On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space

Description

Today over half of all American households own a dedicated game console and gaming industry profits trump those of the film industry worldwide. In this book, Soraya Murray moves past the technical discussions of games and offers a fresh and incisive look at their cultural dimensions. She critically explores blockbusters likeThe Last of Us, Metal Gear Solid, Spec Ops: The Line, Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed to show how they are deeply entangled with American ideological positions and contemporary political, cultural and economic conflicts.As quintessential forms of visual material in the twenty-first century, mainstream games both mirror and spur larger societal fears, hopes and dreams, and even address complex struggles for recognition. This book examines both their elaborately constructed characters and densely layered worlds, whose social and environmental landscapes reflect ideas about gender, race, globalisation and urban life. In this emerging field of study, Murray provides novel theoretical approaches to discussing games and playable media as culture. Demonstrating that games are at the frontline of power relations, she reimagines how we see them - and more importantly how we understand them. Cover Author bio Endorsement Title page Copyright information Table of contents Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: Is the ‘Culture’ in Game Culture the ‘Culture’ of Cultural Studies? Video Games and the Matter of Culture Games in the Academy Which Games? On the Importance of Cultural Studies for Game Studies Cultural Studies Meets Game Studies Form and/as Identity Politics in Games Being Critical GamerGate, Games Criticism and Gender Problems Looking Ahead 1 Poetics of Form and Politics of Identity; Or, Games as Cultural Palimpsests Introduction A Digital Politics of Identity The Poetics of Form in Liberation Aveline as Queered, Creole, Intersectional Playability and Phantasms ‘History is Our Playground’67 Conclusion: Embracing the Mess 2 Aesthetics of Ambivalence and Whiteness in Crisis Introduction Cultural Context: Whiteness in Crisis, Racial Violence and Games The Last of Us Critical Whiteness Studies and Whiteness After 9/11 The Last of Us and Imperiled Whiteness Spec Ops: The Line and the White Hero Interrupted Tomb Raider, Whiteness and the Female Heroine in Peril Conclusion: A Trauma Narrative of Whiteness 3 The Landscapes of Games as Ideology Introduction Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Game Spaces and World-Building: Formalism Studying Game Space in a Cultural Context Theorizing Game Space as Ideological Landscape There is No Such Place: Afghanistan in The Phantom Pain Conclusion: A Particular View of a Particular World 4 The World is a Ghetto: Imaging the Global Metropolis in Playable Representation Introduction: Speculative Futures, Genre and the Global Metropolis Max Payne 3: Noir Figure, Exotic Ground Remember Me and Urban Amnesia Play in the Fourth World City Bullet Time, Memory Remixing and Harvey’s Space-Time Compression Two Playable Cities: The Favela and the Cyberpunk Metropolis Conclusion: Playing Possible Futures Bibliography Index