End-Game

End-Game PDF Author: Lorenzo DiTommaso
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110752867
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
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.

End-Game

End-Game PDF Author: Lorenzo DiTommaso
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110752867
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Video Games, Crime, and Control

Video Games, Crime, and Control PDF Author: Kevin F. Steinmetz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040087639
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Discussing the state of play in contemporary popular culture, specifically the role of crime and crime control in the video game medium, this book discusses the criminological importance of video games. Pulling together an international group of scholars from Brazil, Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, this edited volume analyzes a wide range of noteworthy video games, including Bioshock, Death Stranding, Diablo 2, Beat Cop, The Last of Us, Disco Elysium, Red Dead Redemption, P.T., Spider-Man, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and Grand Theft Auto. The book thus seeks to advance dialog on video games as important cultural artifacts containing significant insights regarding dominant perceptions, interests, anxieties, contradictions, and other matters of criminological interest. Covering policing, vigilantism, different forms of violence, genocide, mental illness, and criminological theory, Video Games, Crime, and Control will be of great interest to students and scholars of Criminology, Media Studies, and Sociology, specifically those focusing on Game Studies and Cultural Criminology.

Playthrough Poetics

Playthrough Poetics PDF Author: Milena Droumeva
Publisher: Amherst College Press
ISBN: 1943208816
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
Game streamers and live commentators are producing increasingly comprehensive analyses of gameplay, yet scholarship still tends to flatten the experiential media of video games into text for close reading. By shifting focus toward the immersiveness of video games, Playthrough Poetics makes the case for gameplay as a necessary, alternate method. Contributors to this volume engage widely with the activity of play through autoethnographies, meta-analyses of self-broadcasting, new procedural methods like gamespace soundwalking, as well as the affective aspects of games research. In doing so, they model new possibilities for academic players and gamers alike. Rigorous scholarship meets cultural practice in this innovative, multi-modal edited collection that includes video essays and offers transcripts of the playthroughs themselves. Readers (and viewers) will come away with a toolkit of models, case studies, and conceptual frameworks for analyzing video games through gameplay. This volume is a fresh return to the joy of play: the poetics of games as contemporary forms of storytelling and interactivity. With contributions from Ashlee Bird, Brandon Blackburn, Milena Droumeva, Kishonna Gray, Robyn Hope, Ben Scholl, Maria Sommers, Ashlyn Sparrow, Christine Tran, and Aaron Trammell.

Uneven Futures

Uneven Futures PDF Author: Ida Yoshinaga
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026254394X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Essays on speculative/science fiction explore the futures that feed our most cherished fantasies and terrifying nightmares, while helping diverse communities devise new survival strategies for a tough millennium. The explosion in speculative/science fiction (SF) across different media from the late twentieth century to the present has compelled those in the field of SF studies to rethink the community’s identity, orientation, and stakes. In this edited collection, more than forty writers, critics, game designers, scholars, and activists explore core SF texts, with an eye toward a future in which corporations dominate both the means of production and the means of distribution and governments rely on powerful surveillance and carceral technologies. The essays, international in scope, demonstrate the diversity of SF through a balance of popular mass-market novels, comics, films, games, TV shows, creepypastas, and more niche works. SF works explored range from Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi, 2084: The End of the World by Boualem Sansal, Terra Nullius by Claire Coleman, Watchmen and X-Men comics, and the Marvel film Captain America: The Winter Soldier, to the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin, and the Wormwood trilogy by Tade Thompson. In an era in which ecological disaster and global pandemics regularly expose and intensify deep political-economic inequalities, what futures has SF anticipated? What survival strategies has it provided us? Can it help us to deal with, and grow beyond, the inequalities and injustices of our times? Unlike other books of speculative/science fiction criticism, Uneven Futures uses a think piece format to make its critical insights engaging to a wide audience. The essays inspire visions of better possible futures—drawing on feminist, queer, and global speculative engagements with Indigenous, Latinx, and Afro- and African futurisms—while imparting important lessons for political organizing in the present. Contributors: Ben Abraham, Emmet Asher-Perrin, Brent Ryan Bellamy, Gerry Canavan, Andrew Ferguson, Fabio Fernandes, Dexter Gabriel, M. Elizabeth Ginway, Sean Guynes, Ouissal Harize, David M. Higgins, Veronica Hollinger, Allanah Hunt, Nicola Hunte, Nathaniel Isaacson, Ayana Jamieson, Darshana Jayemanne, Gwyneth Jones, Brendan Keogh, Sami Ahmad Khan, Cameron Kunzelman, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, Isiah Lavender III, Caryn Lesuma, Karen Lord, Sarah Marrs, Farah Mendlesohn, Cathryn Merla-Watson, Hugh Charles O’Connell, B. Pladek, John Rieder, Lysa Rivera, Kim Stanley Robinson, Steven Shaviro, Rebekah Sheldon, Alison Sperling, Alfredo Suppia, Bogi Takács, Taryne Jade Taylor, Sherryl Vint, Kirin Wachter-Grene, Ida Yoshinaga.

