Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2023.2184952
N. P. Houe
Empathy with game characters is generally treated as a positive outcome of gameplay experiences, although the concept of ‘empathy games’ has received due criticism in recent years by mostly indie game developers and scholars of queer games. Empathy with game characters in single-player videogames, in the sense of both player-characters and non-player characters, is therefore often described as a profound emotional experience for players, or an especially compelling expression of identification, agency, immersion, social-emotional skills, or selflessness. Videogames like The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013, 2020), This War of Mine (11 bit studios, 2014) and That Dragon, Cancer (Numinous Games, 2016), for instance, compel players to engage with the trauma of game characters in different ways to induce resounding affective responses and experiences in players. However, because people primarily use themselves as referents for understanding others, even when their own experiences are not intuitively relevant, they generally underestimate the impact of their own affective states when trying to empathise, which leads to an egocentric bias in emotional perspective-taking with both themselves and others. Consequently, when players feel intense emotions about game characters and represented trauma, it can easily obstruct the process of empathy by directing players’ experiences toward themselves, creating a gap in understanding and emotional connection between self and other. Player’s own seminally related experiences may thus overshadow any trauma they perceive in-game, and such a indiscriminatory projection of self into other may express an egocentric bias rather than empathy in any prosocial sense. This complicates the thematisation and reception of trauma in single-player videogames, where
对游戏角色的移情通常被视为游戏体验的积极结果，尽管近年来“移情游戏”的概念受到了大多数独立游戏开发商和酷儿游戏学者的批评。因此，从玩家角色和非玩家角色的角度来看，在单人电子游戏中对游戏角色的同理心通常被描述为玩家的一种深刻的情感体验，或者是身份认同、代理、沉浸感、社交情感技能或无私的一种特别引人注目的表达。例如，《最后的我们》（The Last of Us，Naughty Dog，20132020）、《我的战争》（This War of Mine，11 bit studios，2014）和《那条龙，癌症》（The Dragon，Cancer，Numnous Games，2016）等电子游戏迫使玩家以不同的方式接受游戏角色的创伤，从而在玩家身上引发强烈的情感反应和体验。然而，由于人们主要将自己作为理解他人的参照物，即使他们自己的经历与直觉无关，他们在试图移情时也通常低估了自己情感状态的影响，这导致了在对待自己和他人的情感视角中存在以自我为中心的偏见。因此，当玩家对游戏角色和所代表的创伤感到强烈情绪时，它很容易通过将玩家的经历引导到自己身上来阻碍移情过程，从而在自我和他人之间造成理解和情感联系的差距。因此，玩家自己的神学院相关经历可能会掩盖他们在游戏中感受到的任何创伤，而这种对自我向他人的无差别投射可能会表达一种以自我为中心的偏见，而不是任何亲社会意义上的同理心。这使单人视频游戏中创伤的主题化和接受变得复杂
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Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2023.2184946
Laurent Milesi
Tendencies in video game development are not immune to the perception of paradigm shifts or at least modulations in the contemporary mindset. One of these has been a slow but steady return of the subject to critical centre stage, no doubt prompted in part by an increasing sense of multidirectional threat, renewed ‘felt ultimacies’ and emerging posthumanity’s identity crisis from the mid-to-late 1990s onwards. During the 1990s and beyond, which saw the advent of some of the most innovative video game franchises, this helped redraw the arc of the hero’s conception, from earlier superman (or, more seldom, superwoman, such as the Tomb Raider series’ iconic Lara Croft) saving the world or at least capable of incredible feats, to a more vulnerable, humble protagonist bent on saving themselves and, increasingly, to a responsible citizen aware of their situatedness in the world trying to empathise with the endangered planet.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2023.2184951
A. Ionescu
Since time immemorial children have been playing and re-enacting wargames, individual battles or whole campaigns, recreating the ambience of military conflicts. Wargames imply strategic choices, hence decision-making which also occasionally involves ethics. History itself can also be seen as ‘merely the sum of millions of human decisions’, as Robert Cowley suggested in a commentary on the everyday choices which ‘can alter our lives, sometimes in drastic and unforeseen ways’.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2023.2184947
G. Calleja
The battle was not going well. Our team was pinned down by two enemy sniper squads. After a few failed attempts at re-capturing an objective we had lost to the enemy, I decided to go on a solo mission in a desperate attempt at turning the tide of battle. I took a long route around the edge of the battlefield, deploying smoke grenades in open areas to mask my flanking manoeuvre. Red dots flashed on my mini-map, indicating a multitude of enemies close to me. My heart racing I made my way stealthily behind enemy lines. I spotted a crane in the middle of a large construction site with a vantage point on the two sniper squads. I ran from cover to cover and made my way up the ladder, fearing I would be spotted and shot; all the effort going to waste. I made it to the top and took out my binoculars, tagging enemies where I could see them. Then I pulled out my sniper rifle, and both me and my avatar took a deep breath in. I aimed, accounting for the distance and pressed the trigger. Headshot. My sights shifted left and spotted another sniper. Another headshot. Four more went down, before word got out and the other targets I had marked disappeared into cover. Then the loud crack of an AK47 made me jump out of my seat. A red dot flashed on the mini-map, right at my position. I looked down and just a few metres away at ground level an enemy trooper was crouched behind a container firing. Without thinking I stood up, backed up a few metres, then sprinted down the crane rigging and jumped off the edge, opening my chute at the last minute for a few seconds, and landing right behind the enemy soldier, knifing him in the back and running off into the building site.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2023.2184950
