Grounded in framing and place branding theories, this study proposes a novel approach to analyse how digital newspapers reported on the protest for tourism degrowth held in Barcelona in July 2024. Using qualitative framing analysis, it examines textual and visual frames of 45 news stories and their accompanying images across 28 digital newspapers. Results show newspapers framed the protest as a conflict. While local, regional and national newspapers focused on the demonstration, several international media oversimplified and dramatized the event, conferring a violent dimension to protesters, whose demands were overshadowed by their visibility tactics to attract media attention. The findings suggest a narrative potentially detrimental to Barcelona’s branding strategy, reflecting tensions between residents and other branding stakeholders. This article provides a multidisciplinary exploration of the coverage of the most significant protest for tourism degrowth in Barcelona to date and offers recommendations for improving place branding strategies in tourist cities.
This article explores the consumption of Korean dramas (K-dramas) among Spanish audiences through a qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews. Framed within the context of Hallyu (i.e. the Korean Wave) as a transnational cultural phenomenon, the study examines both the enjoyment factors and the sociocultural impact of K-dramas on non-Korean viewers. The findings reveal that K-dramas are valued not only for their romantic narratives and stylistic distinctiveness but also for their perceived moral clarity, aesthetic appeal and affective intensity. However, the study also uncovers ambivalent effects: from the internalization of Korean beauty standards and gender ideals to the projection of exoticized cultural fantasies. While some viewers critically engage with these narratives, others conflate fiction with cultural reality, risking symbolic fetishization. This study contributes to understanding the symbolic negotiation between media consumption, cultural desire and reflexivity in the age of soft power.
Review of: Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat , Hito Steyerl (2025) London and New York: Verso, 192 pp., ISBN 978-1-80429-802-2, h/bk, USD 24.95 ISBN 978-1-80429-805-3, e-book, USD 9.99
Within a platform governance paradigm, the content creator’s role seems to be placed in a position of vulnerability and resignation. This article examines the relationship between content creators and digital platforms, focusing on the views and practices of the former. To this end, in-depth interviews were conducted with eighteen Spanish content creators active on Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, YouTube and X. The results show that the participants perceive platforms as omnipresent, indecipherable and unreachable. However, the analysis also shows that participants respond to platforms with individual to collective strategies, ranging from responses that deal with the impact of the platforms’ rules to strategies that challenge the platforms’ governance. Moreover, these strategies are shaped by the negotiation between their values and the platforms’ default logic, showing different degrees of politicization. This work provides a better understanding of creator culture and offers insights into efforts to construct bottom-up governance where content creators could act as stakeholders within the digital platform ecosystem.
Review of: Glasgow: A History (Vol. I of VI) , The Tenementals (2024), LP, UK: Last Night from Glasgow
Concerns about contemporary (digital) media literacy are increasingly prominent. Where digital solutions are often proposed, inequalities of access to technology and related infrastructure create barriers to delivering media literacy training. The objective of this pilot study in Brazil was to explore the potential for non-digital solutions, with a focus on analogue games as an approach to combating fake news and mis-/disinformation. In this project, educators and schoolteachers attended six workshops delivered by game studies researchers, in which participants learned how to use games to extend the media literacy of themselves and others. Discussions about making games encouraged participants to explore their media literacy expertise and to refine it by reflecting on media literacy as a systematic and mechanical challenge. We conclude that, distinct from approaches that use games and gameplay as vehicles for learning, this perspective focuses on thinking with and through games rather than simply learning from them.
This study investigates the social impact of search engine optimization (SEO), AI and news monitoring, conceptualizing these technologies as a ‘triad’ that exerts significant influence on agenda-setting, ethical standards and the neutrality of algorithmic platforms. This technological convergence challenges the normative foundations of journalism, introducing constraints on editorial autonomy, informational diversity and the configuration of public discourse. To explore this phenomenon, a mixed-method research design was employed, integrating structured and semi-structured interviews with professionals from leading Brazilian and Spanish newsrooms. Data were analysed using ATLAS.ti for qualitative and a Likert scale for quantitative, enabling a comprehensive mapping of perceptions regarding digital visibility, editorial practices and ethical principles. Findings reveal that online visibility has become a decisive factor in news production, generating a feedback loop between audience metrics and agenda-setting. To mitigate risks such as informational homogenization and algorithmically induced filter bubbles, the study underscores the necessity of frameworks and transparency mechanisms that reconcile technological innovation with social responsibility, thereby safeguarding plurality and integrity within the digital information ecosystem.
