How culture uses games and how games use culture: an examination of Latin America's gaming practices and the representation of the region's cultures in games. Video games are becoming an ever more ubiquitous element of daily life, played by millions on devices that range from smart phones to desktop computers. An examination of this phenomenon reveals that video games are increasingly being converted into cultural currency. For video game designers, culture is a resource that can be incorporated into games; for players, local gaming practices and specific social contexts can affect their playing experiences. In Cultural Code, Phillip Penix-Tadsen shows how culture uses games and how games use culture, looking at examples related to Latin America. Both static code and subjective play have been shown to contribute to the meaning of games; Penix-Tadsen introduces culture as a third level of creating meaning. Penix-Tadsen focuses first on how culture uses games, looking at the diverse practices of play in Latin America, the ideological and intellectual uses of games, and the creative and economic possibilities opened up by video games in Latin America—the evolution of regional game design and development. Examining how games use culture, Penix-Tadsen discusses in-game cultural representations of Latin America in a range of popular titles (pointing out, for example, appearances of Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer statue in games from Call of Duty to the tourism-promoting Brasil Quest). He analyzes this through semiotics, the signifying systems of video games and the specific signifiers of Latin American culture; space, how culture is incorporated into different types of game environments; and simulation, the ways that cultural meaning is conveyed procedurally and algorithmically through gameplay mechanics.
Video games have become important objects of study for different academic disciplines. From the birth of the medium in the mid-twentieth century to the present, video games have offered new and creative ways of approaching reality and fiction, and not only serve as entertainment, but also have significant cultural, social, and technological implications. The formal study of this medium is the purview of the field of game studies, which brings together the contributions of various disciplines. This paper presents a bibliographical review of several theoretical trajectories in game studies, reflecting on the relevance of early debates on narratology and ludology, and examining the ways these initial divisions of the field have branched beyond that debate. Over the past several years, the narratological line of critique has established links with other theories such as cognitivism, the theory of fictional worlds and the contributions of unnatural narratology to the analysis of new technologies; ludology, for its part, has grown through its adaptations to postcolonial and decolonial theories in cultural studies, as well as through its connections to critical race and gender studies. We conclude that as game studies has evolved as a discipline, its initial theoretical debates have undergone profound transformations that have brought depth to the analysis of games’ meaning and diversified to the tools and techniques we have for analysing games as digital and cultural artefacts.
This oral and written history examines three generations of pioneering women game developers from Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile—the South American region known as the Southern Cone. Each of the individuals interviewed—Marcela Nievas, Sofía Battegazzore, Maureen Berho, and Martina Santoro—offers insight on female leadership over three generations of precipitous growth in regional game development. Together, their personal and professional trajectories demonstrate how the embodied and material conditions of game production condition diverse histories of game development, challenging universalizing myths of a global game industry in which “anybody can make games.” At the same time, these four developers' histories working outside the conventional centers of the global game industry reflect the transformative role of women developers and game designers across the Global South in shaping three generations of global game culture.
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