DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES AND ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR

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The main goal of this paper is to point out that the dimensions of national cultures have a huge impact on different aspects of organisational behaviour. The main support in the work is Hofstede’s five-dimensional cultural model. The authors pay special attention to the dimensions of power distance and uncertainty avoidance. When both of indexes are high at the level of national culture, organizational climate will have some special features such as high hierarchical pyramids, centralised decision making, and autocratic behaviour of managers, negative attitudes towards work, stress and lack of entrepreneurial behaviour. Also, special interest in this topic results from the fact that both of these dimensions in Serbia are very high. 

LUDIC DISPLACEMENT OF A BIBLICAL MYTH

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The Binding of Isaac, a 2011 video game by Edmund McMillan, is a postmodern take on the biblical episode of the same name which can be characterized as a displacement, in terms of Lubomír Doležel’s Heterocosmica. It presents a radical intervention on the original narrative, one that creates a polemical anti-world transmitted through the perspective of Isaac, a boy suffering abuse from his televangelism obsessed mother. The main fabric of the game is his grotesque, gamified fantasy about encountering the delusional parent, which is filled with anxiety about his own sinfulness, with a counterweight that can be found in entities imported from popular culture, especially videogames. The game’s roguelike genre enables a procedural expression of the experience of abuse through an iterative storytelling technique, with the interplay of difference and repetition forming a cyclical narrative about the (im)possibilities of contemporary ludism to amend trauma.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE – SHAKESPEARE AND VIDEO GAMES

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The paper analyses video games in the context of new media and considers their artistic potential from the perspective of Game Studies. Using To Be or Not to Be, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as an example, the paper presents a theoretical examination of the game’s structural, textual and narrative features and ludic elements, so as to elucidate the principles of adaptation and transformation of a literary text into a new digital form, as well as the advantages and the disadvantages of such processes. Trust in the narrative, along with adequate game mechanics and the player’s perception have proven to be crucial for accomplishing intention of the game. At the same time, the analysis serves as a basis for interpretive framework that would lead to affirming the aesthetic potential of video games and thus give rise to uncovering the artistic potential of other algorithmic structures.

LUDOLOGY AND NARRATOLOGY – LEGEND ABOUT THE BATTLE

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The paper provides an overview and an analysis of the narratological and ludological approach to the study of video games and a review of the establishment of the fledgling field of game studies. The starting points of both theoretical positions, derived from the same literary theoretical corpus, are presented. The state of this discipline and the academic tensions in this field also indicate the ways in which academic community functions, as well as the mechanisms of their division or complication in the organizational and methodological plan. The ludological approach, which reduces the study of video games to the description and classification of rules and game mechanics, is regarded as reductionist, but also useful and applicable for understanding the specifics of video games. It is concluded that ludology, together with narratology and other academic disciplines in the field of humanities, forms a complete corpus of video game studies.

MEDIA CONVERGENCE OF VIDEO GAMES AND FILMS

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The starting point for defining the relation between film and video games is the well-known thesis that each new medium assumes some formal and contentual characteristics of its predecessors, although the previous medium reconfigures its own and absorbs the properties of the new medium as well. The aim is to present a broader theoretical framework, which would serve as a basis for further exploration of this relation. A multidisciplinary approach will be used based on the concepts of media studies, game studies, film studies and cultural studies. Video games are often based on cinema’s thematic, narrative and genre models, while the recursive narrative logic of games is present in films. The use of film language is noticeable in video games, while in movies, it is modified by the aesthetic properties of games. Hollywood industry and the videogames industry are synergistic and offer users many ways of consuming products in different media.

GAMES IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE

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This is a part of the introductory essay of the now already canonical study on gaming culture, written by Nick Dyer-Witheford & Greigde Peuter – Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Regardless of the year of publishing, it still represents an extremely useful review that is not without serious critical insights. Placing the culture of video games in the epistemological passe-partout determined by the Empire theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the authors had laid one of the key foundations for critical game studies, based on a deep understanding of the logic of virtual games, as well as their teleology and reception. The authors’ cultural-political analysis of the media illustrates how central video games have become the very structure of our contemporary global order: both as a means of governing and as a (virtual) space of struggle and resistance.

EDITOR’S NOTE

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