Download or read book Guns Grenades and Grunts written by Gerald A. Voorhees and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-11-02 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known for their visibility and tendency to generate controversy, first-person shooter (FPS) games are cultural icons and powder-kegs in American society. Contributors will examine a range of FPS games such as the Doom, Half-Life, System Shock, Deus Ex, Halo, Medal of Honor and Call of Duty franchises. By applying and enriching a broad range of perspectives, this volume will address the cultural relevance and place of the genre in game studies, game theory and the cultures of game players. Guns, Grenades, and Grunts gathers scholars from all disciplines to bring the weight of contemporary social theory and media criticism to bear on the public controversy and intellectual investigation of first-person shooter games. As a genre, FPS games have helped shepherd the game industry from the early days of shareware distribution and underground gaming clans to contemporary multimillion dollar production budgets, Hollywood-style launches, downloadable content and worldwide professional gaming leagues. The FPS has been and will continue to be a staple of the game market.
Download or read book Guns Grenades and Grunts written by Gerald A. Voorhees and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-11-02 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known for their visibility and tendency to generate controversy, first-person shooter (FPS) games are cultural icons and powder-kegs in American society. Contributors will examine a range of FPS games such as the Doom, Half-Life, System Shock, Deus Ex, Halo, Medal of Honor and Call of Duty franchises. By applying and enriching a broad range of perspectives, this volume will address the cultural relevance and place of the genre in game studies, game theory and the cultures of game players. Guns, Grenades, and Grunts gathers scholars from all disciplines to bring the weight of contemporary social theory and media criticism to bear on the public controversy and intellectual investigation of first-person shooter games. As a genre, FPS games have helped shepherd the game industry from the early days of shareware distribution and underground gaming clans to contemporary multimillion dollar production budgets, Hollywood-style launches, downloadable content and worldwide professional gaming leagues. The FPS has been and will continue to be a staple of the game market.
Download or read book Guns Grenades and Grunts written by Gerald A. Voorhees and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known for their visibility and tendency to generate controversy, first-person shooter (FPS) games are cultural icons and powder-kegs in American society. Contributors will examine a range of FPS games such as the Doom, Half-Life, System Shock, Deus Ex, Halo, Medal of Honor and Call of Duty franchises. By applying and enriching a broad range of perspectives, this volume will address the cultural relevance and place of the genre in game studies, game theory and the cultures of game players. Guns, Grenades, and Grunts gathers scholars from all disciplines to bring the weight of contemporary socia.
Download or read book Remembering the Second World War written by Patrick Finney and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remembering the Second World War brings together an international and interdisciplinary cast of leading scholars to explore the remembrance of this conflict on a global scale. Conceptually, it is premised on the need to challenge nation-centric approaches in memory studies, drawing strength from recent transcultural, affective and multidirectional turns. Divided into four thematic parts, this book largely focuses on the post-Cold War period, which has seen a notable upsurge in commemorative activity relating to the Second World War and significant qualitative changes in its character. The first part explores the enduring utility and the limitations of the national frame in France, Germany and China. The second explores transnational transactions in remembrance, looking at memories of the British Empire at war, contested memories in East-Central Europe and the transnational campaign on behalf of Japan’s former ‘comfort women’. A third section considers local and sectional memories of the war and the fourth analyses innovative practices of memory, including re-enactment, video gaming and Holocaust tourism. Offering insightful contributions on intriguing topics and illuminating the current state of the art in this growing field, this book will be essential reading for all students and scholars of the history and memory of the Second World War.