Laurent Milesi
In his Poetics Aristotle famously claimed that fear (phobos) – defined in Book II of Rhetoric as ‘a sort of pain or disturbance coming from the appearance of a future destructive or painful evil’ – and pity (eleos) are the joint emotions which tragedy aims at stimulating. Known to all living creatures and an essential element in one of humanity’s most ancient art forms expressing internal (psychological) or external (historical-political) conflicts and tensions, fear, and the mobilisation thereof, is understandably most suited to spectatorial entertainment and especially to the multimodal interactive platform of videogames; alongside speed in racing sims, competitiveness in e-sports and combat in wargames, it is among the greatest sources of in-game adrenalin rush keeping the gamer immersed or on their proverbial toes. Signalling the centrality of this emotion in gameplay is so crucial to the game industry that a significant number of releases flag the word as part of their title – apart from those analysed below, let us mention, among the hundredor-so existing or upcoming games listed on the Steam platform, Fear Effect (Kronos Digital Entertainment, 2000), Cold Fear (Darkworks, 2005), Cry of Fear (Team Psykskallar, 2013) or, referring to the fear of ghosts, Phasmophobia (Kinetic Games, 2020), etc.
在他的《诗学》中，亚里士多德著名地宣称恐惧(phobos)——在《修辞学》第二卷中被定义为“一种来自未来破坏性或痛苦的邪恶的出现的痛苦或不安”——和怜悯(eleos)是悲剧旨在激发的共同情感。所有生物都知道，这是人类最古老的艺术形式之一的基本元素，表达内部(心理)或外部(历史-政治)冲突和紧张，恐惧及其动员，可以理解为最适合观赏性娱乐，特别是电子游戏的多模式互动平台;与竞速模拟游戏中的速度、电子竞技中的竞争力和战争游戏中的战斗一样，它也是让玩家沉浸其中或保持警觉的最大游戏肾上腺素来源之一。在游戏玩法中表明这种情绪的中心地位对游戏行业来说非常重要，以至于许多游戏都将这个词作为游戏名称的一部分——除了下面分析的那些，让我们在Steam平台上列出的100多款现有或即将推出的游戏中提到，《Fear Effect》(Kronos Digital Entertainment, 2000)、《Cold Fear》(Darkworks, 2005)、《Cry of Fear》(Team Psykskallar, 2013)或《Phasmophobia》(Kinetic games, 2020)等等。
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Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2023.2184948
Souvik Mukherjee
The Pathfinder, the protagonist of the videogame Mass Effect: Andromeda (Bioware, 2017), often gazes across the vast expanse of the Andromeda Galaxy, its planetary systems and also the often-hostile landscape of the planets, some of which need to be made habitable for the human colonists for whom she scouts the terrain to make it inhabitable in accordance with the colonial promise of the mission. The Pathfinder could even have been surveying the vast map of any of the Age of Empires games (Ensemble Studios, etc., 1997–), mostly obscured by the black ‘fog of war’ and waiting to be colonised by the player. As games researcher Shoshana Magnet describes it, the space is a ‘gamescape’ or a ‘landscape in video games [that] is actively constructed within a particular ideological framework’.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2023.2184953
Poonam Chowdhury
The online American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology defines grief as ‘the anguish experienced after significant loss, usually the death of a beloved person.’ Grief is a difficult emotion to represent because of its complexity. When it comes to the rich cultural texts of videogames, the mechanism of death as loss is interwoven into most win-lose games. However, the topic and trauma of death is not dealt with the same sensitivity and care as it is dealt with in real life. More often than not, a death in a videogame simply hints at ‘try again’. Such a cold impersonal message on the screen fails to affect the player. One might lose their progress in the game and may have to replay a level, but this frustration is nothing like losing a loved one in real life. As pointed out by Sabine Harrer in her seminal book Games and Bereavement, ‘if loss is a structural affordance of games in that it is the logical opposite of winning, this version of loss does little to acknowledge the reality of lived grief as it occurs in human life.’ She further argues that loss in games needs to be dealt with attachment and care instead of mastery and success.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2022.2156696
Susette S. Min
In Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss it When It’s Gone (2019), Astra Taylor foregrounds the need for people to constantly reason and reflect on ‘the great Socratic question “How should I live?”’ with the objective to mold and modify democracy’s form. Once an ideal collective task in which everyone was welcome to join and participate, democracy has now become an exclusive undertaking and distant horizon as more and more people become disenfranchised and are denied the ability to disrupt and disagree with the current state of things.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2022.2156694
Almas Khan
The Super Bowl is arguably America’s quintessential national event, attracting over a hundred million viewers from across demographic backgrounds. 2014’s Big Game, however, is remembered less for action on the field than for a multilingual Coca-Cola commercial coupling ‘America the Beautiful’ lyrics with a montage of Americans from diverse backgrounds. Former Republican Congressman Allen West afterward blogged: ‘If we cannot be proud enough as a country to sing “American [sic] the Beautiful” in English in a commercial during the Super Bowl, by a company as American as they come – doggone we are on the road to perdition’. Commentators responded by condemning nativism and hailing their immigrant families’ cultural and linguistic enrichment of the nation. The Super Bowl controversy epitomises the endurance of language politics in the U.S., and Benedict Anderson would have been unsurprised by the commercial’s inspiring such impassioned sentiment. In his landmark monograph Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), Anderson described patriotic music’s power to engender ‘a special kind of contemporaneous community’.
