Near-death experience in video games or how looking death in the eyes can be a sales concept: the case of Blasphemous from an anthropological, metaphysical, and promotional standpoint

San Nicolás Romera, César; Nicolás Ojeda, Miguel Ángel; Ros Velasco, Josefa

Publication:
Near-death experience in video games or how looking death in the eyes can be a sales concept: the case of Blasphemous from an anthropological, metaphysical, and promotional standpoint

dc.contributor.author	San Nicolás Romera, César
dc.contributor.author	Nicolás Ojeda, Miguel Ángel
dc.contributor.author	Ros Velasco, Josefa
dc.contributor.department	Comunicación
dc.date.accessioned	2025-09-24T06:21:35Z
dc.date.available	2025-09-24T06:21:35Z
dc.date.issued	2022-12-13
dc.description	© 2022, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This document is the Published version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Escritura e Imagen. To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/10.5209/esim.84833
dc.description.abstract	La muerte es habitual en los videojuegos y uno de los elementos clave para alcanzar el estatus de superventas. Desde una perspectiva antropológica, la experiencia cercana a la muerte en los videojuegos permite al jugador familiarizarse con este fenómeno inexplorado a través de la interacción, necesaria para comprenderlo e incluirlo naturalmente en la vida desde un punto de vista metafísico, dada la naturaleza lúdico-comunicativa de los videojuegos y su capacidad de crear cultura y horizontes de significado, no ya solo el videojuego como dispositivo, sino toda la narrativa promocional transmedia en la que los jugadores participan de primera mano. En este artículo analizamos los componentes antropológicos y metafísicos de la representación de la muerte en los videojuegos siguiendo la teoría del absolutismo de la realidad del filósofo alemán Hans Blumenberg, así como el caso de Blasphemous y su narrativa promocional para determinar cómo la muerte aparece como un concepto de venta en la publicidad por su lugar en la conciencia simbólica común de los jugadores.
dc.description.abstract	Death is common in video games and one of the key elements to achieve bestseller status. From an anthropological perspective, near-death experience in video games enables the player to encounter familiarity with this uncharted phenomenon through interaction–which is necessary to understand and include it naturally in life from a metaphysical point of view–given the recreationalcommunicative nature of video games and their capacity for creating culture and horizons of meaning not just the video game as a device, but also the full transmedia promotional narrative in which players participate first-hand. In this article, we analyze the anthropological and metaphysical components of the representation of death in video games following the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s theory of the absolutism of reality, as well as the case of Blasphemous and its promotional storytelling to determine how death appears as a sales concept in the publicity due to its place in the players’ common symbolic consciousness.
dc.format	application/pdf
dc.format.extent	21
dc.identifier.citation	Escritura e Imagen 18, 2022: 45-65
dc.identifier.doi	https://doi.org/10.5209/esim.84833
dc.identifier.eissn	Electrónico: 1988-2416
dc.identifier.issn	Papel: 1885-5687
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10201/159409
dc.language	eng
dc.publisher	Universidad Complutense de Madrid
dc.relation	This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 847635 and was supported by the research projects PID2020-113413RB-C31, PID2019-108988GB-I00, and HAR2016-78147-P, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO).
dc.relation.publisherversion	https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/ESIM/article/view/84833
dc.rights	Attribution 4.0 International	*
dc.rights.accessRights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/	*
dc.subject	Death
dc.subject	Hans Blumenberg
dc.subject	Transmedia
dc.subject	Video games
dc.subject	Muerte
dc.subject	Videojuegos
dc.subject	Blasphemous
dc.subject.ods	No relacionado con ningún objetivo de desarrollo sostenible
dc.title	Near-death experience in video games or how looking death in the eyes can be a sales concept: the case of Blasphemous from an anthropological, metaphysical, and promotional standpoint
dc.title.alternative	La experiencia cercana a la muerte en los videojuegos o cómo mirar a la muerte a los ojos puede ser un concepto para vender: el caso de Blasphemous desde un punto de vista antropológico, metafísico y promocional
dc.type	info:eu-repo/semantics/article
dspace.entity.type	Publication	es