Download or read book Sound Play written by William Cheng and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Video games open portals into fantastical worlds where imaginative play prevails. The virtual medium seemingly provides us with ample opportunities to behave and act out with relative safety and impunity. Or does it? Sound Play explores the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical stakes of our engagements with gaming's audio phenomena-from sonic violence to synthesized operas, from democratic music-making to vocal sexual harassment. Author William Cheng shows how the simulated environments of games empower designers, composers, players, and scholars to test and tinker with music, noise, speech, and silence in ways that might not be prudent or possible in the real world. In negotiating utopian and alarmist stereotypes of video games, Sound Play synthesizes insights from across musicology, sociology, anthropology, communications, literary theory, and philosophy. With case studies that span Final Fantasy VI, Silent Hill, Fallout 3, The Lord of the Rings Online, and Team Fortress 2, this book insists that what we do in there - in the safe, sound spaces of games - can ultimately teach us a great deal about who we are and what we value (musically, culturally, humanly) out here.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries written by Kate Oakley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-22 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries is collection of contemporary scholarship on the cultural industries and seeks to re-assert the importance of cultural production and consumption against the purely economic imperatives of the ‘creative industries’. Across 43 chapters drawn from a wide range of geographic and disciplinary perspectives, this comprehensive volume offers a critical and empirically-informed examination of the contemporary cultural industries. A range of cultural industries are explored, from videogames to art galleries, all the time focussing on the culture that is being produced and its wider symbolic and socio-cultural meaning. Individual chapters consider their industrial structure, the policy that governs them, their geography, the labour that produces them, and the meaning they offer to consumers and participants. The collection also explores the historical dimension of cultural industry debates providing context for new readers, as well as critical orientation for those more familiar with the subject. Questions of industry structure, labour, place, international development, consumption and regulation are all explored in terms of their historical trajectory and potential future direction. By assessing the current challenges facing the cultural industries this collection of contemporary scholarship provides students and researchers with an essential guide to key ideas, issues, concepts and debates in the field.
Download or read book Understanding Counterplay in Video Games written by Alan F. Meades and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-05 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers insight into one of the most problematic and universal issues within multiplayer videogames: antisocial and oppositional play forms such as cheating, player harassment, the use of exploits, illicit game modifications, and system hacking, known collectively as counterplay. Using ethnographic research, Alan Meades not only to gives voice to counterplayers, but reframes counterplay as a complex practice with contradictory motivations that is anything but reducible to simply being hostile to play, players, or commercial videogames. The book offers a grounded and pragmatic exploration of counterplay, framing it as an unavoidable by-product of interaction of mass audiences with compelling and culturally important texts.
Download or read book War Games written by Philip Hammond and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-12-12 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of today's most commercially successful videogames, from Call of Duty to Company of Heroes, are war-themed titles that play out in what are framed as authentic real-world settings inspired by recent news headlines or drawn from history. While such games are marketed as authentic representations of war, they often provide a selective form of realism that eschews problematic, yet salient aspects of war. In addition, changes in the way Western states wage and frame actual wars makes contemporary conflicts increasingly resemble videogames when perceived from the vantage point of Western audiences. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from games studies, media and cultural studies, politics and international relations, and related fields to examine the complex relationships between military-themed videogames and real-world conflict, and to consider how videogames might deal with history, memory, and conflict in alternative ways. It asks: What is the role of videogames in the formation and negotiation of cultural memory of past wars? How do game narratives and designs position the gaming subject in relation to history, war and militarism? And how far do critical, anti-war/peace games offer an alternative or challenge to mainstream commercial titles?