超级碗可以说是美国最典型的全国性赛事，吸引了来自不同人口背景的1亿多观众。然而，人们对2014年世界杯的印象与其说是赛场上的精彩表演，倒不如说更多的是可口可乐的多语种广告，将《美丽的美国》(America the Beautiful)的歌词与来自不同背景的美国人的蒙太奇组合在一起。前共和党国会议员艾伦·韦斯特随后在博客上写道:“如果我们作为一个国家不能自豪地在超级碗期间的广告中用英语演唱《美国的美丽》，那么我们就走上了毁灭之路。”评论人士的回应是谴责本土主义，称赞他们的移民家庭丰富了这个国家的文化和语言。超级碗的争议集中体现了美国语言政治的持久性，本尼迪克特·安德森(Benedict Anderson)对这则广告激发了如此慷慨激昂的情绪并不感到惊讶。在他具有里程碑意义的专著《想象的社区:对民族主义起源和传播的反思》(1983)中，安德森描述了爱国音乐产生“一种特殊的当代社区”的力量。
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2022.2156695
J. Kosgei
Ngugi wa Thiong’o argues that the lower esteem with which oral material was historically treated became ‘the basis for expelling some cultures from history and complex thoughts, consigning them to a place in hell.’ Moving beyond this much discussed albeit inconclusive debate on the tension between orality and literacy, this paper takes a more productive path, asking, what happens to theories of community formation when previously hidden, ignored, and suppressed oral knowledge is unearthed? More categorically, this paper builds on Anderson’s notion of imagined communities in which he defines ‘the nation [as] an imagined political community’ because ‘the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.’ In Anderson’s formulation, the nation is imagined in a singular, dominant language which is the language of instruction and writing. For instance, in Europe, Latin was until the 16 century ‘the language of the pan-European high intelligentsia’. By the end of the 18 century, however, English had taken over as ‘the pre-eminent world imperial language,’ in response to the demands of the readership. However, it was soon clear, especially outside Europe, that this locked out other vernaculars and the imaginations they carried, a subject that this paper dwells on. I attempt an application of Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined communities’ from a multilingual perspective by destabilising the dominant space English has occupied, from a literary and oral history standpoint.
Ngugi wa Thiong ' o认为，口头材料在历史上受到的较低尊重成为“将一些文化从历史和复杂思想中驱逐出去的基础，把它们扔进地狱。”“这篇论文超越了关于口语和读写能力之间的紧张关系的讨论，采取了一条更有成效的道路，问，当以前隐藏、忽视和压抑的口头知识被发掘出来时，社区形成的理论会发生什么?”更明确地说，这篇论文建立在安德森的想象共同体概念的基础上，他将“国家(作为)一个想象的政治共同体”，因为“即使是最小的国家的成员也永远不会认识他们的大多数成员，见到他们，甚至听过他们，但在每个人的心中都生活着他们共同的形象。”在安德森的构想中，国家被想象成一种单一的、占主导地位的语言，即教学和写作的语言。例如，在欧洲，直到16世纪，拉丁语一直是“泛欧高级知识分子的语言”。然而，到18世纪末，由于读者的需求，英语已经成为“世界上最杰出的帝国语言”。然而，人们很快就明白了，尤其是在欧洲以外，这将其他方言和它们所承载的想象力拒之门外，这也是本文所要讨论的主题。从文学和口述历史的角度来看，我试图从多语言的角度，通过破坏英语所占据的主导空间，来应用安德森的“想象社区”概念。
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