Exploring the construction of narratives in educational GAMES: a case study of the games collection Personatges en joc

• Grant number: 12/17227-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: January 01, 2013
• End date: December 31, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Maria Lucia Santaella Braga
• Grantee: Patrícia Margarida Farias Coelho
• Supervisor: Ruth Sofia Contreras Espinosa
• Host Institution: Pró-Reitoria de Pós-Graduação (PRPG). Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Universitat de Vic (UVIC), Spain

Abstract

At this point in time, games can't no longer be considered only as entertainment since they have taken other functions (roles) in our society, being used in different social domains. Among them, we highlight the games focused on education (serious games) and games with advertising purposes. (advergames/persuasive games). Nevertheless, despite the efforts of many researchers, there are still gaps in research concerning the development of this object of study. For this reason, we propose to shed light on the discursive construction of the narratives found in these types of games. Due to methodological delimitation, this investigation is restricted to the analysis of the structure of educational games narratives. Therefore, for the corpus, we selected a collection of Spanish games entitled "Personatges en joc", created in partnership by the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya and Universitat de Vic, with the support of the Catalonia government. This choice is based on the construction of this corpus, which so far, consists of three main games, in addition to a number of others, which in turn, trigger narratives of different school subjects. In this way, it fulfills a multidisciplinary educational system, in a sense that it is not only limited to the study of a single subject, rather in several and distinct from each other. So, from a semiotic/discursive perspective (Greimas; Courtés, 2008), and a dialogic one (Bakhtin, 2000), this study has as a goal, the search for a narrative insight in the territory of educational games, by means of a case study of "Personatges en joc", which contributes to the promotion of games research in Brazilian universities, as well as their application in teaching and learning environments. (AU)