Votre recherche

This article attempts to explore the popularization of Japanese console games in China in the past two decades, which reveals the tripartite relationship of the nation-state, transnational cultural power, and local agents.1 This study focuses on the formation and development of the console game industry in a non-Western context, where the society has undergone dramatic transformations and has been largely influenced by the globalization process. Encountering social anti-gaming discourse and cultural protectionism, the importation and distribution of Japanese console games did not get support from the state. However, it found its way to the audience and gained popularity through piracy, the black market, and the local agents’ appropriation, becoming an integrated part of many Chinese early gamers’ lives. This article draws upon the intersection of cultural globalization with game studies, calling for an investigation into the complexity of the game industry through its sociohistorical, political, and cultural environment.

This article addresses the proliferation of images and appearances in the realm of e-sports culture in urban China. The author’s findings are based upon ethnographic research and participant observation of e-sports audience members, teams, and tournaments, including the 2010 E-sports Champion League tournament in Beijing, the 2012 and 2013 World Cyber Games Festivals in Kunshan, and a 2014 Starcraft II tournament in Shanghai. A comparison of these events leads the author to argue that live e-sports events in China are less about spectatorship than they are about creating a spectacle that presents a carefully crafted vision of Chinese politics, nationalism, and capitalist consumer culture. In these cases, the participants and audience members are not only commodities to be sold but also a means of masking contradictory and highly ambivalent discourses about China’s role in technological production, digital game culture, and the promotion of the discourse of Internet addiction.

“Internet addiction” in China and elsewhere is considered a serious social problem. In China, some psychiatrists have claimed 10% of all Internet users—60 million—are potentially “addicted” to the Internet. Following on the heels of the publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), this qualitative-based research article critically investigates the new concept Internet gaming disorder, a category recently included in the DSM-5 as a condition “warranting more clinical research and experience before it might be considered for inclusion in the main book as a formal disorder.” This article takes up this challenge and responds in the following way: When we investigate the social existence of online gamers labeled Internet addicts in China, and then subject their social existence to the DSM’s own definition of a mental disorder, we discover not a clearly understood mental disorder called Internet gaming disorder but more so an issue of social deviance.

This study critically assesses the Chinese online games industry through problematizing the creativity of Chinese games. I find that between 1995 and 2001, Chinese online games were mostly developed by amateurs, noncommercial, and considerably creative. Between 2002 and 2005, industrial growth allowed some room for local creativity despite commercialization and dominance of imported games. Current scholarly, business, and media discourses unfairly ignore creativity in these first two periods and yet praise the Chinese game industry’s commercial success since the late 2000s. I challenge these discourses by illustrating that between 2006 and early 2009, a new, ethically dubious, and uniquely Chinese business model emerged, became domestically dominant, and quietly and profoundly impacted on global online game design. From mid-2009 to 2015, there is ongoing corporatization based on the dubious Chinese business model on the one hand, and a reemphasis on creativity motivated by browser and mobile game formats on the other.

This article examines North American (i.e., Canada and the United States) video game developers’ understanding of race, how they construct narratives when they include characters of different races, and some of the pressures that may shape that process. Discourse analyses of semistructured interview texts found that video game developers operate under an internalized pressure to create game narratives that are quickly understandable and, thus, sellable. This pressure is normatively internalized in the profession as an attempt to hedge against market uncertainty. Video game developers, therefore, depend on social beliefs from the “real world” to inform how video game players might receive their games as well as narratives and themes from past texts such as the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Therefore, this article argues that racism might be enabled because it is believed to be a hedge against market uncertainty.

Exploring issues of labor and inequality at the intersection of AAA and indie sectors, this article interrogates the perception of the indie sector as key to mitigating the production of racializing or racist game content. As developers are central to the industry and the larger games culture, their views reveal how indies are imagined as a privileged site free from economic pressures where racism can be ameliorated. Based on interviews with developers, I argue that the project to redress representational inequities within games is shifted on to indie developers, intensifying their emotional and cultural labor. Indie game developers are imagined as the solution, yet this perspective underestimates the precariousness of independent game production. Economic precariousness may encourage indies to repeat certain patterns of racial representation.

Platformed racism offers a unique lens through which to investigate technological structures that enable racism. Online video games, such as EA Sports’ FIFA series — which dominates the soccer video game market share through its touted realism — feature these structures. Like many platforms, FIFA enables representations of real bodies (i.e., professional soccer players). But, unlike many games, FIFA enables game players to directly affect the creation/modification of these representation in the form of player character cards. Analyzing a census of six years of player cards, this study found that platformed racism was enabled because the game’s realism invited racism when players tried to maintain that realism. The study concludes that the catalyst for racism to emerge in FIFA was the drive towards realism.

