A cidade-jogo em videogames: uma flânerie por Bioshock Infinity e Assassin’s Creed: Unity

Abstract

This thesis has as object of research video games that have an audiovisual city as the main theme of its construction. These are environments made up of audiovisual images with temporal and spatial montages (MANOVICH, 2014; WALTHER, 2004; JÄRVINEN, 2002) that are updated (BERGSON, 2006) in a playful way between software, hardware and players. The city-game is thought of here as a virtual one (BERGSON, 2006) that is updated in several audiovisual media such as cinema, TV and video games, among others. The audiovisual city of video games is the game-city updated in video games, technical images (FLUSSER, 1985) that show the technoculture (FISCHER; KILPP, 2013; 2015) in which they emerge. The corpus in which we observe the game city consists of two cities in video games: Columbia (Bioshock Infinite, 2013) and Paris (Assassin’s Creed: Unity, 2014). These are experiences of the world whose trajectory halted, its proposals to walk through the game wasting time in lost times or settling among the crowd apparently without doing anything to perceive the city more deeply reveal a design, a world programmed by numbers (FLUSSER, 2017 ) with specific aesthetic and political values: teach us to calculate by perceiving the numerical nature of the world. The methodology that accompanied the whole process of knowledge construction was the flânerie (BENJAMIN, 2006; CANEVACCI, 1993) proving to be effective in finding several audiovisual products in which the city has a central space, as well as to walk tirelessly among the chosen video games. and define the corpus. Flannery was also essential to walk through the cities, which led us to choose certain space-times in which the city-game is updated more intensely and to understand the central dynamics of this becoming. The constellations (BENJAMIN, 2006; MONTAÑO, 2015) helped us to explore the relationship between ideas and things (audiovisual cities) by building four central ideas that become operational dynamics of the game city and any other updated city. It deals with audiovisualities as an assembly principle: every city is audiovisual because it is constantly being reassembled between technical images, avatars and players. On the other hand, the dynamics of deep time typical of the media and its technoculture leads us to affirm that every city has buried times (ZIELINSKI, 2006; PARIKKA, 2017; REINHARD, 2018), multiple, simultaneous, uchronic (COUCHOT, 2003). We also affirm here that every city is media, thinking the media as extensions of the human (MCLUHAN, 1969). These extensions create new environments, uses and appropriations. We still realize that every city is planned or programmed by numbers (FLUSSER, 2017), a city-calculation that when playing it teaches us to realize that there are countless cities being designed with each one having its own particularity. These four dynamics of the game city are interwoven all the time and are updated in any audiovisual city, in any city.