Violent Games: Rules, Realism and Effect

Description

It was over a decade ago that experimental psychologists and media-effects researchers declared the debate on the effects of violent video gaming as "essentially over,” referring to the way violence in videogames increases aggressive thoughts, feelings and behaviors in players. Despite the decisive tone of this statement, neither the presence nor popularity of digital games has since diminished, with games continuing to attract new generations of players to experience its technological advancements in the narration of violence and its techniques of depiction. Drawing on new insights achieved from research located at an intersection between humanities, social and computer sciences, Gareth Schott's addition to the Approaches in Digital Game Studies series interrogates the nature and meaning of the "violence” encountered and experienced by game players. In focusing on the various ways "violence" is mediated by both the rule system and the semiotic layer of games, the aim is to draw out the distinctiveness of games' exploitation of violence or violent themes. An important if not canonical text in the debates about video games and violence, Violent Games constitutes an essential book for those wishing to make sense of the experience offered by games as technological, aesthetic, and communicational phenomena in the context of issues of media regulation and the classification of game content "as” violence. Cover Half Title Series Title Imprint Dedication Contents Acknowledgments 1 Violence from games Locating the line between fact and fiction Columbine as a social drama Genre: From violent media to user and experience-.based typologies Performativity by genre 2 Games as violence Supporting classification processes Presupposing experience Is it violence? 3 Re-.framing games Articulating a Ludo-.focused perception Serialistic structures of play Looting in Bioshock 2 Quick time events in Battlefield 3 4 Indexicality and realism (in action) Realism Index Indexicality of sound Authenticity of sound 5 Player control, obligation, and orientation 6 Performativity and violence Interactivity System > Player > System Performativity > Presence 7 Violence as spectacle The polysemic nature of violence Distance and spectatorship Requisitioned death? Slow motion and prolonged gaze Carnivalesque deaths Violence is its own premise: The represented world of the character Destruction Arousal 8 Compulsion, cues, and fixed outcomes Assessing player actions against player options Presuming player acceptance Player failure and fixed outcome Simulating murder Gamifying moral dilemmas Concluding comment Bibliography Index