Download or read book Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies written by Dietmar Meinel and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-02-21 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While video games have blossomed into the foremost expression of contemporary popular culture over the past decades, their critical study occupies a fringe position in American Studies. In its engagement with video games, this book contributes to their study but with a thematic focus on a particularly important subject matter in American Studies: spatiality. The volume explores the production, representation, and experience of places in video games from the perspective of American Studies. Contributions critically interrogate the use of spatial myths ("wilderness," "frontier," or "city upon a hill"), explore games as digital borderlands and contact zones, and offer novel approaches to geographical literacy. Eventually, Playing the Field II brings the rich theoretical repertoire of the study of space in American Studies into conversation with questions about the production, representation, and experience of space in video games.
Download or read book Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies written by Dietmar Meinel and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-02-21 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While video games have blossomed into the foremost expression of contemporary popular culture over the past decades, their critical study occupies a fringe position in American Studies. In its engagement with video games, this book contributes to their study but with a thematic focus on a particularly important subject matter in American Studies: spatiality. The volume explores the production, representation, and experience of places in video games from the perspective of American Studies. Contributions critically interrogate the use of spatial myths ("wilderness," "frontier," or "city upon a hill"), explore games as digital borderlands and contact zones, and offer novel approaches to geographical literacy. Eventually, Playing the Field II brings the rich theoretical repertoire of the study of space in American Studies into conversation with questions about the production, representation, and experience of space in video games.
Download or read book Playing the Field written by Sascha Pöhlmann and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-08-19 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Studies has only gradually turned its attention to video games in the twenty-first century, even though the medium has grown into a cultural industry that is arguably the most important force in American and global popular culture today. There is an urgent need for a substantial theoretical reflection on how the field and its object of study relate to each other. This anthology, the first of its kind, seeks to address this need by asking a dialectic question: first, how may American Studies apply its highly diverse theoretical and methodological tools to the analysis of video games, and second, how are these theories and methods in turn affected by the games? The eighteen essays offer exemplary approaches to video games from the perspective of American cultural and historical studies as they consider a broad variety of topics: the US-American games industry, Puritan rhetoric, cultural geography, mobility and race, urbanity and space, digital sports, ludic textuality, survival horror and the eighteenth-century novel, gamer culture and neoliberalism, terrorism and agency, algorithm culture, glitches, theme parks, historical guilt, visual art, sonic meaning-making, and nonverbal gameplay.
Download or read book On Video Games written by Soraya Murray and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Playing the Field written by Sascha Pöhlmann and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-08-19 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Studies has only gradually turned its attention to video games in the twenty-first century, even though the medium has grown into a cultural industry that is arguably the most important force in American and global popular culture today. There is an urgent need for a substantial theoretical reflection on how the field and its object of study relate to each other. This anthology, the first of its kind, seeks to address this need by asking a dialectic question: first, how may American Studies apply its highly diverse theoretical and methodological tools to the analysis of video games, and second, how are these theories and methods in turn affected by the games? The eighteen essays offer exemplary approaches to video games from the perspective of American cultural and historical studies as they consider a broad variety of topics: the US-American games industry, Puritan rhetoric, cultural geography, mobility and race, urbanity and space, digital sports, ludic textuality, survival horror and the eighteenth-century novel, gamer culture and neoliberalism, terrorism and agency, algorithm culture, glitches, theme parks, historical guilt, visual art, sonic meaning-making, and nonverbal gameplay.
Download or read book Expressive Space written by Gregory Whistance-Smith and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-01-19 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Video game spaces have vastly expanded the built environment, offering new worlds to explore and inhabit. Like buildings, cities, and gardens before them, these virtual environments express meaning and communicate ideas and affects through the spatial experiences they afford. Drawing on the emerging field of embodied cognition, this book explores the dynamic interplay between mind, body, and environment that sits at the heart of spatial communication. To capture the wide diversity of forms that spatial expression can take, the book builds a comparative analysis of twelve video games across four types of space, spanning ones designed for exploration and inhabitation, kinetic enjoyment, enacting a situated role, and enhancing perception. Together, these diverse virtual environments suggest the many ways that video games enhance and extend our embodied lives.
