Lideranças políticas e videogames: um estudo do imaginário no jogo Civilization V

Abstract

In the context of Communication research that investigates the relationship between imaginary and videogames, this master’s dissertation aims to develop an analysis of the creation process of the game Sid Meier’s Civilization V. The study focuses on verifying how the construction of a political leadership imaginary, the narratives, and values of each civilization in the game. Thereunto, analysis on civilizations were made based on the critical observation of the behavior of the game algorithm. Four civilizations were selected: India, Denmark, Brazil, and Polynesia, and the imaginary of their leaders in the game: Gandhi, Harald Bluetooth, Pedro II, and Kamehameha I. The analysis method is the Cartographies of the Imaginarium developed by Leão. As a theorical foundation, the research is based on the complexity paradigma (Morin), and is inserted in the line of research in creative processes in the media (Leão and Salles). For the discussion about the imaginarium of culture on the selected civilizations, the theoretical propositions of Durand and Almeida were selected. As a result, it was possible to observe that the game Civilization V, in its creative process, chose to associate each civilization with stereotyped images, building an easily recognizable imaginary, and widely used in mass cultural production (Vikings, Gandhi, Carnival, among others). At the same time, we verified that the game adopts coherent criteria in its gameplay, based on the association with the basic ideological proposal linked to the leader’s imaginary