Juegos terribles: dificultad y nuevos excesos lúdicos

Abstract

In recent years, some recurrent forms of excess have settled in the video game. An already common modality involves the exacerbation of the ludic dimension: games propose challenges that are increasingly difficult to overcome. The tension between this new production and the mainstream offer suggests the stabilization of operations related to overflow. In other realms of culture, operations of this type have been analysed in the light of the aesthetic category of the sublime, mainly since the baroque in artistic languages. An area of independent video game production is conveying ludic excesses through different textual strategies, as seen with the expansion of Souls style, I Wanna be the Guy or Kaizo Mario games. From a semiotic perspective, the main innovation of these games is related to the regularization of an opaque enunciation that breaks with the expectations of the genres and the mainstream design and makes the discursive mechanisms explicit. This opacity is particularly evident in the visibility of an omnipresent enunciator, whose work is constantly revealed in the overabundance of challenges, traps and puzzles that the games deploy. This communicative displacement is a great novelty in the medium's offer, where traditionally enunciative transparency seems to have dominated.