来る2024年5月9日(木曜日)、立命館大学ゲーム研究センターによる2024年度第3回定例研究会を実施致します。発表者は、Bodil Stelter氏です。登録・参加料不要となっております。お誘い合わせの上、奮ってご参加のほど、お待ちしております。
■発表タイトル Title
Gender-related Valuations in The Last of Us franchise
■発表者 Presenter
Bodil Stelter（University of Bremen）
■日時 Date and Time
5月9日(木曜日) 16:20～18:20
■場所 Venue
立命館大学衣笠キャンパス 学而館研究会室 3 アクセス
Ritsumeikan Kinugasa Campas, Gakujikan Reserch Room 3 Access
■概要 Summary
In June 2020, the highly anticipated sequel to “The Last of Us” game was released. Within hours of its release, the game’s Metascore dropped to 3.3, while previous reviews from journalistic media had accumulated to a score of 95. What had happened? – The common reading of this “review-bombing” event is that players, unhappy with the depiction of queer-characters in the game, assembled and flooded the meta-critic site with 0 ratings to collectively air their grievances, causing yet another debate about homophobia in video game culture. But is this incident representative of video game players’ stance towards the depiction of queer-characters in general? Is homophobia in gaming the hydra that cannot be defeated? Or can these debates give us a deeper, more nuanced insight into players’ negotiations of gender issues in video games? My research focuses on the large-scale discourse of The Last of Us franchise between 2013 and 2023. My focus is not so much on gender through gender studies or a feminist perspective, but rather on the analysis of values, informed by Nathalie Heinich’s sociological theory of valuations. Gender serves as a vignette through which particular forms of value negotiation can be made visible. My research question for this paper is: How do players, journalists, and other actors negotiate their values around and through the gender-related themes and events in the Last of Us franchise? For this day, I will focus primarily on The Last of Us 2, demonstrating values on three levels: Character gender negotiations, game message discussions, and meta discourse discussions. It is a presentation of one of the three empirical chapters of my dissertation.