Journal articles on the topic 'Grand theft auto (Game)'

A growing area of video game research considers factors external to games that might predict both observed in-game and physical world decisions. One factor may be an individual's habitual behaviors, such as their physical activity routines. Because the authors tend to automate behaviors that they repeat in stable circumstances or contexts, virtual re-creations of those stimuli should prompt the same behavior in the game environment. Moreover, as virtual worlds become more similar to the physical world, behaviors the authors learn in physical reality might influence virtual behaviors. The authors ask two research questions: (RQ1) Is there an association between real-world habits and in-game decisions? (RQ2) Does the nature of the in-game task influence any relationship between real-world habits and in-game decisions? A quasi-experiment of 110 students at a large, mid-Atlantic university demonstrated that physical activity routines bias in-game transportation decisions, particularly when prompted to pursue a specific goal over a free exploration task.

This reseacrh aims to analyze the correlation between the exposures of violent scenes in Grand Theft Auto V towards aggressive behavior in teenagers, by posing a central question: how does violence scenes in this game relate to aggressive behavior in teenagers? By using associative quantitative research methods, this research is done through literature study and collecting data in the form of questionnaires. A total of 150 participants who aged 17 to 19 years old and have played Grand Theft Auto V agreed to participate as a respondent. Based on the research, the media exposure dimensions that have been formulated are Frequency, Duration, and Intensity. Aggressive behavior as a form of a teenager’s response to violent scenes has four dimensions: physical aggression, verbal aggression, anger, and hostility. The results of this research indicate that there is a correlation between the exposure Grand Theft Auto V violent scenes towards aggresive behavior in teenagers, with a correlation value of 0.386 which is classified as low. Through this, it can be interpreted that exposure towards Grand Theft Auto V violent scenes contributed 38.6% to aggressive behavior in teenagers.

On the basis of works devoted to the topic of sound studies and video games, the author presents ways of processing and using sounds in order to create virtual phonic spaces. He examines the means by which contemporary game developers influence immersivity, i.e., the process of immersing the gamer in virtual environments, as well as indicating the mutual influences of audial and visual spheres. Analysig the video game Grand Theft Auto IV from the perspective of the sound which accompanies the action, he compares in this respect three areas of the game’s Liberty City with their equivalents in New York on which the virtual city is modelled. The similarities and differences between the digital and virtual spaces are identified, and the reasons for them explained. This makes it possible to show how the use of the tools (explained earlier) employed by the developers of the game enable them to create a credible sounding virtual metropolis.

GTA (Grand Theft Auto) is a video game containing sexual and violent content classified as a mature category (18+). However in Indonesia, this video game is often played by teenegers under 18 years old. This research purposes to describe teeneger’s experience on playing GTA game and the factors influencing them to play the game. The informants of this research are 6 teenegers who have been playing this game with under 18 years old obtained by using snowball sample technique. The method used in this research is qualitative with phenomenological approach. The data were collected through semi-structured interview. The result of this research shows that teenegers who play this game said that they could gain new experiences like being outside of country situation. For teenegers it was exciting because they could perform things that they could not do in the real life like kill, rob, and fight beetwen gang. The factors influencing them to play GTA game come from their playmates, parent’s supervision, and also education level. Playmates are the main cause for teenegers to play GTA game. Teenagers playing GTA game without parent's supervision will tend to get negative impact. While higher level of teeneger education decreases the intensity of playing GTA game. Therefore, in order to minimize negative impact obtained by teenegers in playing GTA game, it requires the parent supervision so that the teenegers know time limit to play and the certain behavior in the game that may or may not be imitated in the real life.

Resumo: O presente artigo classifica-se como um estudo de cunho etnográfico virtual, cujo objetivo principal é analisar os letramentos exercidos no game comercial "The Grand Theft Auto IV". Essa proposta está situada a partir do entendimento que, atualmente, a escola tradicional enfrenta crise nas práticas letradas que é caracterizada pela exigência de certos letramentos que não são condizentes com o perfil dos alunos. Como resultado desse estudo inicial, pode-se concluir que o referido game que, há muito tempo vem sido visto como algo inadequado pela sociedade, devido às cenas violentas e adultas, oferece a oportunidade de desenvolver uma série de letramentos valorosos à educação linguística que não são desenvolvidos no contexto formal de ensino.Palavras-chave: Literacies. Ciberspace. Ciberplace. The Grand Theft Auto V.

The rise of virtual reality has overcome many of the methodological challenges faced by researchers studying spatial navigation. Yet, the difficulty in developing life-like virtual settings still remains a substantial barrier to most studies when fidelity to the real world has to be achieved in order to ensure some psychological validity of the results. Moreover, the variety of the settings results in standardization issues across studies. Our argument is that widely available video games could represent a worthwhile alternative to laboratory-made virtual environments, while providing a satisfactory methodological quality. This study assessed a prototype of landmark-based navigational aid by administering wayfinding tasks in the video game Grand Theft Auto V. Our results provide evidence that this video game offers a transparent and adaptable way to investigate cognitive processes with high experimental control and psychological validity. Recommendations towards the use of video game-based methodologies for future research are discussed.

Through a textual analysis of three noted examples— Bioshock, Spec Ops: The Line, and Grand Theft Auto V—This article explores the capacity for ambivalence in violent video games. The analyses bring into dialogue film scholarship which has sought to understand a comparable trend in cinema with games scholarship, most notably Darley’s discussion of narrative “decentering” and Bogost’s notion of “procedural rhetoric.” In all three games, the core gameplay in which players are rewarded for repetition of violent behaviors is juxtaposed with ambivalent narrative-contextual aspects. However, in the more overtly “multidimensional” video games medium, this juxtaposition plays out in a more fractured manner than in the flatter visual space of cinema.

Artikel ini membahas tentang penggunaan metode trigger detection untuk membuat simulasi lalulintas yang melibatkan kendaraan NPC (Non Playable Character) untuk keperluan game. Dalam sebuah game bertipe racing atau open world seperti Need For Speed, Grand Theft Auto, Watch Dog dan sejenisnya, simulasi kendaraan NPC diperlukan untuk menghasilkan kesan realistis. Dalam membuat alogaritma gerakan kendaraan NPC pada umumnya digunakan metode pathfinding dan metode waypoint. Alternatif yang dapat digunakan adalah metode trigger detection, yaitu dengan menempatkan sejumlah sensor di sekeliling kendaraan. Selanjutnya sensor akan mendeteksi tumbukan antara sensor dengan objek yang berada di lingkungan virtual dalam game. Hasil dari tumbukan tersebut diolah lebih lanjut melalui proses posisi, deteksi, reaksi dan negosiasi agar menghasilkan gerakan yang dinamis. Metode ini selanjutnya diujicoba untuk mengetahui keefektifannya.

AbstractEthics regarding media use can be pointed out in several situations in which media are used. The article takes Grand Theft Auto V, published by Rockstar Games, as an example to show opportunities and limits of the »acting subject« - the gamer - in computer and online games. Human dignity is debated by reference to socio-critical aspects which are confronted with the violation of moral limits. Finally, computer games are highlighted as a convenient medium for the process of ethical learning.

Ante la propuesta de reseñar este libro, quien suscribe estas líneas no pudo más que pensar en la palabra “reto”. “Gamer” era una palabra que había oído, pero que sin duda era muy lejana para una “analfabeta videolúdica” que abría tímidamente la carátula del libro, para adentrarse en páginas que poco a poco demostraban la capacidad del autor, de hacer un libro para un público familiarizado con nombres como Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto o League of Legends, pero también para quien no ha ido más allá del “buscaminas”.

Abstract. This study examines the effect of interactivity on the attribution of responsibility for the character’s actions in a violent video game. Through an experiment, we tested the hypothesis that identification with the main character in Grand Theft Auto IV mediates the effect of interactivity on attributions of responsibility for the main character’s antisocial behavior. Using the framework of the fundamental attribution error, we demonstrated that those who actually played the game, as opposed to those who simply watched someone else playing it, identified with the main character. In accordance with the theoretical expectation, those who played the game and came to identify with the main character attributed the responsibility for his actions to external factors such as “living in a violent society.” By contrast, those who did not interact with the game attributed responsibility for the character’s actions to his personality traits. These findings could be viewed as contrasting with psychological research suggesting that respondents should have distanced themselves from the violent protagonist rather than identifying with him, and with Iyengar’s (1991) expectation that more personalized episodic framing would be associated with attributing responsibility to the protagonist.

