Suchergebnisse

This article explores how the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea is represented in video games developed and played during the height of the War on Terror. Drawing on Šisler's article, 'Digital Arabs: Representation in video games' (2008) and Robinson's articles 'Videogames, persuasion and the War on Terror: Escaping or embedding the military-entertainment complex? (2012) and 'Have you won the war on terror? Military videogames and the state of American exceptionalism' (2015), this article explores two case studies Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (2005) and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2 (2004) using Bogost's (2008, 2010) concept of 'procedural rhetoric' to unpack and detail the visual signifiers and gameplay mechanics of these titles in comparison with other work on games set in 'Axis of Evil' countries. The article concludes by situating the games within the military-entertainment complex more broadly (here focusing on film), arguing that North Korea is ultimately framed paradoxically in video games, a country that is viewed on the one hand as a threat to world peace and on the other as an absurdist dictatorship.

This article uses Lefebvre's spatial triad and his concept of The Right to the City to categorise open-world video games as contested virtual spatial experiences, interconnected with the non-virtual spaces in which they are produced and played and replete with the same spatial, capital forces of alienation to be negotiated and maintained. We use qualitative gameplay data ( n = 15), unpacking players' journeys through Lefebvre's conceived, lived and perceived spaces, to show, respectively, how open-world games can be (1) fundamentally about space, (2) spaces interconnected with the non-virtual world and (3) disruptive spatial experiences. In utilising The Right to the Virtual City and our players' tendency to retreat into the wild spaces of our case study game, Red Dead Redemption 2, we evoke the same alienating forces of commodification and capitalism to which Lefebvre spoke, positioning open-world video games as both contested spatial experiences and opportunities to challenge spatialised inequalities.

Drawing on research from a mixed-methods project on gaming we argue for a qualitative methodological approach called "interactive elicitation," a form of data collection that combines elements of photo elicitation, interviewing and vignettes. After situating our broader research project exploring young people's experiences of violent open-world video games, we outline the process of conducting interactive elicitation, arguing for a mixed-methods approach where participants are observed and interviewed both during and immediately after interacting with particular cultural artefacts, in this case the game GTA V. We reflect on the initial design of the research methodology, the problematic aspects of conducting the research – focusing on social desirability bias – before proffering adaptations to our approach in relation to complementary work in the field of Game Studies. Ultimately, we argue for immediacy in relation to research on cultural experiences and the importance of social desirability as an asset in framing interaction, both of which have implications for sociological and interdisciplinary research more widely.

This book offers an ethnographic exploration of three sites of infamous atrocity and their differing memorialization. Dark tourism research has studied the consumerization of spaces associated with death and barbarity, whilst difficult heritage has looked at politicized, national debates that surround the preservation of death. This book contributes to these debates by applying spatial theory on a scalar level, particularly through the work of Henri Lefebvre. It uses escalating case studies to situate memorialization, and the multifarious demands of politics, consumption and community, within a framework that rearticulates lived, perceived and conceived aspects of deviant spaces ranging from the small (a bench) to the very large (a city).The first case study, the Tyburn gallows site in York, uses Lefebvres notion of theatrical space to contextualize the role of performativity in memorialization. The second, Number 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, builds on this by exploring the absence of memorialization through Lefebvres concept of contradictory space and the impact this has on consumption. The third expands to consider the city as a problematic memorial, here focusing on the political subjectivities of Dresden rebuilt following the devastation of the Second World War and its contemporary associations with neo-Nazi and anti-fascist protests. Ultimately, by examining the issue of scale in heritage, the book seeks to develop a new way of unpacking and understanding the heteroglossic nature of deviant space and memorialization.