Video Games and Environmental Humanities

Video Games and Environmental Humanities PDF Author: Kelly I. Aliano
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031679806
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description


Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality

Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality PDF Author: Marco Caracciolo
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111142566
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
How do physical things differ from non-things—human subjects, animals, abstract ideas, or processes? Those questions, which are as old as philosophy itself, have inspired contemporary debates in ecocriticism, thing theory, and in the interdisciplinary field of new materialism. This book argues that contemporary narrative is well placed to map out and work through the spectrum of the material and the philosophical questions that underlie it. This is because narrative does not resolve the tensions at the heart of conceptions of materiality but rather reframes them, envisioning their implications and exploring their relevance to concrete contexts of human interaction. This monograph is structured around a number of novels, experimental fiction, films, and video games that imagine the inherent agency of things but also interrogate the affective and ethical significance of materiality in human terms. Its aim is to demonstrate the power of formal narrative analysis to foster conceptually and ethically sophisticated ways of thinking about thingness in times of ecological crisis—that is, times in which "stuff" can no longer be taken for granted.

Advertising and Consumer Society

Advertising and Consumer Society PDF Author: Nicholas Holm
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100085471X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
This critical introductory text explores the role of advertising in contemporary culture and its connections to larger economic, social, and political forces. Written in an engaging and accessible style and incorporating a wide range of examples from around the world, the chapters introduce the key concepts, methods, and debates needed to analyse and understand advertising. From an investigation of advertising’s crucial function in media economics and our wider capitalist system to a consideration of the people who both make and watch advertising, this insightful text enables students to: make sense of advertising’s powerful influence as both an economic force and an artistic form; assess the various claims of these two perspectives on advertising; and understand how they challenge and complicate one another. This revised second edition includes a new chapter on branding and promotional culture, and substantially updated content on topics like digital and online advertising, surveillance and empowerment, as well as brand new topics like self-branding/influencers and using technology to evade advertising. Equipping students with the skills needed to partake in this lively discourse, the text is an invaluable resource for studying advertising critically. It is essential reading for students of advertising, media studies and communication studies.

The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century

The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century PDF Author: Simon Bacon
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793643407
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century examines the intimate connections between the horror genre and its audience’s experience of being in the world at a particular historical and cultural moment. This book not only provides frameworks with which to understand contemporary horror, but it also speaks to the changes wrought by technological development in creation, production, and distribution, as well as the ways in which those who are traditionally underrepresented positively within the genre- women, LGBTQ+, indigenous, and BAME communities - are finally being seen and finding space to speak.

Encyclopedia of Video Games [3 volumes]

Encyclopedia of Video Games [3 volumes] PDF Author: Mark J. P. Wolf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440870209
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 1365

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Book Description
Now in its second edition, the Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming is the definitive, go-to resource for anyone interested in the diverse and expanding video game industry. This three-volume encyclopedia covers all things video games, including the games themselves, the companies that make them, and the people who play them. Written by scholars who are exceptionally knowledgeable in the field of video game studies, it notes genres, institutions, important concepts, theoretical concerns, and more and is the most comprehensive encyclopedia of video games of its kind, covering video games throughout all periods of their existence and geographically around the world. This is the second edition of Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming, originally published in 2012. All of the entries have been revised to accommodate changes in the industry, and an additional volume has been added to address the recent developments, advances, and changes that have occurred in this ever-evolving field. This set is a vital resource for scholars and video game aficionados alike.

Existential Science Fiction

Existential Science Fiction PDF Author: Ryan Lizardi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793647364
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
This book explores contemporary existential science fiction media, including film, television, and video games, and their influence on society’s conceptions of memory, identity, and humanity. Most poignantly, Ryan Lizardi argues, are the ways in which a recent cluster of science fiction media, including Gravity (2013), Interstellar (2014), Legion (2017-2019), Westworld (2016-present), Soma (2015), and Death Standing (2019), among others, present a vision of the future that is inextricably tied to an exploration of humanity that is more contemplative and comparative than traditional science fiction. The combination of the existential nature of this current trend in science fiction with the genre’s ability to manifest these abstract concepts in a generic environment that is historically focused on new frontiers and ideas creates a powerful set of media texts that ask audiences to contemplate what it means to exist, think, and connect as human beings. Scholars of media studies, film studies, television studies, genre studies, and philosophy will find this book particularly useful.