This essay attempts to outline the ways in which contemporary videogames produce spatial experiences, and how architects might interrogate their unique media form. Framing videogames as both computational constructions and cultural artefacts, the paper places the study in a lineage of architectural thinkers examining ‘pop-culture’ and technology. This draws from the Smithson's writings on advertisements as technical images, Venturi Scott-Brown's studies on symbolism, through to Reyner Banham's definition of mass produced gizmos. The paper first outlines the importance of videogames on society and their Smithsonian impulses towards architectural design. To support this, I examine the work of game theorists such as Espen Aarseth and Ian Bogost. Aarseth argues that game spaces sever certain ties and ‘deviate’ from reality in order to become playable spaces. Bogost contends that game rules produce ‘procedural rhetoric’ - games may advance arguments through the playing of their rules. Reading from these theories I argue that these rule-based breaks from the real are a potent site for architectural speculation.The second section comprises design case studies scrutinising existing game worlds and producing new videogames as architectural experiments. I begin by examining the significance of symbolism in videogame worlds, and how this might provide alternative trajectories for digital architectural design. I subsequently explore Atkinson and Willis’ concept of the ludodrome, slippages between virtual and real, and discuss Ubiquity, a game I produced to explore this condition. I return to Banham's Great Gizmo, alongside PW Singer's writings on military robotics, to see the gamepad as a new order of gizmo for colonising space. And I discuss ‘Grand Theft Auto V’'s loading screen as a manifestation of satellite imagery aesthetics that collapse space. The paper concludes that games are powerful media for spatial experimentation and we must prepare for new generations of designers highly influenced by such ‘deviated’ architectures.

Despite the recent progress in deep learning and remote sensing image interpretation, the adaption of a deep learning model between different sources of remote sensing data still remains a challenge. This paper investigates an interesting question: do synthetic data generalize well for remote sensing image applications? To answer this question, we take the building segmentation as an example by training a deep learning model on the city map of a well-known video game “Grand Theft Auto V” and then adapting the model to real-world remote sensing images. We propose a generative adversarial training based segmentation framework to improve the adaptability of the segmentation model. Our model consists of a CycleGAN model and a ResNet based segmentation network, where the former one is a well-known image-to-image translation framework which learns a mapping of the image from the game domain to the remote sensing domain; and the latter one learns to predict pixel-wise building masks based on the transformed data. All models in our method can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. The segmentation model can be trained without using any additional ground truth reference of the real-world images. Experimental results on a public building segmentation dataset suggest the effectiveness of our adaptation method. Our method shows superiority over other state-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods, for example, Deeplab-v3 and UNet. Another advantage of our method is that by introducing semantic information to the image-to-image translation framework, the image style conversion can be further improved.

For smart mobility, autonomous vehicles, and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADASs), perception of the environment is an important task in scene analysis and understanding. Better perception of the environment allows for enhanced decision making, which, in turn, enables very high-precision actions. To this end, we introduce in this work a new real-time deep learning approach for 3D multi-object detection for smart mobility not only on roads, but also on railways. To obtain the 3D bounding boxes of the objects, we modified a proven real-time 2D detector, YOLOv3, to predict 3D object localization, object dimensions, and object orientation. Our method has been evaluated on KITTI’s road dataset as well as on our own hybrid virtual road/rail dataset acquired from the video game Grand Theft Auto (GTA) V. The evaluation of our method on these two datasets shows good accuracy, but more importantly that it can be used in real-time conditions, in road and rail traffic environments. Through our experimental results, we also show the importance of the accuracy of prediction of the regions of interest (RoIs) used in the estimation of 3D bounding box parameters.

Pedestrian detection through Computer Vision is a building block for a multitude of applications. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in convolutional neural network-based architectures to execute such a task. One of these supervised networks’ critical goals is to generalize the knowledge learned during the training phase to new scenarios with different characteristics. A suitably labeled dataset is essential to achieve this purpose. The main problem is that manually annotating a dataset usually requires a lot of human effort, and it is costly. To this end, we introduce ViPeD (Virtual Pedestrian Dataset), a new synthetically generated set of images collected with the highly photo-realistic graphical engine of the video game GTA V (Grand Theft Auto V), where annotations are automatically acquired. However, when training solely on the synthetic dataset, the model experiences a Synthetic2Real domain shift leading to a performance drop when applied to real-world images. To mitigate this gap, we propose two different domain adaptation techniques suitable for the pedestrian detection task, but possibly applicable to general object detection. Experiments show that the network trained with ViPeD can generalize over unseen real-world scenarios better than the detector trained over real-world data, exploiting the variety of our synthetic dataset. Furthermore, we demonstrate that with our domain adaptation techniques, we can reduce the Synthetic2Real domain shift, making the two domains closer and obtaining a performance improvement when testing the network over the real-world images.

Computer simulation based on digital twin is an essential process when designing self-driving cars. However, designing a simulation program that is exactly equivalent to real phenomena can be arduous and cost-ineffective because too many things must be implemented. In this paper, we propose the method using the online game GTA5 (Grand Theft Auto5), as a groundwork for autonomous vehicle simulation. As GTA5 has a variety of well-implemented objects, people, and roads, it can be considered a suitable tool for simulation. By using OpenCV (Open source computer vision) to capture the GTA5 game screen and analyzing images with YOLO (You Only Look Once) and TensorFlow based on Python, we can build a quite accurate object recognition system. This can lead to writing of algorithms for object avoidance and lane recognition. Once these algorithms have been completed, vehicles in GTA5 can be controlled through codes composed of the basic functions of autonomous driving, such as collision avoidance and lane-departure prevention. In addition, the algorithm tested with GTA5 has been implemented with a programmable RC car (Radio control car), DonkeyCar, to increase reliability. By testing those algorithms, we can ensure that the algorithms can be conducted in real time and they cost low power and low memory size. Therefore, we have found a way to approach digital twin technology one step more easily.

The objectives of the study was to know the difficult words encountered by the gamers and to know their strategies in translating this unknown word. The researcher used interview as the instrument to collect the material needed for this particular study. It is found that unknown word combined with certain feeling such as dissappoinment creates retention. So, this particular study showed eventhough these students have low capacity in understanding words in English but in GTA game, they were still willing to play. From their willingness it could increase their motivation to translating the word in English. So, the game is a very effective way to building vocabullary skill.

Computer games, like other digital media, are extremely vulnerable to long-term loss, yet little work has been done to preserve them. As a result we are experiencing large-scale loss of the early years of gaming history. Computer games are an important part of modern popular culture, and yet are afforded little of the respect bestowed upon established media such as books, film, television and music. We must understand the reasons for the current lack of computer game preservation in order to devise strategies for the future. Computer game history is a difficult area to work in, because it is impossible to know what has been lost already, and early records are often incomplete. This paper uses the information that is available to analyse the current status of computer game preservation, specifically in the UK. It makes a quantitative analysis of the preservation status of computer games, and finds that games are already in a vulnerable state. It proposes that work should be done to compile accurate metadata on computer games and to analyse more closely the exact scale of data loss, while suggesting strategies to overcome the barriers that currently exist.

Prior research suggests that playing videogames can have a voluntary incapacitating effect on criminal behaviour. The current study investigates whether this negative association between videogames in general and crime rates can also be found for the release of a single videogame – Grand Theft Auto V (GTAV) – and for registered juvenile crime in the Netherlands. A diminishing effect was modelled to estimate the active player base of GTAV (that is, the most players are active on and directly following release, with a decline in the weeks thereafter) and correlated with the number of registered offences in 2012–15 committed by males aged 12–18 and 18–25 years in a time series analysis. The effect of the release of GTAV was negatively associated with the number of registered offences in both age categories, while controlling for covariates (for example, day of the week). Implications are discussed.

The Last of Us realiza una crítica a nuestra sociedad presente desde un futuro apocalíptico que sucederá dentro de unos treinta años. A diferencia de videojuegos como Detroit Become Human, que critican nuestro futuro desde uno más lejano, o Grand Theft Auto IV, que analiza con severidad nuestro presente desde uno ficcionado pero siendo también presente, el videojuego de Naughty Dog habla de nuestro hoy desde un mañana en el que todo ha salido mal. Para hacerlo, Ellie, una niña nacida tras el apocalipsis, estudia nuestra era mediante objetos de cultura pop, diarios y carteles que encuentra. Le pregunta sobre ellos a Joel, que ha vivido en nuestro tiempo, para poder sacar conclusiones. Estudiamos cómo este videojuego asume que todo ha salido mal y cómo lo expresa a través de su narración.