The prestige of languages is one of the factors that influence their acquisition, use and status. Drawing on analytical frameworks from communication studies, the language branding model proposes analysing the ‘brand’ of minority and minoritized languages, using branding tools both to assess their current condition and to design action-oriented interventions. Following the model’s application to Basque, this study advances its adaptation to the specific features of Catalan, examining the model’s five dimensions: Awareness, Associations, Attitudes, Attachment and Activity. This research employs focus groups with participants born in Catalonia and elsewhere, sampled by place of birth, age cohort, initial language and geographical area. The analysis explores perceptions, attributes and the social value of Catalan language. The findings validate the model and yield key insights into public perceptions of Catalan, examined here for the first time as a brand.
This article examines the intersection of gendered technologies and science fiction cinema, tracing the cultural genealogy of the machine-woman archetype from early cinematic and literary narratives to contemporary digital voice assistants (DVAs). By analysing four seminal films – Metropolis (1927), The Perfect Woman (1949), Her (2013) and Ex Machina (2014) – this study identifies recurring figurations of the machine-woman as an assistant, a projection of male anxieties and a space for sexual domination. These cinematic figurations provide a critical framework for understanding the feminization of AI technologies, such as Siri and Alexa, which continue to privilege scripts of service and affective availability and have historically responded passively to verbal abuse. Through a discourse analysis informed by feminist theory, and combining genealogical and intertextual perspectives, this research highlights how DVAs emerge within a longer cultural history of gendered technological imaginaries, reflecting broader patriarchal and capitalist structures. The study further critiques the cultural and technological processes that naturalize the feminization of AI, situating these dynamics within a historical continuum of gendered labour and representation. Ultimately, this research advocates for an interdisciplinary approach that bridges technological innovation with cultural critique. It calls for the reimagining of AI systems as sites of contestation and potential transformation, challenging the enduring stereotypes encoded in their design and fostering more equitable technological futures. This study contributes to the growing discourse on gender, technology and representation by offering a genealogically grounded account of the persistent cultural imaginaries shaping AI development.
This article discusses the potential for the mythological study of (video)games or mytholudic analysis, to both benefit from and enhance ecocriticism. In ecocritique, the question of ecopolitical relationality is at the forefront of critical analysis. In the study of myth, likewise, sociocultural realities can be critically analysed through their salient naturality yet implicit political signification. Considering and reformulating the idea of myth through the concerns of ecocriticism can therefore facilitate ecocritical analysis surrounding invocations of myth. This article sets out to expand understandings of myths and mytholudics to involve ecocritical analysis. Finally, the article develops this approach through a case study of Alba: A Wildlife Adventure (2020), subsuming existent ecocritical analyses into mytholudic ecocriticism.
While myths tend to be understood as a genre of narrative, I argue that it is more useful to understand myths as models for knowing the world and things in it. In doing so, we can also use myth as a way to understand gameworlds. Games both make use of existing 'real-world' myths as well as 'emulating' the process in the creation of fictional worlds that we can play within. Understanding games and myths as models allows us to put them together to better analyse how players inhabit and behave within games, and how they interpret them, both with reference to the gameworld itself as a self-contained 'universe' as well as with reference to the real-world influences that the developers are undeniably influenced by.
This article offers a historical perspective on the representation of ancient Rome within the video game medium, focusing on the transformation of the Roman past into myth, and on the resulting creation of new ludic imaginaries of antiquity. The selected case study concerns the portrayal of Marcus Junius Brutus in some of the most commercially and culturally influential video games of the past two decades: Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (2010), Assassin's Creed: Origins (2017) and Shadow of Rome (2005). By analysing the narrative and visual characterization of Brutus, the aim is to provide insights into how historical figures, through continuous processes of rewriting, are reshaped according to contemporary sensibilities while still retaining roots traceable to ancient sources. These roots-despite historical accuracy and reimagining-may prove productive for the understanding and interpretation of the past.
In this article, we analyse the Boku no Natsuyasumi series (Millennium Kitchen 2000-09), where players control a boy in rural Japan in the 1970s, and other related games starring children in mundane settings. We use myth analysis, analysis of video game form, and the mechanics, dynamics, experiences (MDE) model to identify and study their recurrent motifs and imaginaries and how these are turned into gameplay. We argue that these games are connected to the Japanese idea of furusato ('old village'), a form of political and social nostalgia described as a 'mythopoeia' of modern Japan. We identify four main mythemes: (1) a child protagonist, (2) rurality, (3) community and (4) mechanics about daily activities. Our findings show how this subset of games reflects (international) cultural obsessions about modernity, childhood and nostalgia, while at the same time using ludonarrative strategies to embrace adulthood.
