[ecrea] Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 10.2 published

Intellect is happy to announce that the Journal of Gaming & Virtual 
Worlds 10.2 is now available! For more information about this journal, 
click here >>https://bit.ly/2OdYl7q

Articles include:

*_Illusions of space and time: An ethical approach to temporality in games_*

Authors: Steve Wilcox
Page Start: 115

Time is a much-explored topic in game studies, as are questions of 
historical accuracy and ethics. However, an ethics of time in games 
remains relatively unexplored. This article takes an ethical approach to 
theorizing game time, drawing on French philosopher Michel Serres’s 
distinction between linear and topological time. Serres argues that 
conceiving of time linearly commits us to the belief that progress 
itself is a deterministic and oftentimes violent series of upheavals. 
Contemporary video games that play with time seem to exemplify this. 
Games like Braid, Assassins Creed and Prince of Persia: The Sands of 
Time have players manipulate time for the explicit purpose of 
reproducing a singular narrative, compelling players to synchronize 
their decisions with a violent, linear series of events. In this article 
such games are contrasted with more temporally topological titles such 
as Her Story, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and Life is Strange, 
which deconstruct linearity and demonstrate the ethical affordances of 
non-linear game temporalities.


_*‘Very much like any other Japanese RPG you’ve ever played’: Using 
undirected topic modelling to examine the evolution of JRPGs’ presence 
in anglophone web publications
*_
Authors: Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon
Page Start: 135

What types of discourses characterize Japanese role-playing games 
(JRPGs) as a genre of video games? Why is the genre so difficult to 
define, and why has it become polarizing within the gaming community? 
This article suggests an outline of the evolution of the discourse 
surrounding JRPGs based on a macroanalysis of the anglophone online 
gaming press. Using undirected topic modelling text mining methodology 
to analyse a corpus of 2053 JRPG reviews gathered from ten different 
online journalistic outlets posted between 1992 and 2014, this article 
demonstrates the circumstances of the gradual introduction of the term 
Japanese role-playing games in online publication, first as an extension 
of other examples Japanese pop culture in the late 1990s and early 
2000s, and subsequently as its own genre appropriated by anglophone 
gaming culture in the mid-2000s onwards and subjected to this 
community’s particular regime of values.
*_
Ideology and the virtual city: Social critique and conformity in video 
game power fantasies_*

Authors: Jon Bailes
Page Start: 149

This article analyses three video games based in modern urban settings, 
Saints Row IV, Grand Theft Auto V and No More Heroes, to consider how 
they convey different ideological responses to modern consumer societies 
in their structural and narrative elements. Using Marxist and 
psychoanalytic concepts, I consider how expectations surrounding work, 
leisure, property and relationships create antagonisms that individuals 
must reconcile with life experience. I then show how the three games 
exemplify different forms of ideology, in the shape of ‘power fantasies’ 
that manifest these antagonisms and attempt to resolve them. Throughout 
the article, I reference social theorists such as Fredric Jameson, 
Slavoj Žižek and Herbert Marcuse to define the ‘neo-liberal’ cultural 
background from which these ideologies emerge, and outline their 
features. Such perspectives help evaluate the games as cultural products 
of today’s neo-liberalized social order, which, I argue, struggle to 
interrogate systemic issues, but nonetheless contain hints of deeper 
social critique.

_*‘What is my Call of Duty?’: Exploring the importance of player 
experience in a first-person shooter video game*_

Authors: Marina Krcmar, Rory McGloin And Shu Scott Li
Page Start: 167


The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between 
previous gameplay experience and game responses and perceptions, such as 
guilt and stress, as well as in-game behaviour. Based on a 
dual-processing approach, we expected more experienced players to 
process games using a more effortful, system 2 type processing; whereas, 
less experienced players would process the game using the more automatic 
system 1 type processing. Further, we expected these differences in 
processing to be related to differences in guilt, stress and in-game 
outcomes. Consistent with these predictions we found that more 
experienced game players perceived game characters as less 
anthropomorphic and experienced less stress from shooting at in-game 
characters. In addition, perceiving game characters as more 
anthropomorphic was related to increased feelings of guilt after 
gameplay as well as an increase in stress resulting from shooting at 
in-game characters. Stress was negatively related to lower overall 
bullet counts and increased feelings of guilt. Results are discussed in 
terms of a dual-processing approach to video gameplay.

*_Book Review_*

Authors: Saffyre Falkenberg
Page Start: 189

(En)coding identity: The politics of representation in video games
Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, 
Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm (eds) (2017)

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