Download or read book Ludotopia written by Espen Aarseth and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2019-08-31 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where do computer games »happen«? The articles collected in this pioneering volume explore the categories of »space«, »place« and »territory« featuring in most general theories of space to lay the groundwork for the study of spatiality in games. Shifting the focus away from earlier debates on, e.g., the narrative nature of games, this collection proposes, instead, that thorough attention be given to the tension between experienced spaces and narrated places as well as to the mapping of both of these.
Download or read book Video Games and American Culture written by Aaron A. Toscano and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-12-12 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital media are immersive technologies reflecting behaviors, attitudes, and values. The engrossing, entertaining virtual worlds video games provide are important sites for 21st century research. This book moves beyond assertions that video games cause violence by analyzing the culture that produces such material. While some popular media reinforce the idea that video games lead to violence, this book uses a cultural studies lens to reveal a more complex situation. Video games do not lead to violence, sexism, and chauvinism. Rather, Toscano argues, a violent, sexist, chauvinistic culture reproduces texts that reflect these values. Although video games have a worldwide audience, this book focuses on American culture and how this multi-billion dollar industry entertains us in our leisure time (and sometimes at work), bringing us into virtual environments where we have fun learning, fighting, discovering, and acquiring bragging rights. When politicians and moral crusaders push agendas that claim video games cause a range of social ills from obesity to mass shooting, these perspectives fail to recognize that video games reproduce hegemonic American values. This book, in contrast, focuses on what these highly entertaining cultural products tell us about who we are.
Download or read book Videogames and Postcolonialism written by Souvik Mukherjee and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-07-24 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the almost entirely neglected treatment of empire and colonialism in videogames. From its inception in the nineties, Game Studies has kept away from these issues despite the early popularity of videogame franchises such as Civilization and Age of Empire. This book examines the complex ways in which some videogames construct conceptions of spatiality, political systems, ethics and society that are often deeply imbued with colonialism. Moving beyond questions pertaining to European and American gaming cultures, this book addresses issues that relate to a global audience – including, especially, the millions who play videogames in the formerly colonised countries, seeking to make a timely intervention by creating a larger awareness of global cultural issues in videogame research. Addressing a major gap in Game Studies research, this book will connect to discourses of post-colonial theory at large and thereby, provide another entry-point for this new medium of digital communication into larger Humanities discourses.
Download or read book Videogames Studies Concepts Cultures and Communication written by Monica Evans and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reflects the discussions that occurred during the 2nd Global Conference on Videogame Cultures and the Future of Interactive Entertainment in July 2010. The chapters in this volume cover four primary topics: new frameworks for game studies and analysis, the various cultures surrounding gaming, questions of ethics and controversial...
Download or read book The Composition of Video Games written by Johansen Quijano and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2019-10-11 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Video games are a complex, compelling medium in which established art forms intersect with technology to create an interactive text. Visual arts, architectural design, music, narrative and rules of play all find a place within, and are constrained by, computer systems whose purpose is to create an immersive player experience. In the relatively short life of video game studies, many authors have approached the question of how games function, some focusing on technical aspects of game design, others on rules of play. Taking a holistic view, this study explores how ludology, narratology, visual rhetoric, musical theory and player psychology work (or don't work) together to create a cohesive experience and to provide a unified framework for understanding video games.
Download or read book Video Game Spaces written by Michael Nitsche and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-12-05 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of how we see, use, and make sense of modern video game worlds. The move to 3D graphics represents a dramatic artistic and technical development in the history of video games that suggests an overall transformation of games as media. The experience of space has become a key element of how we understand games and how we play them. In Video Game Spaces, Michael Nitsche investigates what this shift means for video game design and analysis. Navigable 3D spaces allow us to crawl, jump, fly, or even teleport through fictional worlds that come to life in our imagination. We encounter these spaces through a combination of perception and interaction. Drawing on concepts from literary studies, architecture, and cinema, Nitsche argues that game spaces can evoke narratives because the player is interpreting them in order to engage with them. Consequently, Nitsche approaches game spaces not as pure visual spectacles but as meaningful virtual locations. His argument investigates what structures are at work in these locations, proceeds to an in-depth analysis of the audiovisual presentation of gameworlds, and ultimately explores how we use and comprehend their functionality. Nitsche introduces five analytical layers—rule-based space, mediated space, fictional space, play space, and social space—and uses them in the analyses of games that range from early classics to recent titles. He revisits current topics in game research, including narrative, rules, and play, from this new perspective. Video Game Spaces provides a range of necessary arguments and tools for media scholars, designers, and game researchers with an interest in 3D game worlds and the new challenges they pose.
