Download or read book Joystick Nation written by J. C. Herz and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 1997-06-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a scant fifteen years, video and computer games have grown into a $6-billion-a-year global industry, sucking up ever-increasing amounts of leisure time and disposable income. In arcades, living rooms, student dorms, and (admit it) offices from Ohio to Osaka, video games have become a fixture in people's lives, marking a tectonic shift in the entertainment landscape. Now, as Hollywood and Silicon Valley rush to sell us online interactive multimedia everything, J. C. Herz brings us the first popular history and critique of the video-game phenomenon. From the Cold War computer programmers who invented the first games (when they should have been working) to the studios where the networked 3-D theme parks of the future are created, Herz brings to life the secret history of Space Invaders, Pac Man, Super Mario, Myst, Doom, and other celebrated games. She explains why different kinds of games have taken hold (and what they say about the people who play them) and what we can expect from a generation that has logged millions of hours vanquishing digital demons. Written with 64-bit energy and filled with Herz's sharp-edged insights and asides, Joystick Nation is a fascinating pop culture odyssey that's must-reading for media junkies, pop historians, and anyone who pines for their old Atari.
Download or read book Joystick Nation written by Jessie Cameron Herz and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In only 15 years video games have become a multi-billion dollar industry, compelling increasing amounts of time and income. This is a history and critique of the video game phenomenon, from Cold War computer programmers who invented the first games, to the studios where 3-D theme parks are created.
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 The Video Game Theory Reader written by Mark J.P. Wolf and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early days of Pong and Pac Man, video games appeared to be little more than an idle pastime. Today, video games make up a multi-billion dollar industry that rivals television and film. The Video Game Theory Reader brings together exciting new work on the many ways video games are reshaping the face of entertainment and our relationship with technology. Drawing upon examples from widely popular games ranging from Space Invaders to Final Fantasy IX and Combat Flight Simulator 2, the contributors discuss the relationship between video games and other media; the shift from third- to first-person games; gamers and the gaming community; and the important sociological, cultural, industrial, and economic issues that surround gaming. The Video Game Theory Reader is the essential introduction to a fascinating and rapidly expanding new field of media studies.
Download or read book Spy written by and published by . This book was released on 1997-11 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smart. Funny. Fearless."It's pretty safe to say that Spy was the most influential magazine of the 1980s. It might have remade New York's cultural landscape; it definitely changed the whole tone of magazine journalism. It was cruel, brilliant, beautifully written and perfectly designed, and feared by all. There's no magazine I know of that's so continually referenced, held up as a benchmark, and whose demise is so lamented" --Dave Eggers. "It's a piece of garbage" --Donald Trump.
Download or read book Everything Bad is Good for You written by Steven Johnson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-05-02 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now and Farsighted Forget everything you’ve ever read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture. In this provocative, unfailingly intelligent, thoroughly researched, and surprisingly convincing big idea book, Steven Johnson draws from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and media theory to argue that the pop culture we soak in every day—from Lord of the Rings to Grand Theft Auto to The Simpsons—has been growing more sophisticated with each passing year, and, far from rotting our brains, is actually posing new cognitive challenges that are actually making our minds measurably sharper. After reading Everything Bad is Good for You, you will never regard the glow of the video game or television screen the same way again. With a new afterword by the author.
Download or read book Joystick Nation written by J. C. Herz and published by . This book was released on 2001-12 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In only 15 years, video games have become a multi-billion dollar industry, consuming increasing amounts of time and income. This is a history and critique of the game phenomenon, from the Cold War computer programmers who invented the first games, to the studios where 3-D theme parks are created.
Download or read book Militainment Inc written by Roger Stahl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-12-04 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Militainment, Inc. offers provocative, sometimes disturbing insight into the ways that war is presented and viewed as entertainment—or "militainment"—in contemporary American popular culture. War has been the subject of entertainment for centuries, but Roger Stahl argues that a new interactive mode of militarized entertainment is recruiting its audience as virtual-citizen soldiers. The author examines a wide range of historical and contemporary media examples to demonstrate the ways that war now invites audiences to enter the spectacle as an interactive participant through a variety of channels—from news coverage to online video games to reality television. Simply put, rather than presenting war as something to be watched, the new interactive militainment presents war as something to be played and experienced vicariously. Stahl examines the challenges that this new mode of militarized entertainment poses for democracy, and explores the controversies and resistant practices that it has inspired. This volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the relationship between war and media, and it sheds surprising light on the connections between virtual battlefields and the international conflicts unfolding in Iraq and Afghanistan today.
