Download or read book The Playful Undead and Video Games written by Stephen J. Webley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-17 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the central role of the zombie in contemporary popular culture as they appear in video games. Moving beyond traditional explanations of their enduring appeal – that they embody an aesthetic that combines horror with a mindless target; that lower age ratings for zombie games widen the market; or that Artificial Intelligence routines for zombies are easier to develop – the book provides a multidisciplinary and comprehensive look at this cultural phenomenon. Drawing on detailed case studies from across the genre, contributors from a variety of backgrounds offer insights into how the study of zombies in the context of video games informs an analysis of their impact on contemporary popular culture. Issues such as gender, politics, intellectual property law, queer theory, narrative storytelling and worldbuilding, videogame techniques and technology, and man’s relation to monsters are closely examined in their relation to zombie video games. Breaking new ground in the study of video games and popular culture, this volume will be of interest to researchers in a broad range of areas including media, popular culture, video games, and media psychology.
Download or read book Immersion Narrative and Gender Crisis in Survival Horror Video Games written by Andrei Nae and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the narrativity of some of the most popular survival horror video games and the gender politics implicit in their storyworlds. In a thorough analysis of the genre that draws upon detailed comparisons with the mainstream action genre, Andrei Nae places his analysis firmly within a political and social context. In comparing survival horror games to the dominant game design norms of the action genre, the author differentiates between classical and postclassical survival horror games to show how the former reject the norms of the action genre and deliver a critique of the conservative gender politics of action games, while the latter are more heterogeneous in terms of their game design and, implicitly, gender politics. This book will appeal not only to scholars working in game studies, but also to scholars of horror, gender studies, popular culture, visual arts, genre studies and narratology.
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 502 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 Videogames and the Gothic written by Ewan Kirkland and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the many ways Gothic literature and media have informed videogame design. Through a series of detailed case studies, Videogames and the Gothic illustrates the extent to which particular tropes of Gothic culture –neo-medieval aesthetics, secret-filled labyrinthine spaces, the sense of a dark past impacting upon the present – have been appropriated by and transformed within digital games. Moving beyond the study of the generic influences of horror on digital gaming, Ewan Kirkland focuses in on the Gothic, a less visceral mode tending towards the unsettling, the uncertain and the uncanny. He explores the extent to which imagery, storylines and narrative preoccupations taken from Gothic fiction facilitate the affordances and limitations of the videogame medium. A core contention of this book is that videogames have developed as an inherently Gothic form of popular entertainment. Arguing for close proximity between Gothic culture and the videogame medium itself, this book will be a key contribution to both Gothic and digital game scholarship; as such, it will have resonance with scholars and students in both areas, as well as those interested in Gothic novels, media and popular culture, digital games and interactive fiction.
Download or read book Independent Videogames written by Paolo Ruffino and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-07 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Independent Videogames investigates the social and cultural implications of contemporary forms of independent video game development. Through a series of case studies and theoretical investigations, it evaluates the significance of such a multi-faceted phenomenon within video game and digital cultures. A diverse team of scholars highlight the specificities of independence within the industry and the culture of digital gaming through case studies and theoretical questions. The chapters focus on labor, gender, distribution models and technologies of production to map the current state of research on independent game development. The authors also identify how the boundaries of independence are becoming opaque in the contemporary game industry – often at the cost of the claims of autonomy, freedom and emancipation that underlie the indie scene. The book ultimately imagines new and better narratives for a less exploitative and more inclusive videogame industry. Systematically mapping the current directions of a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly difficult to define and limit, this book will be a crucial resource for scholars and students of game studies, media history, media industries and independent gaming.
Download or read book Comics and Videogames written by Andreas Rauscher and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-18 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers the first comprehensive study of the many interfaces shaping the relationship between comics and videogames. It combines in-depth conceptual reflection with a rich selection of paradigmatic case studies from contemporary media culture. The editors have gathered a distinguished group of international scholars working at the interstices of comics studies and game studies to explore two interrelated areas of inquiry: The first part of the book focuses on hybrid medialities and experimental aesthetics "between" comics and videogames; the second part zooms in on how comics and videogames function as transmedia expansions within an increasingly convergent and participatory media culture. The individual chapters address synergies and intersections between comics and videogames via a diverse set of case studies ranging from independent and experimental projects via popular franchises from the corporate worlds of DC and Marvel to the more playful forms of media mix prominent in Japan. Offering an innovative intervention into a number of salient issues in current media culture, Comics and Videogames will be of interest to scholars and students of comics studies, game studies, popular culture studies, transmedia studies, and visual culture studies.
