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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.
List of contents
Introduction: Is the 'Culture' in Game Culture the
'Culture' of Cultural Studies? 1
Video Games and the Matter of Culture 2
Games in the Academy 7
Which Games? 14
On the Importance of Cultural Studies for
Game Studies 17
Cultural Studies Meets Game Studies 22
Form and/as Identity Politics in Games 27
Being Critical 30
GamerGate, Games Criticism and Gender Problems 35
Looking Ahead 42
1 Poetics of Form and Politics of Identity; Or, Games
as Cultural Palimpsests 47
Introduction 48
A Digital Politics of Identity 55
Th e Poetics of Form in Liberation 61
Aveline as Queered, Creole, Intersectional 68
Playability and Phantasms 76
'History is Our Playground' 81
Conclusion: Embracing the Mess 86
2 Aesthetics of Ambivalence and Whiteness in Crisis 89
Introduction 89
Cultural Context: Whiteness in Crisis, Racial
Violence and Games 96
Th e Last of Us 99
Critical Whiteness Studies and Whiteness After 9/11 104vi
The Last of Us and Imperiled Whiteness 109
Spec Ops: Th e Line and the White Hero Interrupted 121
Tomb Raider , Whiteness and the Female Heroine
in Peril 131
Conclusion: A Trauma Narrative of Whiteness 137
3 The Landscapes of Games as Ideology 141
Introduction 141
Metal Gear Solid V: Th e Phantom Pain 146
Game Spaces and World- Building: Formalism 152
Studying Game Space in a Cultural Context 160
Th eorizing Game Space as Ideological Landscape 167
Th ere is No Such Place: Afghanistan in Th e Phantom
Pain 176
Conclusion: A Particular View of a Particular World 180
4 The World is a Ghetto: Imaging the Global
Metropolis in Playable Representation 183
Introduction: Speculative Futures, Genre and the
Global Metropolis 183
Max Payne 3 : Noir Figure, Exotic Ground 188
Remember Me and Urban Amnesia 197
Play in the Fourth World City 203
Bullet Time, Memory Remixing and Harvey's
Space- Time Compression 212
Two Playable Cities: Th e Favela and the Cyberpunk
Metropolis 216
Conclusion: Playing Possible Futures 225
Report
If one wants to understand (and teach) American culture today, video games are one essential site to look to, and Murray's book tells us why and how. Amerikastudien