Download or read book Gamer Nation written by John Wills and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how games actively influence the ways people interpret and relate to American life. In 1975, design engineer Dave Nutting completed work on a new arcade machine. A version of Taito's Western Gun, a recent Japanese arcade machine, Nutting's Gun Fight depicted a classic showdown between gunfighters. Rich in Western folklore, the game seemed perfect for the American market; players easily adapted to the new technology, becoming pistol-wielding pixel cowboys. One of the first successful early arcade titles, Gun Fight helped introduce an entire nation to video-gaming and sold more than 8,000 units. In Gamer Nation, John Wills examines how video games co-opt national landscapes, livelihoods, and legends. Arguing that video games toy with Americans' mass cultural and historical understanding, Wills show how games reprogram the American experience as a simulated reality. Blockbuster games such as Civilization, Call of Duty, and Red Dead Redemption repackage the past, refashioning history into novel and immersive digital states of America. Controversial titles such as Custer's Revenge and 08.46 recode past tragedies. Meanwhile, online worlds such as Second Life cater to a desire to inhabit alternate versions of America, while Paperboy and The Sims transform the mundane tasks of everyday suburbia into fun and addictive challenges. Working with a range of popular and influential games, from Pong, Civilization, and The Oregon Trail to Grand Theft Auto, Silent Hill, and Fortnite, Wills critically explores these gamic depictions of America. Touching on organized crime, nuclear fallout, environmental degradation, and the War on Terror, Wills uncovers a world where players casually massacre Native Americans and Cold War soldiers alike, a world where neo-colonialism, naive patriotism, disassociated violence, and racial conflict abound, and a world where the boundaries of fantasy and reality are increasingly blurred. Ultimately, Gamer Nation reveals not only how video games are a key aspect of contemporary American culture, but also how games affect how people relate to America itself.
Download or read book Human Rights and Ethics Concepts Methodologies Tools and Applications written by Management Association, Information Resources and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 2160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In todays increasingly interconnected and global society, the protection of basic liberties is an important consideration in public policy and international relations. Profitable social interactions can begin only when a foundation of trust has been laid between two parties. Human Rights and Ethics: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications considers some of the most important issues in the ethics of human interaction, whether in business, politics, or science and technology. Covering issues such as cybercrime, bioethics, medical care, and corporate leadership, this four-volume reference work will serve as a crucial resource for leaders, innovators, educators, and other personnel living and working in the modern world.
Download or read book Queerness in Play written by Todd Harper and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-19 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Queerness in Play examines the many ways queerness of all kinds—from queer as ‘LGBT’ to other, less well-covered aspects of the queer spectrum—intersects with games and the social contexts of play. The current unprecedented visibility of queer creators and content comes at a high tide of resistance to the inclusion of those outside a long-imagined cisgender, heterosexual, white male norm. By critically engaging the ways games—as a culture, an industry, and a medium—help reproduce limiting binary formations of gender and sexuality, Queerness in Play contributes to the growing body of scholarship promoting more inclusive understandings of identity, sexuality, and games.
Download or read book End Game written by Lorenzo DiTommaso and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-09-02 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Video games are a global phenomenon, international in their scope and democratic in their appeal. This is the first volume dedicated to the subject of apocalyptic video games. Its two dozen papers engage the subject comprehensively, from game design to player experience, and from the perspectives of content, theme, sound, ludic textures, and social function. The volume offers scholars, students, and general readers a thorough overview of this unique expression of the apocalyptic imagination in popular culture, and novel insights into an important facet of contemporary digital society.
Download or read book Mixed Realism written by Timothy J. Welsh and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mixed Realism is about how we interact with media. Timothy J. Welsh shows how videogames, like novels, both promise and trouble experiences of “immersion.” His innovative methodology offers a new understanding of the expanding role of virtuality in contemporary life. Today’s wired culture is a mixed reality, conducted as exchanges between virtual and material contexts. We make balance transfers at an ATM, update Facebook timelines, and squeeze in sessions of Angry Birds on the subway. However, the “virtual” is still frequently figured as imaginary, as opposed to “real.” The vision of 1990s writers of a future that would pit virtual reality against actual reality has never materialized, yet it continues to haunt cultural criticism. Our ongoing anxiety about immersive media now surrounds videogames, especially “shooter games,” and manifests as a fear that gamers might not know the difference between the virtual world and the real world. As Welsh notes, this is the paradox of real virtuality. We understand that the media-generated virtualities that fill our lives are not what they represent. But what are they if they are not real? Do they have presence, significance, or influence exceeding their material presence and the user processes that invoke them? What relationships do they establish through and beyond our interactions with them? Mixed Realism brims with fresh analyses of literary works such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, along with sustained readings of controversial videogames such as Super Columbine Massacre and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Continually connecting the dots between surprising groupings of texts and thinkers, from David Foster Wallace to the cult-classic videogame Eternal Darkness and from Cormac McCarthy to Grand Theft Auto, it offers a fresh perspective on both digital games and contemporary literature.