This article proposes to incorporate Ren & eacute; Girard's mimetic theory into the study of ludomythology using the game Shadow of the Colossus (Team ICO 2005) as a case study, comparing the existing analyses of the game with the results of this new approach. Textual analyses argue that the game portrays a tragic world and that the actions of the player character are morally negative. Our approach suggests that this perspective corresponds to the foundational myth created by the persecutors of scapegoats, an accusatory narrative that legitimizes the sacrifice of victims. Girardian hermeneutics, supported by methods of video game narratology, reveals this rhetorical mechanism while also suggesting that, within the game's world, the victims are innocent and its protagonist is a hero seeking to abolish the legitimizing foundations of violence which are inherent in the sacrificial society to which he belongs.
This article explores how Dark Souls's complex narrative and its approach to in-game myths enable the analysis of myth as sacred stories as well as ideological discourse that reproduces dominant ways of being. The argument uses a sociology of knowledge approach to ideology to illuminate the specific ways in which myth is showcased in the first Dark Souls game. Specifically, the article shows how, on an average playthrough, myth and prophecy are first perceived as a sacred story that seeks to reunite myth and reality following traditional understandings of myth and rite in Mircea Eliade and Claude L & eacute;vi-Strauss. Then, through highlighting an encounter with a hidden in-game character, the relation between sacred myth and reality is shown to be revealed to always have been underlain by ideology. This journey casts light on the way myth functions as ideology in reproducing an arbitrary social order that is naturalized and taken for granted, and how, through playing the game, players' epistemological relation to truth and lie, myth and reality, may be challenged. Finally, the article further reinforces the notion that Dark Souls affords the player the quality of being a bricoleur in the way gameplay and narrative are implemented, empowering the player as an active force in making sense of the digital in-game world and, potentially, the real social world around them.
Video games have demonstrated a profound connection with mythic structures. This connection can be examined through player interactions in online forums, where mythic elements may emerge and be reinterpreted in user commentary. This study explores whether fans perceive and discuss, on Steam forums, the classical and contemporary mythic structures embedded in the video games they engage with and whether they are linked with their own day-to-day experiences. Through a qualitative analysis of forum posts, this article seeks to identify common themes and trends in how players interpret and engage with mythical elements in games like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Death Stranding, Gone Home and Detroit: Become Human. The findings reveal that players often draw from a diverse range of mythologies to make sense of video-game narratives, while also generating their unique mythic interpretations.
The present article examines the interactive representation of serial killers, victims and law enforcement in video games, focusing on three case studies: Until Dawn, Heavy Rain and Ravenous Devils. Through a textual analysis, we explore how these games reinterpret traditional narrative archetypes through their ludic language. Until Dawn showcases the perspective of the victim in an interactive slasher, Heavy Rain delves into the tormented detective of the neo-noir and Ravenous Devils transforms the killer into a capitalist entrepreneur. The study highlights the ability of the video game medium to explore moral and systemic complexities, remediating film and literary conventions while developing its own aesthetics and mechanics. The results underscore interactivity as a key element to understand the cultural fascination with serial killers and fictional representations of them.
Review of: Extrema derecha 2.0: Qué es y cómo combatirla (‘Far-Right 2.0: What it is and how to fight it’), Steven Forti (2021) Madrid: XXI siglo ventiuno editores, 271 pp., ISBN 978-8-43232-030-9, p/bk, €18.9
This article takes an approach to theorizing the role of Instagram and its users in producing and circulating wellness-related content. We analyse 1500 Instagram posts containing the hashtag #Wellness to identify and describe how Instagram users communicate with their audience through associated performances. The qualitative thematic analysis conducted in our study disclosed multiple dimensions of wellness, encompassing themes related to health concerns, bodily awareness, material possessions, emotional expression and interpersonal relationships. Results confirm wellness as a multi-layer concept and the need to understand and study it in an integrated way. The main contribution of this study indicates that wellness is attainable for all individuals. However, this attainment is often intertwined with commercial motivations and intentions. Post analysis revealed advertisement or promotion of a business, a brand, a product or a service identifying that #Wellness could be acquired, positioning it as a commodity and contradicting the basic principles of its definition. Findings place Instagram as a communication tool from which users take advantage of a marketplace environment logic.
