Jogos casuais: comunicação, entretenimento e desenvolvimento sustentável em EcoCity

Abstract

The complexity of the communicational phenomenon challenges scholars of our times, mainly concerning social environments. Mediated interactions, for instance, have gained major proportions at the turn of the XXI century with the creation of the Communication and Information Technology (CIT). The electronic or computational technological supports have guided much of the entertainment and communications. This way this research analyses today s new communication practices of current times and shows how electronic games have been combining with mediation procedures related to these practices. The present work involves computer games, more specifically the ones called casual games. The study exams the kinds of social interaction in online casual games, and the corpus for analysis is the EcoCity, an open-ended simulation game which runs at social network websites. The approach of building sustainable cities in the game brings environmental issues into play. The hypothesis is that socialization around these factors may somehow add value to the uses and appropriation of individuals towards casual games during communicational and interaction processes.