Download or read book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy Second Edition written by James Paul Gee and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Paul Gee begins his classic book with "I want to talk about video games--yes, even violent video games--and say some positive things about them." With this simple but explosive statement, one of America's most well-respected educators looks seriously at the good that can come from playing video games. In this revised edition of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, new games like World of WarCraft and Half Life 2 are evaluated and theories of cognitive development are expanded. Gee looks at major cognitive activities including how individuals develop a sense of identity, how we grasp meaning, how we evaluate and follow a command, pick a role model, and perceive the world.
Download or read book Videogames and Education written by Harry J. Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Video games challenge our notions of identity, creativity, and moral value, and provide a powerful new avenue for teaching and learning. This book is a rich and provocative guide to the role of interactive media in cultural learning. It searches for specific ways to interpret video games in the context of human experience and in the field of humanities research. The author shows how video games have become a powerful form of political, ethical, and religious discourse, and how they have already influenced the way we teach, learn, and create. He discusses the major trends in game design, the public controversies surrounding video games, and the predominant critical positions in game criticism. The book speaks to all educators, scholars, and thinking persons who seek a fuller understanding of this significant and video games cultural phenomenon.
Download or read book Digital Games as History written by Adam Chapman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-05 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides the first in-depth exploration of video games as history. Chapman puts forth five basic categories of analysis for understanding historical video games: simulation and epistemology, time, space, narrative, and affordance. Through these methods of analysis he explores what these games uniquely offer as a new form of history and how they produce representations of the past. By taking an inter-disciplinary and accessible approach the book provides a specific and firm first foundation upon which to build further examination of the potential of video games as a historical form.
Download or read book Video Games as Culture written by Daniel Muriel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-14 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Video games are becoming culturally dominant. But what does their popularity say about our contemporary society? This book explores video game culture, but in doing so, utilizes video games as a lens through which to understand contemporary social life. Video games are becoming an increasingly central part of our cultural lives, impacting on various aspects of everyday life such as our consumption, communities, and identity formation. Drawing on new and original empirical data – including interviews with gamers, as well as key representatives from the video game industry, media, education, and cultural sector – Video Games as Culture not only considers contemporary video game culture, but also explores how video games provide important insights into the modern nature of digital and participatory culture, patterns of consumption and identity formation, late modernity, and contemporary political rationalities. This book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers, interested in fields such Video Games, Sociology, and Media and Cultural Studies. It will also be useful for those interested in the wider role of culture, technology, and consumption in the transformation of society, identities, and communities.
Download or read book Atari Age written by Michael Z. Newman and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cultural contradictions of early video games: a medium for family fun (but mainly for middle-class boys), an improvement over pinball and television (but possibly harmful). Beginning with the release of the Magnavox Odyssey and Pong in 1972, video games, whether played in arcades and taverns or in family rec rooms, became part of popular culture, like television. In fact, video games were sometimes seen as an improvement on television because they spurred participation rather than passivity. These “space-age pinball machines” gave coin-operated games a high-tech and more respectable profile. In Atari Age, Michael Newman charts the emergence of video games in America from ball-and-paddle games to hits like Space Invaders and Pac-Man, describing their relationship to other amusements and technologies and showing how they came to be identified with the middle class, youth, and masculinity. Newman shows that the “new media” of video games were understood in varied, even contradictory ways. They were family fun (but mainly for boys), better than television (but possibly harmful), and educational (but a waste of computer time). Drawing on a range of sources—including the games and their packaging; coverage in the popular, trade, and fan press; social science research of the time; advertising and store catalogs; and representations in movies and television—Newman describes the series of cultural contradictions through which the identity of the emerging medium worked itself out. Would video games embody middle-class respectability or suffer from the arcade's unsavory reputation? Would they foster family togetherness or allow boys to escape from domesticity? Would they make the new home computer a tool for education or just a glorified toy? Then, as now, many worried about the impact of video games on players, while others celebrated video games for familiarizing kids with technology essential for the information age.
