Cultura de produção de jogos digitais: narrativas, formas amalgamadas e pluriversos transmidiáticos na indústria contemporânea de videogames

Abstract

This study seeks to understand and elucidate issues related to the professional and creative practices of the contemporary digital games industry from the concept of production culture. The objective is to investigate creative processes and professional practices, emphasizing the issue of storytelling in digital games and how they promote a unique narrative and aesthetics, which emanate and are directly related to the specificities of this support. We are particularly interested in the material constitution of video games, considering the different composites that integrate them and how they relate to each other, borrowing resources and languages from other media and associating themselves in an advanced stage of interdependence and mutual cooperation, which we call amalgamated forms. In order to accomplish this research, we combined methodological procedures derived from Baxandall’s (2006) inferential criticism, using a problem vs. solution paradigm to trace incumbencies and guidelines by observing the trajectory of the creative agents of our interest; and Caldwell's (2008) integrated industrial-cultural analysis, using different types of material records of the creative practices of game designers, in addition to the works and testimonies from the professionals themselves, with an autoethnographic content, in order to obtain a more in-depth and systemic view of what we now refer to as the digital game production culture. This methodology was applied in a case study of the trajectory from the game developer company Blizzard Entertainment (1991-2020), offering a historiographic record of the mentioned period and highlighting the set of guidelines that led this agent during the creation of the World of Warcraft and Hearthstone games, specifically. Taking Hearthstone as an exemplary case, we analyzed the narrative and transmedia project developed by Blizzard over the three expansions that made up the “Year of the Dragon” (April 2019 to April 2020), discussing the implications of telling a continued story in a digital game and how the storytelling aspects could be used, deliberately, in favor of the players’ engagement and the expansion of the fictional elements of both works (Hearthstone and World of Warcraft), culminating in the formation of great transmedia pluriverses, who orbit around established digital game franchises but also reverberate in other media, formats and supports.