Generał bez właściwości. Rola etyki i technologii wojennych w kształtowaniu tożsamości postaci gracza w RTS-ach.

• Authors: Kukulak Szymon Piotr

Title variants

EN

A General Without Qualities. The Role of Ethics And Military Technology in Shaping the Identity of a Player’s Character In Real-Time Strategy Games.

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

EN

A player character in a real time strategy game is, as a rule, either well defined or practically anonymous. The latter seems to offer the player an opportunity to define it during the campaign. However, the ethical nature of the strategic goals and mission objectives, as well as the arsenal used on the battlefield, depend almost exclusively on the side of the conflict the character fights for. The article details how a player's freedom of choice is limited through this dependency, using twenty one titles of four different game sagas – Command & Conquer, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Dune and Warcraft – as examples. Three different layers of those games are discussed separately – the game world, player objectives and weaponry involved – focusing on their ethical implications for the player’s character identity. As a result, seven separate kinds of characteristics are defined, by which the player’s character can be described: four dealing with the player’s own objectives, and three – with the arsenal available for the player, which may (or may not) include close-range weaponry of exceptional cruelty (flamethrowers, lasers, chemical sprayers), suicidal units and weapons of mass destruction (chemical and nuclear alike), as well as various means of deception (optical camouf lage, radar jamming, espionage, electromagnetic pulses). The analysis reveals that the restrictions on a player’s freedom in defining his own character have their roots either in real world history, or in popular culture, both shaping the depiction (usually a very sharp one) of each faction of a virtual conflict – and the identity of a player’s character along with it.

Keywords

PL

strategie czasu rzeczywistego; etyka technologii; gry historyczne; gry SF; gry fantasy

EN

real time strategies; ethics of technology; historical games; science fiction games; fantasy games

• Publisher: Polskie Towarzystwo Badania Gier (Games Research Association of Poland)
• Journal: Homo Ludens
• Year: 2015
• Issue: 2(8)
• Pages: 89-108

Dates

published

2015

Contributors

author

Kukulak Szymon Piotr

• Uniwersytet Jagielloński

References

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Identifiers

ISSN

2080-4555