The Last of Us realiza una crítica a nuestra sociedad presente desde un futuro apocalíptico que sucederá dentro de unos treinta años. A diferencia de videojuegos como Detroit Become Human, que critican nuestro futuro desde uno más lejano, o Grand Theft Auto IV, que analiza con severidad nuestro presente desde uno ficcionado pero siendo también presente, el videojuego de Naughty Dog habla de nuestro hoy desde un mañana en el que todo ha salido mal. Para hacerlo, Ellie, una niña nacida tras el apocalipsis, estudia nuestra era mediante objetos de cultura pop, diarios y carteles que encuentra. Le pregunta sobre ellos a Joel, que ha vivido en nuestro tiempo, para poder sacar conclusiones. Estudiamos cómo este videojuego asume que todo ha salido mal y cómo lo expresa a través de su narración.

There is a lack of quantitative data regarding how offenders make decisions about committing a crime or how situational factors influence such decisions. Detailed crime data on decision-making among criminals are required to improve the accuracy of research. Demonstrating a new methodology for assessing the factors impacting criminal decision-making among street robbery offenders, this study identifies visual data that influence criminal decision-making, and verifies the significance of the measured data. To this end, this study first identified and organized the physical aspects affecting criminal decision-making based on the Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) literature. Next, participants were informed of a street crime scenario and asked to replicate the behaviors of criminals in the virtual environment of Grand Theft Auto 5. Factors affecting criminals’ decision-making were then quantitatively assessed using eye-tracking technology. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to verify the significance of the measured data. Results show that windows placed adjacent to the street, balconies and verandas, and signs indicating territoriality have a significant effect on criminals’ decision-making. Confirming the influence of CPTED factors on the occurrence of street robbery, this study advances a new way of acquiring quantitative data through eye-tracker technology, a method hitherto unexplored by existing research on street robbery.

<p class="normal">O artigo aborda a pertinência e possibilidades de se trabalhar jogos digitais violentos no âmbito do ensino da arte. Primeiramente, retoma relato de prática docente (TONIN, 2018), quando jogos<em> </em>de estética e jogabilidade diferenciais foram utilizados em prática de ensino de arte, fazendo eclodir a demanda dos alunos por vivenciar tal proposta com jogos <em>FPS</em> (<em>first-person shooter</em>) e da série <em>Grand Theft Auto</em> (GTA). Em seguida, discute <em>porque</em> e em que sentido é relevante acolher tal demanda, tendo em vista o modo como os jogos digitais são mencionados na BNCC. Então, discute <em>como</em> acolher tal demanda no âmbito no ensino de arte, considerando que tais títulos têm Classificação Indicativa para maiores de idade. Servindo-se de contribuições teórico-metodológicas da Cultura Visual (MARTINS, 2012; AGUIRRE, 2009; HERNANDEZ, 2005), propõe trabalhar a partir das imagens que emergem da experiência com tais jogos – e não jogando o jogo necessariamente –, mas tendo em vista características próprias da experiência estética imersiva, em espaços de simulação (MANOVICH, 2006; FRASCA, 2004). Para subsidiar tal prática, o artigo traz uma seleção de artefatos visuais que abordam a violência por diferentes meios, estéticas e poéticas, destacando <em>art mods</em> (modificações artísticas) de jogos FPS. O artigo estabelece relações entre os modos de ver, de ocultar e de significar a violência, tanto em Arte (SELKGMANN-SILVA, 2003) quanto em jogos digitais (ALVES, 2004; PHILLIPS, 2018; GALLOWAY, 2006), esboçando caminhos para se mediar o olhar crítico-poético sobre as imagens da violência que permeiam a sociedade contemporânea. </p>

This article relies on nonrepresentational narrative research to consider improvisational urban literacy. The author uses narrative to theorize the choice to teach Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in urban high school English classrooms. The author positions this decision as the surprising result of an improvisational, urban literacy pedagogy meant to locate and address issues of race and gender in a video game. This article calls for a broader view of textuality that affirms, supports, and celebrates emergent teacher decision making, as well as practices of urban literacy education that broaden the notion of what constitutes a text.

The Grand Theft Auto franchise features prominently within existing research exploring graphic, virtual, lawless, and damagingly realistic interpersonal violence within video games. Following a review of this literature, we empirically interrogate notions of the ‘realistic’ and the ‘violent’ during gameplay, finding that the undertones of systemic, structural, capitalistic violence are experienced by players as providing the gritty sense of the ‘real’ that the game has been criticised for. Using Galtung’s concept of ‘structural violence’ and Žižek’s notion of the ‘real’, we unpack structural violence as the forerunning violent experience in the open world game. Due to the hidden and subdued nature of this violence, often taken for granted and experienced passively, we argue that it is the most impactful player experience that simultaneously makes the game playable and contextualises violent game activities. For cultural criminology, our data suggest that embedded and discrete forms of violence should be the leading edge of concern when studying the digital economy and playable forms of social harm.

RESUMOEsta pesquisa tem por objetivo evidenciar os diferentes perfis de jogadores dentro do jogo digital Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) para entender como o agir no jogo poderia caracterizar o desempenho dos alunos em atividades escolares. O conhecimento desses perfis permitirá que seja feito o mapeamento dos perfis plurais do grupo, para transpô-lo para a esfera educacional e, posteriormente, construir uma ação gamificada focada nos perfis dos alunos-jogadores. Esse estudo justifica-se pela necessidade de refletir acerca do modelo homogeneizado da escola, para promover uma prática pedagógica que contemple a diversidade de formas de aprendizagem dos estudantes, no sentido de colocá-los como seres ativos no processo de ensino e aprendizagem. Como respaldo teórico, o presente texto debruça-se sobre Alves (2015), que estuda os quatro tipos de jogadores que serão considerados na organização da atividade gamificada e sobre Huizinga (2000) para o entendimento do conceito de vitória/conquista/ganho. O estudo deu-se por meio de análises realizadas ao jogo mencionado. Conclui-se que o processo de gamificação deve levar em conta o perfil do aluno para promover engajamento em atividades escolares, e isso demandará um bom planejamento das aulas.Palavras-chave: Educação; Tecnologia; Jogos digitais; Gamificação. ABSTRACTThis research aims to highlight the different player profiles within the Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) digital game to understand how acting in the game could characterize their performance in school activities. The awareness of these profiles will allow the mapping of plural profiles of the group, to transpose it into the educational sphere and later build a gamified action focused on student-player profiles. This study is justified by the need to reflect on the homogenized model of the school, to promote a pedagogical practice that contemplates the diversity of learning modalities of students, positively reaching them in order to place them as active beings in the teaching and learning process. As theoretical support, the present text focuses on four types of players Alves (2015) that will be considered in the context of the gamified activity and Huizinga (2000) to the understanding of concept of victory / conquest / gain. The process took place through analyzes performed in the mentioned game. It is concluded that the gamification process must take into account the student profile to promote engagement in school activities and this will require good planning for the classes.Keywords: Education; Technology; Digital games; Gamification. RESUMENEsta investigación tiene como objetivo resaltar los diferentes perfiles de jugadores dentro del juego digital Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) para entender cómo la actuación en el juego podría caracterizar el desempeño de los alumnos en las actividades escolares. El conocimiento de esos perfiles permitirá que se haga el mapeo de los perfiles plurales del grupo para transponerlo a la esfera educativa y luego construir una acción gamificada centrada en los perfiles de los estudiantes-jugadores. Este estudio se justifica por la necesidad de reflexionar sobre el modelo homogeneizado de la escuela, para promover una práctica pedagógica que contemple la diversidad de formas de aprendizaje de los estudiantes, en el sentido de ponerlos como seres activos en el proceso de enseñanza y aprendizaje. Como soporte teórico, el presente texto se centra en Alves (2015), que estudia los cuatro tipos de jugadores que serán considerados en la organización de la actividad gamificada, y sobre Huizinga (2000) para la comprensión de la noción de victoria / conquista / logro. El estudio se hizo por medio de análisis realizados al juego mencionado. Se concluye que el proceso de gamificación debe tener en cuenta el perfil del estudiante para promover participación en las actividades escolares, lo que requerirá de una buena planificación de las clases. Palabras-clave: Educación; Tecnología; Juegos digitales; Gamificación.

