Issue 22

CALL FOR ARTICLE PROPOSALS

Video game narratives and digital society: contemporary issues in pixel format

Our societies are increasingly playful and video games are one of the spaces where much of the population’s subjectivity and aesthetic education is constructed, including that of the youngest members. The video game, in its various genres and categorizations, has enormous power of centrality and social representation due to its relation with the construction of cultural identities, the diversity of its expressive forms or its reach as a universal language. Developers and the gaming community can project into games the realities that are close to them.

As a cultural artefact, the video game has an implicit ideology that, like the construction of meaning, is embodied and achieved through the game experience, which is commonly known as the gameplay. As such, the gameplay is associated with issues of a political, economic or social nature. Armed conflicts, humanitarian crises (famine, refugees), the consequences of neoliberalism, climate change, loneliness, suicide, sexual identity, racism and marginalization, are just some of these issues.

Hence, video games should be considered social-spatial practices in which the physical world and the play world feed into each other, especially in games that reflect armed conflicts inspired by real or plausible situations, such as Tom Clancy's The Division franchise (2016-2018) or visions of the world of a marked colonialist nature such as the saga of strategic video games Sid Meier's Civilization (1991-2016). As in other media, most of the proposals are in line with the status quo. However, there are other riskier proposals that address issues such as loneliness, relationships or the consequences of economic crises. These include Night in the Woods (Infinity Fall, 2017), The Stillness of the Wind (Fellow Traveller, 2019) or Kentucky Route Zero (2011-2020).

As video games are eminently interactive, they are an expressive-artistic medium that can be used to explore the issues proposed by each title in a way that is completely different and active compared to earlier media. In this monograph, we aim to analyse in depth how typical issues of our time and societies are reflected in video game worlds and through the defining elements of the language of the medium. Full citizenship cannot exist without game literacy in which citizens can access a video game, understand what its meaning is and be able to create content through the medium.

The present monograph aims to reflect how these interactive digital creations can be used to illustrate and study aspects such as loneliness, death, wars, humanitarian crises, environmentalism, identities, etc. To do this, an appeal is made to authors from different fields

to investigate all these issues from a cross-disciplinary, heterogeneous and rigorous perspective, in which the video game is the prism from which we approach our closest reality.

Contributions should be in article format with the following elements: introduction, literature review, methodology, results, discussion and conclusion.