Emotions and online videogames: analysis of the border between the real and the virtual in Latin America

Abstract

Since the late 1990s the videogame industry implemented on line gameplay to their repertoire, expanding gaming possibilities beyond geographical and cultural boundaries. Latin America has also welcomed this new configuration of multiplayer gaming, although this cosmopolitan condition sometimes show certain intolerance and stigmatization from developed country players towards latin americans, condemning them to silence through complex on line violence exerted against them from economically developed countries. The symbolic considerations that can be extracted from on line encounters and on line confrontations let us recognize emotions and sensibilities that are placed in the limits of what is real and what is virtual, showing us a latin american scenario where the search for recognition goes up to the construction of ideals that go beyond ludicity, to mix itself into the constant process of juvenile socialization.