Cautionary frameworks continue to dominate evaluations of games within political contexts, obstructing consideration of the specific conditions and experiences offered by particular game texts. This paper challenges this tendency of prior government-instigated research to promote viewpoints that are not textually evaluative or play-derived when reporting on perceptions of games possessed by the public. Instead, it prioritizes Dovey and Kennedy’s (2006) argument that ‘we cannot have recourse solely to [games] textual characteristics; we have to pay particular attention to the moment of its enactment as it is played.’ More concretely, this paper describes research sparked by the NZ Classification Office’s interest in exploring ‘the extent to which the public’s perception of causal links between game playing and various social ills’ might be ‘moderated or even undermined by [knowledge of] how players actually respond to and negotiate their way through the content and characteristics of the medium’ (OFLC 2009, 24). Using both game-play observation and in-depth interviews, we concluded that the participants’ preconceptions of Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar North, 2008) were drastically reevaluated after experience playing the game, shifting attitudes and beliefs as to how games should be regulated.

On the one hand, creating rich virtual worlds "by hand" like in the game Grand Theft Auto V is hugely expensive and limited to large studios. On the other hand, procedural content generation (PCG) allows tiny teams to create huge worlds like Hello Games did with only four people (in the beginning) for the recently released game No Man's Sky. Following in the footsteps of Hello Games, this paper tries to equip the reader with an overview about the state-of-the-art of how to build such a virtual world, i.e., a populated virtual city with buildings, streets, parks, vegetation, humans, and vehicles, using just PCG assets. Each PCG asset that is envisioned to bring the city to life is grouped and discussed in detail and the latest research trends in PCG are presented together with open questions. Using the above-mentioned PCG assets, instead of months, a city can be built in a mere couple of minutes by a user without much experience in designing 3D assets. The city can then be used for many applications like games, virtual reality (VR), or film.

Cities are shared spaces. As the massive worldwide Iraq war protests that began in 2002 indicate, the structure of the city allows for the presentation of social statements, where large groups can gather, share ideas or argue beliefs, and where media outlets can broadcast these activities. While cities enable these forms of interaction, digital technologies also allow for worldwide connections, both through communication and entertainment. What is the relationship between the shared, often contested spaces of the city and how they are represented in interactive media such as videogames? What statements are formed in the streets of Grand Theft Auto? In this paper I will discuss three popular games that reproduce urban spaces: the Grand Theft Auto series (1998-2006), Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland (2004), and Getting Up: Contents under Pressure (2006). These games are of interest due to their popularity, as well as the forms of interaction reinforced by the urban game environment. Cities have always been spaces for interaction and competition, becoming the site for festivals, protests and games. Ancient forms of graffiti in Rome and Pompeii have been re-envisioned in a worldwide graffiti movement, transforming blighted areas into image-laden environments. Games of stickball, hockey and football transform streets into fields, as do modern marathons and bicycle races. The city street becomes a zone of interpretation, for adaptation and personalization. More recently, skateboarders have transformed cities into skateparks, forcing designers to develop such curiosities as handrail and planter augmentation meant to deter skating. Even more peculiar, a possible response to the anti-skating backlash is the sport known as ‘free-running’ or le parkeur, where participants use the existing infrastructure to express themselves, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, climbing concrete peaks and adding stylistic flourish with each step. These forms of urban gameplay may also be accompanied by dangerous activities as well. Jenkins suggests that discussions on the negative effects of increased gameplay might be addressed by looking at socioeconomic factors, such as the increasing numbers of young people living in urban or semi-urban areas who have fewer opportunities for activity that takes place out of doors, creating the prospect for increased interaction with videogames (“Complete Freedom”). The adaptability combined with the dangerous allure of the city street makes for problematic, intriguing representations in contemporary videogames that deal with urban spaces. I will first discuss a brief history of games that deal with urban spaces, before discussing three popular games and the manner in which they attempt to represent, and recreate the experiences in the city. Games and the City One of the earliest examples of the city represented in a videogame can be seen in Rampage, released by Bally/Midway in 1986. The game includes the city only as backdrop for demolition by hyperagressive mutant animals. SimCity, created by Will Wright and released in 1989, is considered a landmark in the history of videogames, as it is based in forms of cooperation rather than competition. It has spawned at least 21 varieties, including the highly anticipated Spore, a game that allows the player to control life on a microbiological level. Game developers also have explored the recreation of cities from the past. Games such as Civilization and Children of the Nile: Immortal Cities (2004) allow players to control events on a broad social scale, in the style of SimCity, with the addition of historical information that comes into play. As videogames have developed, an increase in processing power has allowed programmers to create spaces rendered in real-time, in three dimensions, allowing for immersive ‘first-person’ perspectives not possible in earlier game systems. This perspective has changed the way in which the city is engaged, from the simplistic destruction of Rampage to more nuanced ways of moving through game space. When discussing the perspective of the player in the urban game space, we should also discuss the perspective of the city inhabitant. As de Certeau describes it, the act of walking in the city represents a form of ownership, reading and creating ‘texts’ through movement. This perspective can shift, through travel in automobile or train, or by ascending in skyscrapers, changing the understanding of the text in the process. This process is inevitably collaborative, as the urban terrain that is monitored both by individuals and by groups: businesses, governments, police. As Flynn suggests, this notion of walking closely resembles the procedural nature of generating meaning in many videogames. Recent games such as the Grand Theft Auto series (1998-2006), Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland (2004), and Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure (2006) raise issues regarding the representation of the city, and the possibilities afforded the player. Of interest are the following questions: How is the urban environment represented? What options are provided to players for interaction within this environment? Are their implications for everyday practices that borrow from these game-based environments? Grand Theft Auto Grand Theft Auto (GTA) was first released in 1998, and has since expanded into a series of increasingly controversial games. Originally designed for top-down gameplay, a third person point of view was introduced in GTA II (2001). Along with this new point of view came the ability for players to interact with a highly detailed cityspace, deviating from the urban gangster storyline, and interacting with city inhabitants in any number of illicit ways. This interactivity was taken to an extreme in GTA: San Andreas (2004). GTA: San Andreas is set in a state that is a fictional blend of California and Nevada. It continued the gangster storyline of the previous games, becoming notorious for including an encoded, hidden level that allowed players to take part in explicit sex scenes. It featured a style of nonlinear gameplay that allowed players to entertain themselves, exploring the urban