Manifestations of Social Determinism in Picaresque Video Games

ongoing

Video games are one of the most popular cultural media nowadays. Their narratives frequently feature rogues suffering the consequences of social determinism, one of the main characteristics of Picaresque Fiction. Social determinism involves circumstances such as social oppression or ethnic/gender discrimination. Due to this, certain contemporary and past worldviews, as well as current social challenges permeate Picaresque texts, allowing players to experience complex sociocultural contexts through rogues and fictional stories. Built upon my previous research that demonstrates the existence of a videoludic Picaresque that continues the legacy of Picaresque Literature, this project offers increased understanding of this type of contemporary Picaresque fiction insisting in the expression of the current social challenges that imbue it. The primary goal is to show how social determinism is embedded in these video games while manifesting worldviews aligned with contemporary social challenges and influenced by previous Picaresque Literature. Considering narrative and ludic aspects of this cultural medium, a model of analysis for the social determinism in video games will be developed using a multidisciplinary theoretical framework with the intention of exporting it to different media and genres. Despite not existing previous work that study social determinism in the videoludic Picaresque, there are authors who have explored this characteristic in Picaresque Literature, the worldviews of this type of fiction, or manifestations of oppression and discrimination in video games. This project will combine these theories, create new ones, and apply them to video games using a new model shaped with the blended multidisciplinary support of three renowned centres of humanistic knowledge of the University of Glasgow: the Centre for Comparative Literature and Translation, the Stirling Maxwell Centre of Text/Image Cultures and the Games and Gaming Lab.