As a case study, this article examines the development of China’s online game industry and how China responds to the forces of globalization. Based on in-depth interviews, ethnographic research, and the analysis of archive documents from the past few years, this study identifies China’s evolving strategy of neo-techno-nationalism. In the Chinese context, this national strategy manipulates technology to create a version of popular nationalism that is both acceptable to and easily censored by the authorities. Therefore, cultural industries that adopt this strategy stand a good chance of prevailing in the Chinese market. This success explains why the regional competitors of Chinese online games—Korean games—are more successful in China than most of their Western counterparts. By providing a snapshot of the current ecology of China’s online game industry, this article also discusses the influence of regional and global forces in a concrete context and argues that the development of China’s online game industry depends more on political factors than economic factors.

This article examines a terrain in which gender inclusion remains a challenge: competitive esports. In the male-dominated sphere of esports, the underrepresentation of women and nonbinary people often leaves these marginalized groups invisible, with a significant lack of women and nonbinary people competing in top-tier tournaments. We highlight the experience of Wang ‘BaiZe’ Xinyu, a Chinese Hearthstone player who became the first woman to compete in a Hearthstone Championship Tour event in the game’s 3-year history. The narrative surrounding BaiZe’s participation largely focused on her gender and ignored the achievements that led her to qualify for the event. We argue that BaiZe’s entrance to the championship scene was received negatively by both competitors and spectators, reinforcing barriers that exclude women and nonbinary people from entering this male-dominated space. The discrimination faced by these esports competitors reinforces sexism inherent not only in Hearthstone but also in esports in general.

Extant research on e-sports has focused on the growth and value of the phenomenon, fandom, and participant experiences. However, there is a paucity of e-sports scholarship detailing women’s experiences from marginalized communities living in various conservative Muslim countries. This shortage of literature remains despite different radical Islamic groups’ consistent demand for banning several online video games and the Muslim youth’s resistance to these calls. This study aimed to understand the motives and lived experiences of Muslim women e-sports participants from Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. The authors collected data via observations of online video games and in-depth interviews. The study participants revealed that they use e-sports as a vehicle for an oppositional agency and personal freedom from the patriarchal system. The findings also suggest that participants are facing systematic marginalization and grave intrusion of post-colonization. The study contributes to the limited scholarship concerning Indian subcontinent Muslim women’s e-sports participation.

In Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games author Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall analyzes how films and video games from around the world have depicted slave revolt, focusing on the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). This event, the first successful revolution by enslaved people in modern history, sent shock waves throughout the Atlantic World. Regardless of its historical significance however, this revolution has become less well-known—and appears less often on screen—than most other revolutions; its story, involving enslaved Africans liberating themselves through violence, does not match the suffering-slaves-waiting-for-a-white-hero genre that pervades Hollywood treatments of Black history. Despite Hollywood’s near-silence on this event, some films on the Revolution do exist—from directors in Haiti, the US, France, and elsewhere. Slave Revolt on Screen offers the first-ever comprehensive analysis of Haitian Revolution cinema, including completed films and planned projects that were never made. In addition to studying cinema, this book also breaks ground in examining video games, a pop-culture form long neglected by historians. Sepinwall scrutinizes video game depictions of Haitian slave revolt that appear in games like the Assassin’s Creed series that have reached millions more players than comparable films. In analyzing films and games on the revolution, Slave Revolt on Screen calls attention to the ways that economic legacies of slavery and colonialism warp pop-culture portrayals of the past and leave audiences with distorted understandings.

Peut-on envisager une autre histoire du jeu vidéo ?

Qualifié parfois de « dixième art », après que les jeux de rôles sur table (comme Donjons & Dragons) eurent commencé à céder du terrain dans les loisirs de la jeunesse à partir du mil…

Aucune étude n’a jamais démontré que les formes médiatiques disposeraient d’un pouvoir direct de transformation des réalités sociales. Une approche critique un peu sérieuse préférera ainsi appréhender le jeu vidéo comme le site d’un ensemble de rapports de pouvoir opérant au sein de la culture dominante, traversé, à l’instar d’autres formes culturelles, par des contradictions, des résistances et des réappropriations – autrement dit par des circulations dans la production de sens, les formes et les affects, qui viennent renforcer, nuancer ou déstabiliser les normes de l’hégémonie culturelle. Depuis le début des années 2010 et en particulier la polémique du #GamerGate en 2014, la communauté vidéoludique ne peut plus ignorer le sexisme. Les féministes n’ont pourtant pas attendu si longtemps pour se manifester. Mais c’est peut-être l’année 2012 qui marqua un réel tournant, lorsque Anita Sarkeesian lança une campagne de crowdfunding pour une série de vidéos sur sa chaîne YouTube feministfrequency. Sa démarche déclencha une vague de cyberharcèlement qui alla des insultes aux menaces de mort et jusqu’à la publication de données personnelles. Ce modèle de violence sexiste s’est reproduit à de multiples reprises, notamment en France en 2013 à l’encontre de la créatrice de jeu et féministe Mar_Lard, attaquée pour sa critique argumentée du sexisme dans la culture geek. Elle revenait en particulier sur des propos plus que complaisants d’un journaliste à propos d’une séquence où le personnage de Lara Croft, héroïne du mythique je…

