Realismo grotesco e carnalidade : inspirações Bakhtinianas em estudos de games

Streszczenie po ang., bibliogr. Autor na pub. podpisany: Tomasz Z. Majkowski

The aim of this paper is to re-frame criticism of video-game portrayal of the human body and basic human interactions in light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnivalesque and grotesque realism. According to the Russian scholar, the latter is a dominant aesthetic convention for the former, facilitating representation of the essence of carnival (understood as a worldview, not a festival). My claim is that various grotesque deformations of bodies in mainstream, high-budget video games, such as over-muscled male protagonists, hypersexual women and hideous or inhuman enemies, as well as the strange obsession with producing photorealistic settings, fall firmly into this aesthetic. The same is true for the fragmented, incomplete body of the first-person-perspective protagonist. The imaginary is further strengthened by the common way AAA videogames handle human interaction, as they are prone to reduce any contact to various collisions of bodies, eliminating any other social convention-even simple conversation - outside the realm of gameplay or else seriously reducing it. The most important collision of this kind is, of course, combat of an often excessively violent nature. Fighting conjures important aspects of the carnivalesque: ritual humiliation and the dismantling of hierarchies - represented by clear stratification of antagonists, varying by strength and danger they pose to the protagonist - by reducing them to their carnality. This mode of interpretation opens up further perspectives with regard to inquiry into the social importance of violent video games as possible vehicles for the expression of opposition to static ethical and political orders.