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Satire at Play: A Game Studies Approach to Satire

Published: 17 September 2020 Publication History

Abstract

The persuasive potential of games and their use in political propaganda and raising social awareness are well-established components of the game studies discourse, and the literature around persuasive games highlights satire among the expressive tones of several games. Despite this, what persuasive games’ literature still lacks is a complete and stand-alone defining account of satire in games, which could be useful in analyzing both analog and digital games used for satirical purposes.
Our intention with this paper is to frame satire within the field of game studies through notions and perspectives borrowed from other media studies and narratology. In that pursuit, we initially give an operational definition of satire focusing on concepts such as entertainment, critique, and rhetoric. Subsequently, we explore how this definition relates to, and interacts with, key concepts in game studies, such as procedural rhetoric, and the implied designer.

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FDG '20: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
September 2020
804 pages
ISBN:9781450388078
DOI:10.1145/3402942
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 17 September 2020

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  1. Implied designer
  2. Persuasive games
  3. Procedural rhetoric
  4. Satire

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