landscape free from rigid game requirements. It also limited interactions with city dwellers, limiting narrative elements to ‘cut scenes’ that allow for uninhibited gameplay. As Frasca suggests, the later Grand Theft Auto games are really about moving through space, typically seen as a mundane activity, in an interesting way. However, that which makes the movement interesting typically involves killing and maiming and destroying that which stands in the way of the main character. Without getting into a discussion of morals and videogames, the GTA series certainly has pushed the boundaries of video game acceptability, as well as engaging gameplay, allowing players to drift through the urban environment. The Situationist International (SI) sought to engage with the city, opening up possibilities for new forms of engagement and interaction through drifts, or derivé. Through various forms of derivé they engaged with the psychogeographic space of the city, walking through varied areas, and reorganizing these experiences as though in a dream state, or, perhaps, game (Sadler). Surely any video game can be experienced in a similar manner. I suggest that the GTA series, through interactive openness, allows players to reread the text of this virtual city, while at the same time contributing to the ‘society of the spectacle’ that situationist Guy Debord so maligned (Debord). As a successful yet problematic blend of simulation and quest, the rules in GTA: San Andreas are not made explicit; we are familiar with the urban spaces depicted in GTA, at least through the stereotypes portrayed in the media. Players therefore know the rules implicit to these spaces, and what happens when we break them; thus, the allure of the simulated urban environment. The text created is one that combines lived experience, mediated images, and interaction with the fictional urban space. What happens when this environment is made specific, when the game depicts a real city? Tony Hawk Pro Skater The Tony Hawk Pro Skater (THPS) series became very popular after its release in 1999, capitalizing on the marketing of ‘extreme sports’ as seen in events such as ESPN X Games, which debuted in 1995. While not the first skateboarding game on the market, THPS captured the imagination of the game buying audience, allowing players to skate as Tony Hawk, or any number of pro skaters. The latest installment of the series is Tony Hawk American Wasteland (THAW), which promotes the seamless connections between levels that are detailed reproductions of Los Angeles. While the GTA series allows for, and in many cases encourages, activities that would be deemed illegal, THAW extends the possibility that the player could actually perform these acts in the place depicted in the game. Does this allow for greater immersion, which then inspires players to ‘take it to the street?’ Or, does the gameplay reinforce the argument against such activities in the actual urban space, affirming their ‘destructive’ nature? Although skaters can be a nuisance, particularly in crowded downtown areas, the appropriation of utilitarian infrastructure can also be seen as improvisational art, adapting existing urban features in the process of skating. The SI notion of detournement can be seen in the actions of many skaters, as the process of skating brings new meanings to the urban landscape. Whether the Pro Skater series adds to the possibilities for detournement, or further limits the actual skating that happens in the city, is only relevant to those who skate and those who attempt to prevent this sport from taking place. As you skate through the city, writing the text of your experience through railslides and grinds, you are also given the ability to ‘tag’ the walls of Los Angeles, literally inscribing your place in the environment. The control of urban spaces, and the possibilities for rewriting these spaces—for detournement—brings me to my third example. Getting Up Marc Ecko, clothing designer and hip-hop aficionado, released Getting Up: Contents under Pressure in 2006. Players assume the identity of ‘Trane,’ a young graffiti artists desparate to learn the ropes in the city of ‘New Radius.’ New Radius is currently under the draconian control of ‘Mayor Sung,’ who has promised to rid the city of the scourge of graffiti. As Trane, you make your way through New Radius, battling foes and meeting graffiti legends, who teach you new skills along the way. Getting Up is unique from the games previously mentioned, as you have the ability to interact with the urban environment in a manner that is not incessantly violent or overtly destructive. In fact, the game is marketed as a way to get the thrill of ‘tagging’ without actually taking part in illegal activity. It is also a unique experience, as Trane walks through the entire environment. This slows down the gameplay, and allows the character to take in the highly detailed environments. It a very literal way, the player in Getting Up is writing the city, as de Certeau describes it, though this writing is typically underappreciated as creative activity, much less art. Conclusion The games that I have described present the city in very different ways, and offer players diverse options for interacting and thinking about the city. While, the impact of these games remains to be seen, and may never register beyond the world of the gamer, these games present urban environments as active spaces for engagement, even if it is the thuggishness reinforced in Grand Theft Auto. I would hope that the creativity shown in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater would lead to the creation of not only more skateparks in suburban spaces, but the acknowledgement of the need for detournement in public urban spaces such as Philadelphia’s Love Park, a favorite East Coast US skate spot that has been the center of much controversy as a result of its popularity. If Pro Skater brings the issue of street skating to a national audience, it is doing good, both as entertainment and social force. Similarly, Marc Ecko’s Getting Up has the potential to not only memorialize the birth of graffiti and hip hop in 1970’s New York; it can also instruct on the flourishing worldwide graffiti scene, allowing those who deserve (and desire) attention to have it. Recent projects such as pacmanhattan have inverted the relationships between gaming and the urban environment that I have described. Taking the game to the city, players engage in interpretations of the video game classic Pac Man in the streets of Manhattan, utilizing a variety of locative media devices. While these games do not change the physicality of the city, they surely change our psycheographical interpretation of that space, in a way that folds together the freedom of gameplay with the control of the street. Jenkins suggests that designers should pay more attention to the work of architects and urban planners as they create interactive worlds (“Game Design”). I would also suggest that the opposite take place. Urban designers might learn from the urban spaces created in games such as American Wasteland and Getting Up, as they present options for the detournement of fixed spaces evident in the graffiti and skate cultures. Increased control will result in diverse responses that subvert this control. Cities should remain spaces for walking, for drifting, for protesting: for games. References Bureau of Public Secrets. Situationist International Anthology. Ed. K. Knabb. Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1991. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1984. Flynn, B. Languages of Navigation within Computer Games. Paper presentation, Digital Art and Culture, Melbourne, Australia, 2003. April 2006 http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Flynn.pdf>. Jenkins, Henry. “Complete Freedom of Movement: Videogames as Gendered Play Spaces.” In The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology. Eds. K. Salen and E. Zimmerman. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology. Eds. K. Salen and E. Zimmerman. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Frasca, G. Sim Sin City: Some Thoughts on Grand Theft Auto. Game Studies 2003. April 2006 http://www.gamestudies.org/0302/frasca/>. Sadler, S. The Situationist City. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Sweeny, Robert. "Code of the Streets: Videogames and the City." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/07-sweeny.php>. APA Style Sweeny, R. (Jul. 2006) "Code of the Streets: Videogames and the City," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/07-sweeny.php>.