Download or read book The Cute and the Cool written by Gary Cross and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twentieth century was, by any reckoning, the age of the child in America. Today, we pay homage at the altar of childhood, heaping endless goods on the young, reveling in memories of a more innocent time, and finding solace in the softly backlit memories of our earliest years. We are, the proclamation goes, just big kids at heart. And, accordingly, we delight in prolonging and inflating the childhood experiences of our offspring. In images of the naughty but nice Buster Brown and the coquettish but sweet Shirley Temple, Americans at mid-century offered up a fantastic world of treats, toys, and stories, creating a new image of the child as "cute." Holidays such as Christmas and Halloween became blockbuster affairs, vehicles to fuel the bedazzled and wondrous innocence of the adorable child. All this, Gary Cross illustrates, reflected the preoccupations of a more gentle and affluent culture, but it also served to liberate adults from their rational and often tedious worlds of work and responsibility. But trouble soon entered paradise. The "cute" turned into "cool" as children, following their parental example, embraced the gift of fantasy and unrestrained desire to rebel against the saccharine excesses of wondrous innocence in deliberate pursuit of the anti-cute. Movies, comic books, and video games beckoned to children with the allures of an often violent, sexualized, and increasingly harsh worldview. Unwitting and resistant accomplices to this commercial transformation of childhood, adults sought-over and over again, in repeated and predictable cycles-to rein in these threats in a largely futile jeremiad to preserve the old order. Thus, the cute child-deliberately manufactured and cultivated--has ironically fostered a profoundly troubled ambivalence toward youth and child rearing today. Expertly weaving his way through the cultural artifacts, commercial currents, and parenting anxieties of the previous century, Gary Cross offers a vibrant and entirely fresh portrait of the forces that have defined American childhood.
Download or read book Digital Play written by Stephen Kline and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2003 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a marketplace that demands perpetual upgrades, the survival of interactive play ultimately depends on the adroit management of negotiations between game producers and youthful consumers of this new medium. The authors suggest a model of expansion that encompasses technological innovation, game design, and marketing practices. Their case study of video gaming exposes fundamental tensions between the opposing forces of continuity and change in the information economy: between the play culture of gaming and the spectator culture of television, the dynamism of interactive media and the increasingly homogeneous mass-mediated cultural marketplace, and emerging flexible post-Fordist management strategies and the surviving techniques of mass-mediated marketing. Digital Play suggests a future not of democratizing wired capitalism but instead of continuing tensions between "access to" and "enclosure in" technological innovation, between inertia and diversity in popular culture markets, and between commodification and free play in the cultural industries. -- publisher description.
Download or read book Before the Crash written by Mark J. P. Wolf and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-15 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors examine the early days of video game history before the industry crash of 1983 that ended the medium’s golden age. Following the first appearance of arcade video games in 1971 and home video game systems in 1972, the commercial video game market was exuberant with fast-paced innovation and profit. New games, gaming systems, and technologies flooded into the market until around 1983, when sales of home game systems dropped, thousands of arcades closed, and major video game makers suffered steep losses or left the market altogether. In Before the Crash: Early Video Game History, editor Mark J. P. Wolf assembles essays that examine the fleeting golden age of video games, an era sometimes overlooked for older games’ lack of availability or their perceived "primitiveness" when compared to contemporary video games. In twelve chapters, contributors consider much of what was going on during the pre-crash era: arcade games, home game consoles, home computer games, handheld games, and even early online games. The technologies of early video games are investigated, as well as the cultural context of the early period—from aesthetic, economic, industrial, and legal perspectives. Since the video game industry and culture got their start and found their form in this era, these years shaped much of what video games would come to be. This volume of early history, then, not only helps readers to understand the pre-crash era, but also reveals much about the present state of the industry. Before the Crash will give readers a thorough overview of the early days of video games along with a sense of the optimism, enthusiasm, and excitement of those times. Students and teachers of media studies will enjoy this compelling volume.