Download or read book Manifestations of Queerness in Video Games written by Gaspard Pelurson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-29 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking the reader on a journey through queer manifestations in games, this book advocates for video games as a rich, political and cultural medium, which provides us with tools to navigate the future of gaming. Situated at the intersection of New Media, Game, Cultural and Queer Studies, the book navigates diverse interspecies relationships, queer villains from the past, Pokémon memes on border politics, flânerie in post-industrial cities and one-sided erotic fights. It provides new critical engagements with the works of Jose Esteban Muñoz, Bonnie Ruberg, Guy Debord and Jack Halberstam, examining queer representation, gaming subcultures and dissident play practices. Making the bold claim that video games might be the queerest medium today, this book provides organic, self-reflective and, ultimately, thought-provoking thinking in which both games and gamers are queered. This book will be of interest to scholars researching game studies, sex, gender and sexuality in new media, but also readers interested in literature, digital media, society, participatory culture and queer studies.
Download or read book Historia Ludens written by Alexander von Lünen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-30 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to further a debate about aspects of "playing" and "gaming" in connection with history. Reaching out to academics, professionals and students alike, it pursues a dedicated interdisciplinary approach. Rather than only focusing on how professionals could learn from academics in history, the book also ponders the question of what academics can learn from gaming and playing for their own practice, such as gamification for teaching, or using "play" as a paradigm for novel approaches into historical scholarship. "Playing" and "gaming" are thus understood as a broad cultural phenomenon that cross-pollinates the theory and practice of history and gaming alike.
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 281 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 Narrative Mechanics written by Beat Suter and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2021-05-31 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do stories in games have in common with political narratives? This book identifies narrative strategies as mechanisms for meaning and manipulation in games and real life. It shows that the narrative mechanics so clearly identifiable in games are increasingly used (and abused) in politics and social life. They have »many faces«, displays and interfaces. They occur as texts, recipes, stories, dramas in three acts, movies, videos, tweets, journeys of heroes, but also as rewarding stories in games and as narratives in society - such as a career from rags to riches, the concept of modernity or market economy. Below their surface, however, narrative mechanics are a particular type of motivational design - of game mechanics.
Download or read book Representing Conflicts in Games written by Björn Sjöblom and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an overview of how conflicts are represented and enacted in games, in a variety of genres and game systems. Games are a cultural form apt at representing real world conflicts, and this edited volume highlights the intrinsic connection between games and conflict through a set of theoretical and empirical studies. It interrogates the nature and use of conflicts as a fundamental aspect of game design, and how a wide variety of conflicts can be represented in digital and analogue games. The book asks what we can learn from conflicts in games, how our understanding of conflicts change when we turn them into playful objects, and what types of conflicts are still not represented in games. It queries the way games make us think about armed conflict, and how games can help us understand such conflicts in new ways. Offering a deeper understanding of how games can serve political, pedagogical, or persuasive purposes, this volume will interest scholars and students working in fields such as game studies, media studies, and war studies.
Download or read book Zombie Futures in Literature Media and Culture written by Simon Bacon and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-10-31 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative investigation into how zombie narratives over the past ten years have been specifically leading up to a unique intersection with the world as it exists in the 2020s, this book posits the undead as a vehicle to communicate humanity's pathway into, and out of, the ideological, health and environmental pandemics of our time. Exploring depictions of zombies across literature, poetry, comics, television, film and video games, Simon Bacon brings together this timely intervention into how zombies enable speculation about future modes of being in a changing world and represent the fluid notion of 'old' and 'new' normals. With each chapter moving beyond traditional readings of the undead, Zombie Futures situates the zombie as an evolving cultural imaginary at the centre of discourses around how human cognition and embodiment are effected by global realities such as consumerism, new technologies, climate change and planetary degeneration. Structured around contagious partisan ideologies, ecological sickness, mental health crisis and the very literal COVID-19 virus, this book establishes how the zombie figure might manifest post-human and post-normative futures. Works featured include graphic novels and comics like The West + Zombies, Crossed and Endzeit, the South Korean series and films Kingdom, Train to Busan and Peninsula, The Last of Us and the Resident Evil game franchises, Bollywood horror anthology Ghost Stories, Joss Whedon's Serenity, Cargo and literature such as The Girl with All the Gifts, the fiction of Stephen Graham Jones and Ryan Mecum's Zombie Haiku. In a time when popular culture and scholarship has been overrun with the undead, this original study offers a refreshing look at the zombie and what it can tell us about about our world going into and emerging from global catastrophe.
