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- Volume 7, Issue 2, 2015
Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2015
Volume 7, Issue 2, 2015
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Dissonance, truth and the political limits of possibility in MMOs
More LessAbstractThis article argues and synthesizes two fundamental points about the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMO), with World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic serving as the chief examples of the genre. The first is that the use of ethical dilemmas in MMOs is a content-level manifestation of their unique fit to the current moment of late capitalism insofar as such dilemmas stage freedom of choice and action within a structure that restricts autonomy. The second is that the ludonarrative dissonance (via both Lukacs and Hocking) instigated by the merger of the closed, ‘epic’ form of the video game and the open-ended social aspects introduced in the MMO is a formal aesthetic response to late capitalism. These two threads of argument dovetail into a conclusion on the status of the MMO as a tool of hegemony – a cultural product that manifests and reinforces the norms of the present moment and at the same time has the potential to be repurposed for liberatory ends.
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Lost/gained in translation: Oware 3D, Ananse: The Origin and questions of hegemony
More LessAbstractThe computer and its related technology are typically interpreted as signifiers of western culture. Thus, when a ‘non-western’ cultural product is parsed through an electronic format, there is the inevitable gesture towards the extent to which the process of adaptation is a ‘westernized’ one. Irrespective of the tenuous nature of this question, hegemonic repercussions occur; thus this article considers the literary as well as socio-political implications of two different adaptations of aspects of traditional Ghanaian culture into mobile video games. The two games are Kobla Nyomi’s Oware 3D (2014), which is the virtual descendant of the Akan traditional board game Oware; and the Leti Arts produced Ananse: The Origin (2014), which refashions the Akan folk tale trickster Kweku Ananse into a superhero. This article processes the two adaptations as paraphrase and translation, respectively: the paraphrase from a board game to a mobile video board game on the one hand, and the translation from an oral literature-based folk tale to a mobile video action/adventure game. This comparative analysis is undertaken in the context of the game-making hegemony that is concomitant not only with globalization and cultural exchange, but also with the intersections between creative license and tradition.
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Fighting heroic hegemony with ennui: The remarkable everyday in World of Warcraft
More LessAbstractThis article explores the predominance of mundane everyday tasks within the World of Warcraft (WoW) gamespace to emphasize the importance of the quotidian within this purported heroic environment. The importance of what is understood to be ordinary-everyday-tasks in accomplishing heroic quests, I argue, challenges popular and scholarly perceptions of WoW, as a gendered gaming space based in heroic time and presumably inhabited by skilled male technocrats. I illustrate that the WoW game-environment, in offering players the option of in-game progression not only through slaying dragons but also by picking herbs and sewing clothes makes a definite rupture in the idea of heroic temporality, which is traditionally understood as masculine while the everyday is essentialized as feminine. Without gendering any task as either feminine or masculine I assert that heroic identity in WoW is extensively influenced by everyday ennui, to the extent that maintenance of heroic status quo often means a regular engagement with the quotidian. By allowing for the possibility of gameplay in multiple temporal modes WoW challenges social constructions of heroic time as masculine and everyday time as feminine. In doing so these multiple temporalities open out possibilities for perceiving the WoW landscape as ideal for resisting hegemonies of masculinized heroism and the creation and sustenance of alternative modes of agency.
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From destination to nation and back: The hyperreal journey of Incredible India
More LessAbstractThis article argues that, despite the granting of political independence to most colonized places around the world by the 1960s and the academic criticism of the attitudes that furthered colonial intervention, there is a continued propagation of the idea that the West needs to intervene in the East. In contrast to traditional media where such articulation is immediately challenged, the medium of computer games provides a backdoor entry for such interventionist roles, which largely go un-noticed and unchallenged. This article argues that India has always been imagined as an exotic destination ripe for intervention by the West. This depiction has been carried forward to the virtual world of computer games. In these games India is seen as a passive, feminine destination for the exploits of the western traveller who must intercede to ensure the existence of India. The threats to India are shown to be often due to the nature of India itself, an irrational, magical space, wild and illogical, requiring the iron hand of the western traveller-adventurer. The western travelleradventurer appropriates the symbolisms associated with power in the local culture and establishes not only a lasting rule but also an ambience of continued influences even after the disintegration of the empire. The article argues for the need of rigorous intervention in the digital world of computer games while linking such portrayals to the continued neocolonial and neo-imperealist designs of the West.
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Trouble in paradise: Viva Piñata, charismatic megafauna and the sour side of gaming with animals
More LessAbstractThis article investigates the sandbox title Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise. It argues that the game privileges charismatic megafauna and forwards popular notions about what is considered a desirable animal. By privileging certain species over others, Viva Piñata inadvertently places itself in a conversation about conservation, endangered species and pest management. Recognizably domestic animals (ducks, chickens, etc.) and beautiful, easily recognized animals (lions, tigers) are the symbols of cultural good in the game, while other beasts (bats, moles, wolves) bear the label of ‘pest’ and must be guarded against or destroyed. Furthermore, all of the animals carry a literal monetary value; charismatic megafauna have higher values, just as they do in the cultural imagination. Admittedly, all of the animals within the game are cute creatures, named after the candy that fill them (Fizzlybear, Mousemallow), but Viva Piñata remains a site of cultural hegemony, where popular views about animals are enacted through gameplay. To support these ideas, this article follows the critical work of Chilla Bulbeck and Randy Malamud.
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