Download or read book Technoculture written by Debra Benita Shaw and published by Berg. This book was released on 2008-07-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a world where science and technology shape the global economy and everyday culture, where new biotechnologies are changing what we eat and how we can reproduce, and where email, mobiles and the internet have revolutionised the ways we communicate with each other and engage with the world outside us.Technoculture: The Key Concepts explores the power of scientific ideas, their impact on how we understand the natural world and how successive technological developments have influenced our attitudes to work, art, space, language and the human body. Throughout, the lively discussion of ideas is illustrated with provocative case studies - from biotech foods to life-support systems, from the Walkman and iPod to sex and cloning, from video games to military hardware. Designed to be both provocative and instructive, Technoculture: The Key Concepts outlines the place of science and technology in today's culture.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Play in Today s Society written by Rodney P. Carlisle and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2009-04-02 with total page 1033 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2009 "This ground-breaking resource is strongly recommended for all libraries and health and welfare institutional depots; essential for university collections, especially those catering to social studies programs." —Library Journal, STARRED Review Children and adults spend a great deal of time in activities we think of as "play," including games, sports, and hobbies. Without thinking about it very deeply, almost everyone would agree that such activities are fun, relaxing, and entertaining. However, play has many purposes that run much deeper than simple entertainment. For children, play has various functions such as competition, following rules, accepting defeat, choosing leaders, exercising leadership, practicing adult roles, and taking risks in order to reap rewards. For adults, many games and sports serve as harmless releases of feelings of aggression, competition, and intergroup hostility. The Encyclopedia of Play in Today′s Society explores the concept of play in history and modern society in the United States and internationally. Its scope encompasses leisure and recreational activities of children and adults throughout the ages, from dice games in the Roman Empire to video games today. With more than 450 entries, these two volumes do not include coverage of professional sports and sport teams but, instead, cover the hundreds of games played not to earn a living but as informal activity. All aspects of play—from learning to competition, mastery of nature, socialization, and cooperation—are included. Simply enough, this Encyclopedia explores play played for the fun of it! Key Features Available in both print and electronic formats Provides access to the fascinating literature that has explored questions of psychology, learning theory, game theory, and history in depth Considers the affects of play on child and adult development, particularly on health, creativity, and imagination Contains entries that describe both adult and childhood play and games in dozens of cultures around the world and throughout history Explores the sophisticated analyses of social thinkers such as Huizinga, Vygotsky, and Sutton-Smith, as well as the wide variety of games, toys, sports, and entertainments found around the world Presents cultures as diverse as the ancient Middle East, modern Russia, and China and in nations as far flung as India, Argentina, and France Key Themes Adult Games Board and Card Games Children′s Games History of Play Outdoor Games and Amateur Sports Play and Education Play Around the World Psychology of Play Sociology of Play Toys and Business Video and Online Games For a subject we mostly consider light-hearted, play as a research topic has generated an extensive and sophisticated literature, exploring a range of penetrating questions. This two-volume set serves as a general, nontechnical resource for academics, researchers, and students alike. It is an essential addition to any academic library.
Download or read book Hearts and Mines written by Tanner Mirrlees and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2016-01-15 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Katy Perry training alongside US Marines in a music video, to the global box-office mastery of the US military-supported Transformers franchise, to the explosion of war games such as Call of Duty, it’s clear that the US security state is a dominant force in media culture. But is the ubiquity of cultural products that glorify the security state a new phenomenon? Or have Uncle Sam and Hollywood been friends for a long time? Hearts and Mines examines the rise and reach of the US Empire’s culture industry – a nexus between the US’s security state and media firms and the source of cultural products that promote American strategic interests around the world. Building on and extending Herbert I. Schiller’s classic study of US Empire and communications, Tanner Mirrlees interrogates the symbiotic geopolitical and economic relationships between the US state and media firms that drive the production of imperial culture.
Download or read book The Dragon and the Dazzle written by Marco Pellitteri and published by Tunué. This book was released on 2010 with total page 734 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the worldwide circulation of the products of cultural industries, an important role is played by Japanese popular culture in European contexts. Marco Pellitteri shows that the contact between Japanese pop culture and European youth publics occurred during two phases. By use of metaphor, the author calls them the Dragon and the Dazzle. The first took place between 1975 and 1995, the second from 1996 to today. They can be distinguished by the modalities of circulation and consumption/re-elaboration of Japanese themes and products in the most receptive countries: Italy, France, Spain, Germany and, across the ocean, the United States. During these two phases, several themes have been perceived, in Europe, as rising from Japan's social and mediatic systems. Among them, this book examines the most apparent from a European point of view: the author names them machine, infant, and mutation, visible mostly through manga, anime, videogames, and toys. Together with France, Italy is the European country that in this respect has had the most central role. There, Japanese imagination has been acknowledged not only by young people, but also by politicians, television programmers, the general public, educators, comics and cartoons authors. The growing influence of Japanese pop culture, connected to the appreciation of its manga, anime, toys, and videogames, also urges political and mediologic questions linked to the identity/ies of Japan as they are understood--wrongly or rightly--in Europe and the West, and to the increasingly important role of Japan in international relations."--Back cover
Download or read book America s Digital Army written by Robertson Allen and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2017-07-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An ethnographic study based on scholar Robertson Allen's years of behind-the-scenes ethnographic fieldwork within the work environments of the video game developers, military strategists, enlisted soldiers, and defense contractors who produced the official U.S. Army video game, "America's Army.""--
Download or read book The Myth of the American Superhero written by John Shelton Lawrence and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the nation seems to yearn for redemption from the evils that threaten its tranquility, the authors maintain that Joseph Campbell's monomythic hero is alive and well, but significantly displaced, in American popular culture.
