropriation of difference. I want to suggest that the spike in social liberalism may not be the result of a socio-cultural change in ideology, but instead reflects a change in how traditionally marginalized people are marketed to in late capitalism. The Sims, in this formation, becomes a hybrid entity, fueling both progressive liberal discourse and the relentless pursuit of profit at the expense to those it (mis)represents.

In Defense of Cutscenes

The technique of cutscenes, as typically found in story-based action games, is placed within a wider discursive problematic, focusing on the role of pre-written narratives in general. Within a theoretical framework raised by Espen Aarseth, Markku Eskelinen and Marie-Laure Ryan, I discuss the relations between the ergodic and the representational, and between play and narration. I argue that any game event is also a representational event, a part of a typical and familiar symbolic action, in which cutscenes often play a crucial part. Through cutscenes, the ergodic effort acquires typical meanings from the generic worlds of popular culture.