Video games are predicated on representations of space, and those spaces are depicted and delimited by specialised visual markings that specify how the game can be played in those areas. For games to present a sense of space, they must display some sense of spatiality beyond that of merely virtualizing a simple game, in the way that puzzle and card games like Tetris and computerized Solitaire do. For games to present space, the games must contain immersive play environments. Many games present immersive environments for play and these spaces can come in many forms: from cityscapes to general play environments in games of various genres and game play styles like Grand Theft Auto 3 (GTA3), Warcraft III, and Super Mario Brothers. Given the many video game genres, this article focuses on games that present some type of virtualized environments. Although video games that present play spaces or environments can be divided into walls, ceilings, and floor or ‘turf’ sections, turf sections prove the most pivotal of the in-game elements to game play. The game turf sections are any part of the game space that the player can use as a basis for spatial exploration. In games like Resident Evil where movement is restricted to walking and running across the floor, only the floors are turf areas. In games like Spiderman—where the player can climb the walls and ceilings with equal ease—the walls, ceilings, and floors all merge into a heterogeneous turf. These game turfs often employ codes such as green for safe and red for danger and create a basic gaming rhetoric for spatial representation and a method for reading video game spaces. In this way, video game turfs serve to mark boundaries and borders for methods of exploration and play. The internal game spaces and delimitations and the external delimitations of the play spaces constitute game turfs. This article also argues that debates over violence in video games misunderstand these turf boundaries and maintains that the violence in video games can be perceived not as random desensitising violence, but as violence within a specific space—that of game play. Media theorists like Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano (Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill ) and educators like Jeanne B. Funk (“Violent Video Games: Who's at Risk?”) both argue that violent video games can lead to an increase in violent behaviour or desensitization towards violence. These debates over violence in video games ignore the rhetoric of gaming created through markings like turf, and they ignore the physical turf on which video games are most often played. The arguments against violence in video games assume a simple causal relationship between people playing video games and actual violence. These arguments neglect the rhetoric of gaming, which establishes borders and spaces of acceptable action as well as setting the moral turf for actions. Similarly, players rely on the game turfs to indicate game play methods and spatial usage. When the turfs are incorrectly represented, video game players suffer frustration during game play; games also purposely complicate these turfs at times to increase game play difficulty, or to intentionally frustrate players. The internal game space of a video game cannot be examined outside of the space of play because the space of play dictates how the game is played and how the game space is to be read. This interrelationship of game to play space can be seen through the concept of cheating. Johan Huizinga notes that The player who trespasses against the rules or ignores them is a ‘spoil-sport.’ The spoil-sport is not the same as the false player, the cheat; for the latter pretends to be playing the game... It is curious to note how much more lenient society is to the cheat than to the spoil-sport. This is because the spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. (11) The significance of the play-world to the video game space still holds as true as with other games. While the games have internal rules for game play, the games are played within spaces of play which encompass more than just the rules within the game. The complex relationship of video game internal space as it exists within a field of play requires that any valid discussion of video games and violence must acknowledge the acts and functions within the game and within the play space. For constructing the internal game space, Mark Wolf notes in his article “Abstraction and the Video Game” that video game imagery can be discussed in terms of both appearance and function: “Since the substance of video games is both simultaneously imagery and events, their elements can be abstracted in both appearance and behavior” (49). Wolf’s comment illustrates the multiple levels of significance that accompany seemingly simple video game representations. The simplest level of video game representation is clearly illustrated with games like the Legend of Zelda series, which depicts roads and towns as safe (or safer), and wilderness areas, like forests, swamps, and mountains, as unsafe. The level of ‘safe’ for any area determines how many fights, also called random encounters, occur. The Final Fantasy game series also uses the same distinction with road areas as more secure than wild areas. In addition to security, the area types--desert, forest, swamp--indicate the type of monsters to be encountered. In similar ways, simulation and colonization games like SIMCITY and Warcraft III depict controlled and well developed areas in particular ways while depicting undeveloped areas with markings to indicate the resources or game space type for those areas. The game music also sets the score for the game space, with games like Resident Evil using one score only for the save rooms, a rare safe space in Resident Evil, where the player can save the game and store the items. These game space delimitations help players in reading the game spaces and how the game spaces will operate. These turf types also indicate the acceptable levels of play—that is, how to play appropriately in the game—which both children and adults learn in other types of organised play like sports, board games, card games, and other organised play activities – that is, how to play appropriately in the game. These turf types all indicate internal game space creation. Internal game space rules are also established through the game narrative. These space divisions are not always marked by the same visual language that marks the basic turfs of other games. Instead, these spaces are defined by the visual language as combined with the game narrative. In fact, the game that has sparked the most recent violence and video game controversy, Grand Theft Auto 3, has some of the most exacting narratively defined turfs. GTA3 presents an amoral world of gangsters, crooked cops, prostitutes, and others of similar character. GTA3 further delimits its game space by setting certain areas as turfs for the different criminal elements, including Chinatown for the Chinese gangs, Yakuza areas for the Japanese mafia, and a Mob area for the Italian mafia. Within these turfs, the violence–in-video-games controversy notes violence in terms of blood spilt, but it fails to recognise how the fighting is contextualised within the scope of the game narrative, a turf in itself. Fighting certainly constitutes violence, but in video games it primarily remains violence as self-defense and as violence against non-human creatures. The division between human and non-human may seem grossly arbitrary, but children’s cartoon regulations allow for violence against non-humans while violence against humans remains regulated. Violent turfs, then, also relate to the narrativised nature of the characters against whom the violence is directed. Game narratives also divide games into narrativised turfs with spaces of acceptable action. Within a game like Legend of Zelda or Diablo the player can interact with the villagers, but the player cannot hurt or kill the villagers. The village or town space is a safe place for the player and for the villagers, as are many areas outside of the towns and villages where villagers reside. This safe space also prevents the player from hurting the villagers when they demand inflated prices for goods that would help the player to save the town. This sort of enforced morality based on the game turf is neglected in the debate over violence in video games as with articles like Craig A. Anderson and Karen E. Gill’s, which seek to examine the game as divorced from the play space and from the game narrative even though it shows how video game violence is most often situated within a moral landscape (“Video Games and Aggressive Thoughts”). Distinctions within game spaces are evident in all games that present environments of play because games require borders of play to function. In addition to the visual and narrative turfs within them, video games are played within a physical play space. The game space is the space of the immersive game environment—the story space of Diablo II, for instance. The play space is the space in which the game is played – often a living room or bedroom in a home. The debate over violence in video games neglects the multiple landscapes over which they argue. Furthermore, although this debate focuses on the possibility of children playing video games and then becoming violent, it ignores the fact that the play space of video games is a physical and mental space of unreality and make-believe where players are most often heroes fighting against evil monsters. Arguments over violence in video games collapse these levels of game space and the play space within which the games are played. Although the internal game space may be filled with mobsters, blood, and killing, the play space is most often defined by patience, quiet attention, and sharing with other players as the games are played communally with siblings and friends. In confusing the game space by viewing it as solely defined by the narrative of the actual game, the debate over violence in video games also fails to recognise that the use of media varies with different play styles, which also influences the overall play space. While video games do often have violent narratives, video game spaces and play are composites of the actual game and the spaces in which the games are played, which are heavily controlled by how the players play. Video game spaces cannot be reduced to merely the game narratives or game spaces because video game play requires the interaction of play. Considering play requires considering both the internal game spaces and the exterior environment of where and how the players play. Thus, an awareness and examination of game turfs provides a different perspective on the debate over violence and video games that embraces the multiple spaces and multiple uses of space in video games. Works Cited Anderson, Craig A. and Karen E. Dill. “Video Games and Aggressive Thoughts, Feelings, and Behavior in the Laboratory and in Life.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 78:4 (April 2000): 772-790. Blizzard Entertainment. Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. (PC). Irvine, CA: Blizzard Entertainment, 2002. Funk, Jeanne B. “Violent Video Games: Who's at Risk?” Kid Stuff : Marketing Sex and Violence to America's Children. Eds. Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 168-192. Grossman, Dave and Gloria DeGaetano. Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence. New York: Crown, 1999. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. Maxis (EA). SIMCITY 3000 Unlimited. (PC). Redwood City, CA: Maxis (EA), 2000. Nintendo. Super Mario Brothers. (Nintendo Entertainment System). Redmond, WA: Nintendo, 1985. Rockstar North. Grand Theft Auto 3 (GTA3). (Playstation2, PC) New York: Rockstar Games, 2001. Sucker Punch. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus. (Playstation2). San Mateo, CA: SCEA, 2002. Wolf, Mark. “Abstraction and the Video Game.” Eds. Mark Wolf and Bernard Perron. The Video Game Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003. 47-65. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Taylor, Laurie. "Video Game Internal Turfs and Turfs of Play" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/09-video.php>. APA Style Taylor, L. (2004, Mar17). Video Game Internal Turfs and Turfs of Play. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/09-video.php>

Filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino have taken full advantage of the disconcerting effect that pop music can have on an audience. Recently, video games have followed their example, with franchises such as Grand Theft Auto, Fallout and BioShock using appropriated music as an almost integral part of their stories and player experiences. BioShock Infinite takes it one step further, weaving popular music of the past and pop music of the present into a compelling tale of time travel, multiverses, and free will. The third installment in the BioShock series has as its setting the floating city of Columbia. Decidedly steampunk, this vision of 1912 makes considerable use of popular music of the past alongside a small number of anachronistic covers of more modern pop music (largely from the 1980s) at crucial moments in the narrative. Music becomes an integral part of Columbia but also an integral part of the player experience. Although the soundscape matches the rest of the environment, the anachronistic covers seem to be directed at the player, the only one who would recognise them as out of place. The player is the time traveller here, even more so than the character they are playing, making BioShock Infinite one of the most literal representations of time travel and the tourist experience which video games can represent.

If Blake is right and the path of excess leads to the tower of wisdom then video games ought to provide plenty of shortcuts along the way. Wading through gore, dismemberment and the occasional bout of torture, violent games have pushed the limits of depiction of violence. While even video nasties pad the ‘money shot’ scenes of extremity with exposition and story (however flimsy), video games concentrate more carnage per minute than any other media form – so why are so many of us increasingly drawn to them as a leisure activity? Of course it is wrong to lump all video games together with violent games, as game critics are liable to do. US lawyer and anti-video game campaigner Jack Thompson describes games as ‘murder simulators’ that train players into violent responses through operant conditioning and rewards. He describes game playing as an antisocial, “”masturbatory activity”:http://www.netjak.com/review.php/1091”. Indeed it is mainly through the conduct of critics like Thompson and censors that games are visible in mainstream culture, which is ironic given the large audience that games have. In Australia, video games have been at the vanguard of the steady censorship creep which has been occurring over the last few years, banning games outright or forcing local distributors censored versions. Unless they are regular visitors to the Office of Film and Literature Classification website, or one of the watchdog sites, such as Refused Classification, most Australians are unaware that they are watching censored films, playing censored games. Earlier in 2006 the graffiti game Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents under Pressure was banned on a little-used regulation that it promoted crime (in this case the crime was graffiti and fare evasion; the OFLC did not have an issue with the violence in the game). Since then, these ‘crime promotion’ principles have been extended to ban Islamic books, a return to direct political censorship in Australia. So what is it about games that have stirred regulators into action? Why are games convenient scapegoats to extend the net of censorship? It is certainly not because game playing is not a minority activity – a recent survey conducted by Bond University indicated that 76% of Australian households have game hardware, that the average age of gamers is 24 and that 38% of gamers were female. Perhaps it has to do with ambivalence toward the extreme content in games, even from those who play them. With a brief excursion through a set of recent video games I can sneak up behind the unsuspecting and slit their throats (Splinter Cell), shake down prostitutes (Grand Theft Auto), torture enemies with power tools (The Punisher) and tear off someone’s arm and beat them with it (Stubbs the Zombie). These are just the interactive elements, if we figure in the horrors we observe rather than perform in games like the Resident Evil or Silent Hill series we have a catalogue of extremity that surpasses the video nasties of the 1980s. The extremity does collect around violence and horror, sexual content is largely missing, at least from the games available through game retailers (the adult industry has their own interactive content). Recently the first Sex in Video Games conference was held in San Francisco, flagging emerging trends in this area. One of the more high profile games to be banned for sexual content in Australia, then released in an edited form was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas because of the ‘hot coffee’ sexual content. What is striking about this content is that is was only accessible through a downloaded modification in the PC version and not accessible from the console versions – which did not stop the censors banning all versions of the game entirely. These concerns about extreme violence and sexual content are made more complicated when we go beyond elements scripted by game designers and begin to consider interactively generated content, emergent gameplay, online interaction and the ability to modify games. It is clear that this is media that is very different to older media forms, yet too often we criticise and censor the gaming experience using film as a benchmark. Concepts of realism, impact and justification are borrowed directly from film analysis, primarily because we lack a critical language to understand and discuss video games. But 50 Cent: Bulletproof is different to Salo, on so many levels. We do not understand the impact that video games have on us, and particularly the effect that they have on children. Media studies research does not help, being intractably locked between the those who see media as programming human behaviour and those who believe audiences are in control. As a result is all too easy to give into moral panics, on the basis of what games might do. Games are also a convenient scapegoat for other social problems, such as with the Columbine massacre. Regulators therefore take a conservative stance on video game dangers, using children as the benchmark for everyone. In Australia there is no R rating available to games. If games fulfil the criteria for an R, they are Refused Classification, in the same category as child pornography and extreme violent pornography. The federal laws control commercial distributors but the classification decisions also feed into ancillary state laws which give police wide powers to detain, search and prosecute those who distribute informally. This is of concern for game players but more worrying now that the principles used to regulate games have been extended to political texts. In Australia we also have the unusual principle that media which promote crime or instruct in the matter of crime can be refused classification and fall into the same regulatory net. This was the principle under which Getting Up was banned but has potential for growth to other games and media generally. There have only been a few decisions in this area but they make clear that censors have very broad discretion (most crime movies could fall foul of this provision), that the regulators have very little empirical evidence on what causes criminality and that they adopt a zero tolerance attitude to satire. So what does this increasing surveillance mean for the future of video games? For mainstream gaming not much, the industry has always had peripheral controversy. From the blocky extremity of 1982’s Custer’s Revenge to modern games like Reservoir Dogs (banned in Australia in June 2006) some developers have pushed the boundaries, usually overtly courting controversy but the backlash seems to be gaining momentum. The trend toward censorship of games in Australia would seem to bear the hallmarks of a moral panic, if not for the medium’s widespread penetration into our culture and the size of the audience. Most of the games which have been banned have passed unnoticed not being commercially successful or reviewed well overseas, but this censorship sets ugly precedents. Video games are yet to really develop an avant garde or art-house, but if they are, this process will be hampered by legal controls that do not understand the medium and are not committed to free expression as an ideal. It is clear that, for various reasons, there is little serious public discourse around games beyond what is lead by pro-censorship critics and regulators. The statistics indicate that the majority of Australians play games or at least have contact with someone who does, yet games enjoy little of the public discussion and criticism that films or television do, where the audience is presumed to be broader. Many gamers are even embarrassed to discuss their hobby, putting it on par with consumption of pornography as embarrassing, juvenile or as Thompson would suggest masturbatory. But just as pornography has become subject of more serious critical attention despite the potential cringe, so to do games. Part of the change will come as there is more critical academic engagement. This is not suggesting that games should ‘grow up’ or aspire to art. Part of their appeal lies in their engagement with the id, the potential for extremity. Rather than argue that games are valid despite their excesses, might we perhaps look to the excesses in order to understand the appeal? Don’t knock the pleasures of beating someone to death with their own arm until you’ve tried it. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Beattie, Scott. "Extremity, Video Games and the Censors." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/08-beattie.php>. APA Style Beattie, S. (Nov. 2006) "Extremity, Video Games and the Censors," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/08-beattie.php>.

