Jogando com a cidade: a construção das ações no espaço urbano nos jogos digitais de mundo aberto Bioshock e Grand Theft Auto IV

Abstract

This research aims to comprehend how open world/sandbox games that use as scenery wide urban environments propose themselves to rebuild the city space as virtual procedural environments, in which the player is given the chance to act and obtain reactions form the game-software based on certain rules of action and pre-established commands set up by the games creators. Based on the complexity and the great attention to details in the construction of urban environments, the chosen games were Bioshock and Grand Theft Auto (GTA) IV. The first moment in this research is dedicated to the comprehension of which are the main characteristics that define what is a game and to the definition of which are the specific characteristics that can be related to digital games, and also how to recognize the expressive possibilities given to the player in these games. The whole analysis is based on the practice of exploring the game as a player and on the careful description of the games cities environments based on that exploration, aiming to elucidate how these environments are made available to the player using the framework stablished by the methodological practice proposed by the Actor-Network Theory as Latour defined it. This perspective of analysis tries to stay focused on the kind of relations that exist between the structuring of space and objects and the modes of appropriation, comprehension and the uses that can be made of them. To reach this, we appeal to concepts of design, urbanism and geography as a way to base our vision about choices made on the project or on the construction of virtual or concrete spaces. Based on the way these games present themselves to the player, our research option was to perform the analysis of them in two distinct moments: first, analyzing the linear route of missions and challenges defined by the games creators; then, searching for the options of agency and transformation given to the player when unattached to specific missions, free to explore the rules and limits of interaction with the games environments. On the last moment, this research attains itself to comprehend the differences of relation each one of the games stablish with the urban space that they had built for the player and proposes some elements to be observed in open world games to define of which kind is the relation of simulation and which is the kind of in-game freedom they allow to the player.