Jogos digitais, simulação e representação do passado: jogar Bioshock (2007) como um exercício de investigação histórica

Abstract

Video games are among the expressive means of culture that have most popularized historical themes. This reason (in fact, evidence) is already a reason to draw historians' attention to the ways in which digital games seem to appropriate "historical discourses". This Doctoral Thesis has the objective of reflecting such forms, paying attention to the particular questions of the language of the games and the effects of the aesthetic experience promoted by the “action of the game” when it takes place in relation to a given representation of the past. It will do this, in the first place, presenting the exercises of “simulation”, a characteristic task of games, in contact with images and forms of the represented past. In this sense, elements of the games' own structure, such as "gameplay", will be discussed as type of statement specific to the narrative practiced by these means. Thus, the first chapter of the work will be concerned with presenting and discussing a certain theoretical and methodological contribution, seeking from that to think of a definition for the term "historical games". Chapters 2 and 3 will focus on the analysis of the game BioShock (2007), idealized by the game-designer Ken Levine, which became a classic evaluated by the quality of its narrative, built under a great amount of historical meanings and inspired by literary works and philosophies of the mid-20th century. In addition to analyzing the numerous relationships that BioShock establishes with culture, this work will be dedicated to observing how its narrative operation, in a direct negotiation between game and player, promotes critical meanings of the interpretation of the past, thus demonstrating the capacity of video games in dialogue with publicly constituted historical knowledge. Finally, the fourth and last chapter will extend the debate on the relationship between simulation and representation of the past, commenting on other models of genres and games that perform movements that BioShock cannot offer. Finally, it is a work that seeks to contribute to the institution of the video game as an object of legitimate study of historical research, since digital games have become indisputable public / cultural phenomena.