%0 Journal Article
%T Ambivalent Violence in Contemporary Game Design
%A Marcus Maloney
%J Games and Culture
%@ 1555-4139
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/1555412016647848
%X Through a textual analysis of three noted examples¡ªBioshock, Spec Ops: The Line, and Grand Theft Auto V¡ªThis 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
%K violent video games
%K film violence
%K ambivalence
%K procedural rhetoric
%K textual analysis
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1555412016647848