Oblivious to the Story: the Case of the Shooter Game RIO:

Abstract

The article proposes a reading of the modes in which a Brazilian videogame pre-released in 2020, titled RIO — Raised in Oblivion, portrays the favelas as spaces of violence and appropriation of older —yet present— imaginaries about those environments. Retrieving Elite Squad (Tropa de Elite, directed by Jose Padilha in 2007) as a turning point in how shooting in Rio de Janeiro’s slums got fictionalized in the big screen — for its use of characters, documental narrative and transmedia techniques, the paper emphasizes postmodern qualities about RIO’s playability and storytelling, drawing from Lipovetsky (1989) and Lyotard (1989). New media theorists such as Bolter and Grusin (2000) and Turkle (1997) help us to recognize the singularities of the gaming experiences when it comes to comparing it to other media, and Soraya Murray (2018) bases our overall approach into the cultural fabric of a shooter game, inasmuch as we bring to the forefront the manner in which RIO borrows imaginations and dream-like scenarios of violence to serve a very impactful proposal of the favelas: they are spectacularized environs where otherness finds little to no human story substrate. In doing so, the present text intends to observe videogames produced in countries as inequal as Brazil as highly relevant artefacts to understanding how a certain perpetuation of violence representations of the favelas takes shape in society with new technology.