Download or read book Playing War written by Matthew Thomas Payne and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the culture that made military shooter video games popular, and key in understanding the War on Terror No video game genre has been more popular or more lucrative in recent years than the “military shooter.” Franchises such as Call of Duty, Battlefield, and those bearing Tom Clancy’s name turn over billions of dollars annually by promising to immerse players in historic and near-future battles, converting the reality of contemporary conflicts into playable, experiences. In the aftermath of 9/11, these games transformed a national crisis into fantastic and profitable adventures, where seemingly powerless spectators became solutions to these virtual Wars on Terror. Playing War provides a cultural framework for understanding the popularity of military-themed video games and their significance in the ongoing War on Terror. Matthew Payne examines post-9/11 shooter-style game design as well as gaming strategies to expose how these practices perpetuate and challenge reigning political beliefs about America’s military prowess and combat policies. Far from offering simplistic escapist pleasures, these post-9/11 shooters draw on a range of nationalist mythologies, positioning the player as the virtual hero at every level. Through close readings of key games, analyses of marketing materials, and participant observations of the war gaming community, Playing War examines an industry mobilizing anxieties about terrorism and invasion to craft immersive titles that transform international strife into interactive fun.
Download or read book Reagan s Boys and the Children of the Greatest Generation written by Jonathan M. Bullinger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1980s and 1990s, aging Baby Boomer parents constructed a particular type of memory as they attempted to laud their own parents’ wartime accomplishments with the label "The Greatest Generation." This book is the first to tell the entire story of this particular type of U.S. World War II memory begun by U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1984, and promoted the same year by newscaster Tom Brokaw. The story continues in 1994, when it was given academic credence by historian Stephen E. Ambrose, a sensory realism and ideal American character by director Steven Spielberg and actor Tom Hanks, sloganized by Tom Brokaw in 1998, and later interpreted in light of 9/11 and new wars.
Download or read book War Games written by Jonna Eagle and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The word “wargames” might seem like a contradiction in terms. After all, the declaration “This is war” is meant to signal that things have turned deadly serious, that there is no more playing around. Yet the practices of war are intimately entangled with practices of gaming, from military videogames to live battle reenactments. How do these forms of play impact how both soldiers and civilians perceive acts of war? This Quick Take considers how various war games and simulations shape the ways we imagine war. Paradoxically, these games grant us a sense of mastery and control as we strategize and scrutinize the enemy, yet also allow us the thrilling sense of being immersed in the carnage and chaos of battle. But as simulations of war become more integrated into both popular culture and military practice, how do they shape our apprehension of the traumatic realities of warfare? Covering everything from chess to football, from Saving Private Ryan to American Sniper, and from Call of Duty to drone interfaces, War Games is an essential guide for anyone seeking to understand the militarization of American culture, offering a compact yet comprehensive look at how we play with images of war.
Download or read book Identity and Leadership in Virtual Communities Establishing Credibility and Influence written by Hickey, Dona J. and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2014-02-28 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The presence and ubiquity of the internet continues to transform the way in which we identify ourselves and others both online and offline. The development of virtual communities permits users to create an online identity to interact with and influence one another in ways that vary greatly from face-to-face interaction. Identity and Leadership in Virtual Communities: Establishing Credibility and Influence explores the notion of establishing an identity online, managing it like a brand, and using it with particular members of a community. Bringing together a range of voices exemplifying how participants in online communities influence one another, this book serves as an essential reference for academicians, researchers, students, and professionals, including bloggers, software designers, and entrepreneurs seeking to build and manage their engagement online.