Download or read book Narratives Crossing Boundaries written by Joachim Friedmann and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2023-09-30 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the dominant narrative forms in the age of media convergence, films and games call for a transmedial perspective in narratology. Games allow a participatory reception of the story, bringing the transgression of the ontological boundary between the narrated world and the world of the recipient into focus. These diverse transgressions - medial and ontological - are the subject of this transdisciplinary compendium, which covers the subject in an interdisciplinary way from various perspectives: game studies and media studies, but also sociology and psychology, to take into account the great influence of storytelling on social discourses and human behavior.
Download or read book Player vs Monster written by Jaroslav Svelch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-02-07 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the gruesome game characters we love to beat—and what they tell us about ourselves. Since the early days of video games, monsters have played pivotal roles as dangers to be avoided, level bosses to be defeated, or targets to be destroyed for extra points. But why is the figure of the monster so important in gaming, and how have video games come to shape our culture’s conceptions of monstrosity? To answer these questions, Player vs. Monster explores the past half-century of monsters in games, from the dragons of early tabletop role-playing games and the pixelated aliens of Space Invaders to the malformed mutants of The Last of Us and the bizarre beasts of Bloodborne, and reveals the common threads among them. Covering examples from aliens to zombies, Jaroslav Švelch explores the art of monster design and traces its influences from mythology, visual arts, popular culture, and tabletop role-playing games. At the same time, he shows that video games follow the Cold War–era notion of clearly defined, calculable enemies, portraying monsters as figures that are irredeemably evil yet invariably vulnerable to defeat. He explains the appeal of such simplistic video game monsters, but also explores how the medium could evolve to present more nuanced depictions of monstrosity.
Download or read book The Paradox of Transgression in Games written by Torill Mortensen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-24 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Paradox of Transgression in Games looks at transgressive games as an aesthetic experience, tackling how players respond to game content that shocks, disturbs, and distresses, and how contemporary video games can evoke intense emotional reactions. The book delves into the commercial success of many controversial videogames: although such games may appear shocking for the observing bystander, playing them is experienced as deeply rewarding for the player. Drawing on qualitative player studies and approaches from media aesthetics theory, the book challenges the perception of games as innocent entertainment, and examines the range of emotional, moral, and intellectual experiences of players. As they explore what players consider transgressive, the authors ask whether there is something about the gameplay situation that works to mitigate the sense of transgression, stressing gameplay as an aesthetic experience. Anchoring the aesthetic game experience both in play studies as well as in aesthetic theory, this book will be an essential resource for scholars and students of game studies, aesthetics, media studies, philosophy of art, and emotions.
Download or read book Forms and Functions of Endings in Narrative Digital Games written by Michelle Herte and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-16 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks closely at the endings of narrative digital games, examining their ways of concluding the processes of both storytelling and play in order to gain insight into what endings are and how we identify them in different media. While narrative digital games share many representational strategies for signalling their upcoming end with more traditional narrative media – such as novels or movies – they also show many forms of endings that often radically differ from our conventional understanding of conclusion and closure. From vast game worlds that remain open for play after a story’s finale, to multiple endings that are often hailed as a means for players to create their own stories, to the potentially tragic endings of failure and "game over", digital games question the traditional singularity and finality of endings. Using a broad range of examples, this book delves deeply into these and other forms and their functions, both to reveal the closural specificities of the ludonarrative hybrid that digital games are, as well as to find the core elements that characterise endings in any medium. It examines how endings make themselves known to players and raises the question of how well-established closural conventions blend with play and a player’s effort to achieve a goal. As an interdisciplinary study that draws on game studies as much as on transmedial narratology, Forms and Functions of Endings in Narrative Digital Games is suited for scholars and students of digital games as well as for narratologists yet to become familiar with this medium.
Download or read book The Dark Side of Translation written by Federico Italiano and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-06 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We tend to consider translation as something good, virtuous and bright, but it can also function as an instrument of concealment, silencing and misdirection—as something that darkens and obscures. Propaganda, misinformation, narratives of trauma and imagery of the enemy—to mention just a few of the negative phenomena that shape our lives—show patterns of communication in which translation either functions as a weapon or constitutes a space of conflict. But what does this dark side of translation look like? How does it work? Ground-breaking in its theoretical conception and pioneering in its thematic approach, this book unites international scholars from a range of disciplines including philosophy, translation studies, literary theory, ecocriticism, game studies, history and political science. With examples that illustrate complex theoretical and philosophical issues, this book also has a major focus on the translational dimension of ecology and climate change. Transdisciplinary and topical, this book is key reading for researchers, scholars and advanced students of translation studies, literature and related areas. Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429321528
