Games

Since Destroyer, the first Spanish video game to be commercialized, appeared in 1980, the Spanish video game industry has gone through different phases, not all of them involving growth. There have been moments of great splendor and popularity, but also unremarkable periods of time. We are currently witnessing the peak of the industry's history in terms of the number of Spanish video games developed, and perhaps also in terms of quality, to the point that we are already beginning to talk about a second golden age for Spanish software.

This collection of games shows examples of the use of narrative in video games, highlighting the variety of possible stories, genres and formats that can be offered to the public. Unlike the traditional narrative where the receiver is limited to observing already established content, in the videoludic narrative the players live the story in the first person and are able to interact with it. This is due to the non-linear structure of the story, which in the video game is always branched, metamorphic and centered on the decisions of the person playing the game. Despite this difference in structure, video games often draw on narrative strategies popular in the tradition of the cultural industry: The transposition of literary, comic, and audiovisual products as a way of updating content for a new audience; the revival of utopia and dystopia as a narrative space to tell stories of the present; the appropriation of traditional narrative genres for the creation of modern myths. They show the potential of videogames to reinvent narrative, allowing us to explore and imagine possible worlds.

This collection engages in dialog with the conventions of the horror genre and opens up new possibilities by altering some of the rules of videoludic language. The video games presented look to the monstrous, the fantastic and the sinister as narrative strategies learned from audiovisual stories and the literary genre. By transferring these to the new medium, a new dimension is added: the playful mechanics of the videogame itself. Making use of the characteristic conventions of this medium and altering them as appropriate in order to obtain certain effects, these games generate a wide range of feelings in those who play them. Thus we see: - The monstrous as a narrative of the world as a hostile place. - The fantastic as an imaginary constitutive of reality. - The sinister as a specific manifestation of the invisible. All contribute to generating the pleasures inherent in this genre, increased by the interactive possibilities of the medium.

In this collection, video games are presented as a form of art and culture that draws from other forms of artistic expression, and it is possible to clearly identify the aesthetic influences of the great masters of the traditional arts. As in the case of Gris and the sculptural work of Alexander Calder, playing with video games means interacting with meaningful systems that help us to become part of the act of creation and aesthetic consumption. From the revival of traditional craft techniques to the recreation of new realities based on innovative aesthetic principles, in video games we find: • Aesthetic design, reviving artistic techniques of the past. • The design of space as a new form of landscape; architectural and environmental art. • The gaming experience as the driving force behind a new aesthetic product of the digital era. All show how in the gaming experience, the perception of pleasure, beauty and the sublime is accompanied by the perception of the player's own experience, thus creating a bridge between tradition and innovation.