Temos que pegar : espirais de apropriação e regras autoimpostas de jogabilidade em trechos de vídeos de let’s play do jogo Pokémon Leafgreen

Abstract

This dissertation aims to identify and comprehend the different forms of appropriation made visible in video game playthroughs. We have decided to study a Let’s Play series on the YouTube channel TheSw1tcher, named Super Best Friends Play Pokémon LeafGreen [Nuzlocke/Hard Mode]. These videos show a Pokémon LeafGreen run made by the channel creators, under self-imposed rules that alter the way of playing it. We understand these videos by light of remix and mashup culture theory, as well as the notion of appropriation to expand our understanding of the object of study. Not only, we use these concepts together with references on play theory and play retelling. We observe how changed rules, gameplay, dialogue between the video authors and the relations shared with the public work as elements of an appropriation spiral perceptible in interferences made the author’s videos. These moments present notions of death and burial inserted in the Pokémon game setting by utilizing Nuzlocke rules. In these sections, the Let’s Play creators appropriate many different references. Those references demand an ongoing construction together with the viewers, so that they may be fully recognized. We describe and analyze those sequences, while emphasizing on continuities and ruptures between appropriations. We then understand games as defined by the way they are played, that is, by their gameplay, and we believe that in the videos we have analyzed we are able to see a form of gameplay appropriation, or as we call it, regameplay. We verify that is not possible to assert that the Pokémon game, when played inside the context of Nuzlocke self-imposed rules, keeps its regular form of gameplay. In our final argument, we discuss how a comprehension of the appropriation spiral allowed us to look for conflicts in the double function adopted by the Let’s Player, and its gamer-narrator divergence. The way the sections and alterations made on the videos present a sequence of returns to a previous form of gameplay by TheSw1tcher’s members opens space for and understanding of the videos fall in popularity as a consequence of a shared lack of interest between players, both the Let’s Players and their viewers.