Tecnologias de contato: os impactos das plataformas dos jogos digitais na jogabilidade social

Abstract

With people spending billions of hours every week playing games, often in multiplayer games, video games have become an extremely important medium for communication and interaction. Many game studies focus on their highest contextual level: their reception and operation by their users. This dissertation proposes an alternate method, a study of the lowest level: the hardware and software platforms which execute video games. By turning our attention away from the final user and focusing on the technological context, we begin to understand how the technologies are appropriated by game developers to enable new forms of socializing inside their games. This dissertation presents the results of a historic-comparative study of the social interactions inside video games throughout their history. From the results, we have extracted a set of variables which define the different forms of social gameplay inside games, and we have categorized the technologies which impact social gameplay. Based on this analysis, we propose a way for the platform creators to plan their technological development and for developers to think of other ways to appropriate technologies and create new types of social gameplay.