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.
- 334 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
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47
47
1
Poetics
of
Form
and
Politics
of
Identity;
Or,
Games
as
Cultural
Palimpsests
A
mess
is
not
a
pile,
which
is
neatly
organized
even
if
situated
in
an
inconvenient
place
underfoot.
A mess
is
not
an
elegant
thing
of
a
higher
order.
It
is
not
an
intellectual
project
to
be
evaluated
and
risk-managed
by
waistcoat-clad
underwriters.
A mess
is
a
strew
of
inconvenient
and
sometimes
repellent
things.
It
is
less
an
imbroglio
of
the
sort
one
finds
in
a
painting
of
Pollock
or
Picasso,
and
more
the
mess
one
finds
in
a
sculpture
of
Kienholz.
A mess
is
an
accident.
A mess
is
a
thing
that
you
find
where
you
don’t
want
it.
A mess
is
the
cascade
of
broken
glass
on
the
floor
when
you
miss
the
alarm
clock
and
catch
the
water
glass.
A mess
is
the
heap
of
hot,
unseen
dog
shit
on
the
stoop,
and
then
on
the
stoop
and
the
bootsole.
A mess
is
inelegant,
a
clut-
ter,
a
shamble,
a
terror.
We
recoil
at
it,
yet
there
it
is,
and
we
must
deal
with it.
Videogames
are
a
mess.
A mess
we
don’t
need
to
keep
trying
to
clean
up,
if
it
were
even
possible
to
do so.
1
Ian
Bogost,
‘Video
Games
are
a
Mess’
Table of contents
- 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?
- 1 Poetics of Form and Politics of Identity; Or, Games as Cultural Palimpsests
- 2 Aesthetics of Ambivalence and Whiteness in Crisis
- 3 The Landscapes of Games as Ideology
- 4 The World is a Ghetto: Imaging the Global Metropolis in Playable Representation
- Bibliography
- Index
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