The socio-politics of digital games
An interview with Leandro Augusto Borges Lima
With governments trying to restrict online gaming in their societies, Find Out Why is raising awareness about the political aspects of games in culture, the preservation of freedoms, and the social impact of gamer communities.
We reach out to Dr. Leandro Augusto Borges Lima who specializes in digital games, cyberculture, social networks, and sociability on the Internet.
In his interview, he sheds light on the reality that games are integral in modern culture and he explains how they can factor into identity formation.
By Elena Gkiola
Read the interview below or listen here
Gaming and games are a study topic in academia. What is your research focus?
Since games started being produced and developed, people also tried to understand them from different areas within science. For my part, I focus on sociological and political perspectives. Nevertheless, there are many other ways of studying games from design to game development and coding, the list is as vast as the game industry itself.
When did game studies formally become a research topic, and what is the major advancement you see in the study of sociology and politics of games?
It really became more of a topic of discussion after the 2000s. Before that, we have a lot of important research that was scattered around. Now we have a community around games as a scientific research topic. Personally, I think there has been a lot of advancement in the application of queer theory in the past four or five years in games. This is incredibly positive because games tend to be seen — especially by the media — as the realm of the white male heterosexual gamer, whereas that is not really the case. Gamers are diverse.
How do you see the role of the player and their agency in relation to the game itself?
The player is very central in researching games because without them there is no game.
In my research, I tackle all of the aspects that are involved in what I call the “video games culture.” I look at it as a configurative dynamic where players configure the industry, and the industry configures the players.
In addition to this, our backgrounds, our individual experiences, also configure how we engage with games, and that can lead to how developers develop games and vice versa.
Even when we -researchers- analyze the content of the game itself, we become the gamers, we are the ones that make the game happen. That perspective and that experience play a role when we reflect on our findings.
Is it only when one plays games that one is considered part of the gaming culture?
You do not need to have a console and you do not need to have the gear to play games to understand them. One can simply watch people playing games!
It is common for people to watch other people playing games online. This is not necessarily a new thing. The game-watching experience has always been there, with a crowd of people watching someone playing in the arcade while waiting their turn. Watching people playing games is highly effective for one to obtain game literacy.
The media can also help with game literacy because they broadcast big e-sports tournaments and have experienced commentators who explain very clearly to the audience what is going on. Just by watching other gamers play and by listening to commentator’s explanations, you can learn more about games and understand why they are so mainstream.
Can online games enhance traditional education methods?
We have been studying games for education for a long time. There is a separate field for this called “edu-gaming”, or we can also brand it under the “serious games” umbrella.
I come from a slightly different angle in the sense that I think about the games we play on an everyday basis, that are bestsellers, that can also be used for teaching purposes.
At Erasmus University, I was teaching a course on games, and I gave a lot of games for my students to play. Every week they had to do a gaming diary where they would reflect on whichever games they played. I often use games as something that people can engage with and critically question and learn.
It is common to underestimate how games can help us explain a lot of things that are happening in the world in the same way that movies and books and TV series can. My belief is that because we can interact directly with the game and the game characters, it really helps us experience things in a unique way or experiment with different modes of seeing the world, modes of living in the world. Just doing that can lead to a better understanding of ourselves.
Can the game design pose limitations to self-exploration because the emotions are embedded in the game itself?
Yes, there is the possibility for game designers to embed the game with emotions with values that they want to convey to people, so they will encode messages in the game. However, the way that these messages are decoded, varies.
Stuart Hall, the father of the encoding-decoding communication model, claims that there are three readings of any medium: the negotiated, the dominant, and the oppositional.
So whichever emotions and messages were encoded in the text, they can be interpreted in many ways by the audience. The player is being configured simultaneously by so many things: by the game, by where they are playing the game, by the time they play. All of these aspects impact the emotions and feelings of players. Everything is really connected from the production and design of the parts of the game to the people sitting down and playing a game on their sofa while eating a pizza.
Are the communities of gamers also a research topic in game studies?
Multiplayer games have the potential to foster strong communities that are often not restricted to just the gaming environment. The same communities migrate to Internet forums like Reddit, WhatsApp groups, or Discord servers where the exchange of ideas is not only restricted to the game itself. That phenomenon can potentially have sociopolitical research interest.
Video games and radicalization: is there a correlation?
There is an inconsistency in how we talk about the problems of video games and violence in the sense that there is no scientific proof between games causing violence and therefore causing radicalized acts, like shootings, for example. There is no study that proved anything remotely consistent about it.
However, another issue of radicalization with games — where the connection is a lot clearer- is in the community of gamers with radical far-right political views and the way they organize around games.
Even the terminology “gamer” is a place of a political dispute that is very much connected to this radicalization. Many young adults, some of my students included, would not choose to identify as “gamers” and risk carrying that stigma of homophobia, sexism, or racism.
Social and political phenomena appear in the gaming culture as well and that needs to be investigated more carefully. We want to give anyone the tools to recognize when something is toxic and potentially damaging to them so they can avoid that.
Is being a player an identity?
Identity is something that is always changing that we are always constructing, reconstructing, and re-figuring. Some people will figure out things about themselves and their identity much later in life.
Gamer identity is something that we can connect more to our consumption practices as well as to our cultural consumption. For some people though their player identity would be a big part of their lives.
The identity process is very dynamic and very complex. It is not only connected to general demographics but also to our lived experiences. We can say that our identity is constantly under construction, and everything that we experience in life forms our identity and who we are.
A gamer identity might be one aspect of yourself and is something you do not need to be shy about. There is nothing wrong with playing games at whichever age you are. You never grow out of games, and I believe that you can grow with the games.
What do you wish to see more in the future in the field of game studies?
The research in games is growing and it would be interesting to see how we can translate that into more civic action.
The interview was originally published here