The popularity and visibility of video games within American popular culture is prompted debates within from a spectrum of institutions, ranging from the media and the academy to Main Street and the political sphere. Erasing the complexity, much of the discourse focuses instead on questions of violence and the impact of gaming culture on (White) American youth. While focusing on Grand Theft: San Andreas specifically, this essay explores the culture wars surrounding American video game culture, arguing that the moral panics directed at video games and the defenses/celebrations of virtual reality operate through dominant discourses and hegemonic ideologies of race. Erasing their racial content and textual support for state violence directed at communities of color, the dominant discourse concerning youth and video games rationalizes the fear and policing of Black and Brown communities.

En 2007, le monde du jeu vidéo est secoué par une violente polémique au sujet du jeu vidéo Resident Evil 5. Ce dernier est accusé de faire commerce du racisme, en invitant à se glisser dans la peau d'un américain blanc body-buildé, missionné dans une région africaine anonyme, et tuant des dizaines d'hommes et de femmes noires présentées comme de dangereux zombies infectés du virus T. Depuis, la communauté des joueurs et joueuses de jeux vidéo interpelle régulièrement les créateurs et créatrices des jeux sur les questions du racisme et du sexisme.Dans son ouvrage, Mehdi Derfoufi analyse les rapports de force qui structurent l'industrie du jeu vidéo, dévoilant comment le racisme se niche parfois insidieusement au cœur de scénarios de jeux vidéo à succès. Il nous invite à nous questionner. Quels sont les pays qui pèsent sur les milliards d'euros du marché mondial du jeu vidéo ? Qui sont les game designers et auteurs des jeux ? Comment les représentations racistes sont-elles véhiculées à travers les personnageset les imaginaires vidéoludiques ? L'auteur nous dévoile avec brio les logiques racialisantes à l’œuvre au sein d’un marché économique très concurrentiel où des stéréotypes exotisants servent régulièrement à faire vendre un jeu. Il nous montre aussi comment la division internationale du travail et la hiérarchie économico-politique Nord/Sud pèse sur le marché du jeu vidéo et ralentit l’émergence de nouvelles représentations. Pourtant, de nombreux espoirs, notamment dans les pays du Sud participent au renouvellement de la culture geek : face aux violences racistes, la riposte s’organise.

Seeking ways to understand video games beyond their imperial logics, Patterson turns to erotics to re-invigorate the potential passions and pleasures of play.

This book uncovers popular games' key role in the cultural construction of modern racial fictions. It argues that gaming provides the lens, language, and logic - in short, the authority - behind racial boundary making, reinforcing and at times subverting beliefs about where people racially and spatially belong. It focuses specifically on the experience of Asian Americans and the longer history of ludo-Orientalism, wherein play, the creation of games, and the use of game theory shape how East-West relations are imagined and reinforce notions of foreignness and perceptions of racial difference.

"Afterlives of Indigenous Archives offers a compelling critique of Western archives and their use in the development of “digital humanities.” The essays collected here present the work of an international and interdisciplinary group of indigenous scholars; researchers in the field of indigenous studies and early American studies; and librarians, curators, activists, and storytellers. The contributors examine various digital projects and outline their relevance to the lives and interests of tribal people and communities, along with the transformative power that access to online materials affords. The authors aim to empower native people to re-envision the Western archive as a site of community-based practices for cultural preservation, one that can offer indigenous perspectives and new technological applications for the imaginative reconstruction of the tribal past, the repatriation of the tribal memories, and a powerful vision for an indigenous future."

Videogames’ ability to depict cultural iconographies and characters have occasionally led to accusations of insensitivity. This article examines gamers’ reactions to a developer’s use of Africans as enemies in a survival horror videogame, Resident Evil 5. Their reactions offer insight into how videogames represent Whiteness and White privilege within the social structure of ‘‘play.’’ Omi and Winant’s (1994) racial formation theory notes that race is formed through cultural representations of human bodies organized in social structures. Accordingly, depictions of race in electronic spaces rely upon media imagery and social interactions. Videogames construct exotic fantasy worlds and peoples as places for White male protagonists to conquer, explore, exploit, and solve. Like their precursors in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, videogame narratives, activities, and players often draw from Western values of White masculinity, White privilege as bounded by conceptions of ‘‘other,’’ and relationships organized by coercion and domination.