Introduction: Game Culture and GenderAs texts with the potential to help mediate specific forms of identity, video games are rich and complex sites for analysis. A tendency, however, still exists in scholarship to treat video games as just another kind of text, and work that explores the expression of masculine identity persists in drawing from cinematic analysis without proper consideration of game design and how these games are played (Triana). For example, insights from studies into horror cinema may illuminate the relationship between players and game systems in survival horror video games (Habel & Kooyman), but further study is needed to explore how people interact with the game.This article aims to build towards a scholarly definition of the term “Power Fantasy”, a concept that seems well established in wider discourse but is not yet well theorised in the scholarly literature. It does so through a case of the most recent reboot of Doom (2016), a game that in its original incarnation established an enduring tradition for high-action Power Fantasy. In the first-person shooter game Doom, the player fills the role of the “Doom Guy”, a faceless hero who shuttles between Earth and Hell with the sole aim of eviscerating demonic hordes as graphically as possible.How, then, do we begin to theorise the kind of automediation that an iconic game text like Doom facilitates? Substantial work has been done to explore player identification in online games (see Taylor; Yee). Shaw (“Rethinking”) suggests that single-player games are unexplored territory compared to the more social spaces of Massively Multiplayer Online games and other multiplayer experiences, but it is important to distinguish between direct identification with the avatar per se and the ways in which the game text mediates broader gender constructions.Abstract theorisation is not enough, though. To effectively understand this kind of automediation we also need a methodology to gain insights into its processes. The final part of this article, therefore, proposes the analysis of “Let’s Play” videos as a kind of gender identity performance which gives insight into the automediation of dominant masculine gender identities through Power Fantasy video games like Doom. This reflexive performance works to denaturalise gender construction rather than reinforce stable hegemonic identities.Power Fantasy and Gender IdentityPower Fantasy has become an established trope in online critiques and discussions of popular culture. It can be simply defined as “character imagines himself taking revenge on his bullies” (TVTropes). This trope takes on special resonance in video games, where the players themselves live out the violent revenge fantasy in the world of the game.The “power fantasy” of games implies escapism and meaninglessness, evoking outsize explosions and equally outsized displays of dominance. A “power gamer” is one who plays with a single-minded determination to win, at the expense of nuance, social relationships between players, or even their own pleasure in play. (Baker)Many examples apply this concept of Power Fantasy in video games: from God of War to Metroid: Prime and Grand Theft Auto, this prevalent trope of game design uses a kind of “agency mechanics” (Habel & Kooyman) to convince the player that they are becoming increasingly skilful in the game, when in reality the game is simply decreasing in difficulty (PBS Digital Studios). The operation of the Power Fantasy trope is also gendered; in a related trope known as “I Just Want To Be a Badass”, “males are somewhat more prone to harbour [the] wish” to feel powerful (TVTropes). More broadly, even though the game world is obviously not real, playing it requires “an investment in and commitment to a type of masculine performance that is based on the Real (particularly if one is interested in ‘winning’, pummelling your opponent, kicking ass, etc.)” (Burrill 2).Indeed, there is a perceived correlation (if not causation) between the widespread presence of Power Fantasy video games and how “game culture as it stands is shot through with sexism, racism, homophobia, and other biases” (Baker). Golding and van Deventer undertake an extended exploration of this disconcerting side of game culture, concluding that games have “become a venue for some of the more unsophisticated forms of patriarchy” (213) evidenced in the highly-publicised GamerGate movement. This saw an alignment between the label of “gamer” and extreme misogyny, abuse and harassment of women and other minorities in the industry.We have, then, a tentative connection between dominant gameplay forms based on high skill that may be loosely characterised as “Power Fantasy” and some of the most virulent toxic gender expressions seen in recent times. More research is needed to gain a clearer understanding of precisely what Power Fantasy is. Baker’s primary argument is that “power” in games can also be characterised as “power to” or “power with”, as well as the more traditional “power over”. Kurt Squire uses the phrase “Power Fantasy” as a castaway framing for a player who seeks an alternative reward to the usual game progression in Sid Meier’s Civilisation. More broadly, much scholarly work concerning gameplay design and gender identity has been focussed on the hot-button question of videogame violence and its connection to real-world violence, a question that this article avoids since it is well covered elsewhere. Here, a better understanding of the mediation of gender identity through Power Fantasy in Doom can help to illuminate how games function as automedia.Auto-Mediating Gender through Performance in Doom (2016) As a franchise, Doom commands near-incomparable respect as a seminal text of the first-person shooter genre. First released in 1993, it set the benchmark for 3D rendered graphics, energetic sound design, and high-paced action gameplay that was visceral and deeply immersive. It is impossible to mention more recent reboots without recourse to its first seminal instalment and related game texts: Kim Justice suggests a personal identification with it in a 29-minute video analysis entitled “A Personal History of Demon Slaughter”. Doom is a cherished game for many players, possibly because it evokes memories of “boyhood” gaming and all its attendant gender identity formation (Burrill).This identification also arises in livestreams and playthroughs of the game. YouTuber and game reviewer Markiplier describes nostalgically and at lengths his formative experiences playing it (and recounts a telling connection with his father who, he explains, introduced him to gaming), saying “Doom is very important to me […] this was the first game that I sat down and played over and over and over again.” In contrast, Wanderbots confesses that he has never really played Doom, but acknowledges its prominent position in the gaming community by designating himself outside the identifying category of “Doom fan”. He states that he has started playing due to “gushing” recommendations from other gamers. The nostalgic personal connection is important, even in absentia.For the most part, the critical and community response to the 2016 version of Doom was approving: Gilroy admits that it “hit all the right power chords”, raising the signature trope in reference to both gameplay and music (a power chord is a particular technique of playing heavy metal guitar often used in heavy metal music). Doom’s Metacritic score is currently a respectable 85, and, the reception is remarkably consistent between critics and players, especially for such a potentially divisive game (Metacritic). Commentators tend to cite its focus on its high action, mobility, immersion, sound design, and general faithfulness to the spirit of the original Doom as reasons for assessments such as “favourite game ever” (Habel). Game critic Yahtzee’s uncharacteristically approving video review in the iconic Zero Punctuation series is very telling in its assessment of the game’s light narrative framing:Doom seems to have a firm understanding of its audience because, while there is a plot going on, the player-character couldn’t give a half an ounce of deep fried shit; if you want to know the plot then pause the game and read all the fluff text in the character and location database, sipping daintily from your pink teacup full of pussy juice, while the game waits patiently for you to strap your bollocks back on and get back in the fray. (Yahtzee)This is a strident expression of the gendered expectations and response to Doom’s narratological refusal, which is here cast as approvingly masculine and opposed to a “feminine” desire for plot or narrative. It also feeds into a discourse which sees the game as one which demands skill, commitment, and an achievement orientation cast within an exclusivist ideology of “toxic meritocracy” (Paul).In addition to examining reception, approaches to understanding how Doom functions as a “Power Fantasy” or “badass” trope could take a variety of forms. It is tempting to undertake a detailed analysis of its design and gameplay, especially since these feed directly into considerations of player interaction. This could direct a critical focus towards gameplay design elements such as traversal and mobility, difficulty settings, “glory kills”, and cinematic techniques in the same vein as Habel and Kooyman’s analysis of survival horror video games in relation to horror cinema. However, Golding and van Deventer warn against a simplistic analysis of decontextualized gameplay (29-30), and there is a much more intriguing possibility hinted at by Harper’s notion of “Play Practice”.It is useful to analyse a theoretical engagement with a video game as a thought-experiment. But with the rise of gaming as spectacle, and particularly gaming as performance through “Let’s Play” livestreams (or video on demand) on platforms such as TwitchTV and YouTube, it becomes possible to analyse embodied performances of the gameplay of such video games. This kind of analysis allows the opportunity for a more nuanced understanding of how such games mediate gender identities. For Judith Butler, gender is not only performed, it is also performative:Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. (214)Let’s Play videos—that show a player playing a game in real time with their commentary overlaying the on screen action—allow us to see the performative aspects of gameplay. Let’s Plays are a highly popular and developing form: they are not simple artefacts by any means, and can be understood as expressive works in their own right (Lee). They are complex and multifaceted, and while they do not necessarily provide direct insights into the player’s perception of their own identification, with sufficient analysis and unpacking they help us to explore both the construction and denaturalisation of gender identity. In this case, we follow Josef Nguyen’s analysis of Let’s Plays as essential for expression of player identity through performance, but instead focus on how some identity construction may narrow rather than expand the diversity range. T.L. Taylor also has a monograph forthcoming in 2018 titled Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming, suggesting the time is ripe for such analysis.These performances are clear in ways we have already discussed: for example, both SplatterCat and Markiplier devote significant time to describing their formative experiences playing Doom as a background to their gameplay performance, while Wanderbots is more distanced. There is no doubt that these videos are popular: Markiplier, for example, has attracted nearly 5 million views of his Doom playthrough. If we see gameplay as automediation, though, these videos become useful artefacts for analysis of gendered performance through gameplay.When SplatterCat discovers the suit of armor for the game’s protagonist, Doom Guy, he half-jokingly remarks “let us be all of the Doom Guy that we can possibly be” (3:20). This is an aspirational mantra, a desire for enacting the game’s Power Fantasy. Markiplier speaks at length about his nostalgia for the game, specifically about how his father introduced him to Doom when he was a child, and he expresses hopes that he will again experience “Doom’s original super-fast pace and just pure unadulterated action; Doom Guy is a badass” (4:59). As the action picks up early into the game, Markiplier expresses the exhilaration and adrenaline that accompany performances of this fastpaced, highly mobile kind of gameplay, implying that he is becoming immersed in the character and, by performing Doom Guy, inhabiting the “badass” role and thus enacting a performance of Power Fantasy:Doom guy—and I hope I’m playing Doom guy himself—is just the embodiment of kickass. He destroys everything and he doesn’t give a fuck about what he breaks in the process. (8:45)This performance of gender through the skilled control of Doom Guy is, initially, unambiguously mediated as Power Fantasy: in control, highly skilled, suffused with Paul’s ‘toxic meritocracy. A similar sentiment is expressed in Wanderbots’ playthrough when the player-character dispenses with narrative/conversation by smashing a computer terminal: “Oh I like this guy already! Alright. Doom Guy does not give a shit. It’s like Wolf Blascowicz [sic], but like, plus plus” (Wanderbots). This is a reference to another iconic first-person shooter franchise, Wolfenstein, which also originated in the 1980s and has experienced a recent successful reboot, and which operates in a similar Power Fantasy mode. This close alignment between these two streamers’ performances suggests significant coherence in both genre and gameplay design and the ways in which players engage with the game as a gendered performative space.Nonetheless, there is no simple one-to-one relationship here—there is not enough evidence to argue that this kind of gameplay experience leads directly to the kind of untrammelled misogyny we see in game culture more broadly. While Gabbiadini et al. found evidence in an experimental study that a masculinist ideology combined with violent video game mechanics could lead to a lack of empathy for women and girls who are victims of violence, Ferguson and Donnellan dispute this finding based on poor methodology, arguing that there is no evidence for a causal relationship between gender, game type and lack of empathy for women and girls. This inconclusiveness in the research is mirrored by an ambiguity in the gendered performance of males playing through Doom, where the Power Fantasy is profoundly undercut in multiple ways.Wanderbots’ Doom playthrough is literally titled ‘I have no idea what I’m Dooming’ and he struggles with particular mechanics and relatively simple progression tools early in the game: this reads against masculinist stereotypes of superior and naturalised gameplay skill. Markiplier’s performance of the “badass” Doom Guy is undercut at various stages: in encountering the iconic challenge of the game, he mentions that “I am halfway decent… not that good at video games” (9:58), and on the verge of the protagonist’s death he admits “If I die this early into my first video I’m going to be very disappointed, so I’m going to have to kick it up a notch” (15:30). This suggests that rather than being an unproblematic and simple expression of male power in a fantasy video game world, the gameplay performances of Power Fantasy games are ambiguous and contested, and not always successfully performed via the avatar. They therefore demonstrate a “kind of gender performance [which] will enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire” (Butler 211). This cuts across the empowered performance of videogame mastery and physical dominance over the game world, and suggests that the automediation of gender identity through playing video games is a complex phenomenon urgently in need of further theorisation.ConclusionUltimately, this kind of analysis of the mediation of hegemonic gender identities is urgent for a cultural product as ubiquitous as video games. The hyper-empowered “badass” digital avatars of Power Fantasy video games can be expected to have some shaping effect on the identities of those who play them, evidenced by the gendered gameplay performance of Doom briefly explored here. This is by no means a simple or unproblematic process, though. 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