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Feminism in Play
Feminism in Play focuses on women as they are depicted in video games, as participants in games culture, and as contributors to the games industry. This volume showcases women’s resistance to the norms of games culture, as well as women’s play and creative practices both in and around the games industry. Contributors analyze the interconnections between games and the broader societal and structural issues impeding the successful inclusion of women in games and games culture. In offering this framework, this volume provides a platform to the silenced and marginalized, offering counter-narratives to the post-racial and post-gendered fantasies that so often obscure the violent context of production and consumption of games culture.
Guns, Grenades, and Grunts
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.
The Grounds of Gaming
"Stark gender disparities characterize the places where digital gameplay often takes place-remote gaming setups, campus computer labs, esports arenas, and convention centers, for instance-as well as the overall cultures of video gameplay, spectatorship, and game production. Despite new franchises, platforms, and initiatives expanding games beyond their conventional audience of young, cis-het white men, gaming still feels off-limits or unsafe for many.The Grounds of Gaming explores the physical places where games are played and how they contribute to the persistence of gaming's problematic gender politics. Through a series of case studies that document the gender dynamics of the various sites where video games literally take and make place, author Nicholas Taylor unpacks questions about how place matters to digital play, how issues in gaming cultures and politics are perpetuated through particular arrangements of bodies, technologies, spaces, and infrastructures. In charting the connections between place, masculinities, and play, The Grounds of Gaming makes space for marginalized perspectives, practices, and populations in gaming cultures"--
Masculinities in Play
This volume addresses the persistent and frequently toxic associations between masculinity and games. It explores many of the critical issues in contemporary studies of masculinity—including issues of fatherhood, homoeroticism, eSports, fan cultures, and militarism—and their intersections with digital games, the contexts of their play, and the social futures associated with sustained involvement in gaming cultures. Unlike much of the research and public discourse that put the onus of “fixing” games and gaming cultures on those at its margins—women, LGBTQ, and people of color—this volume turns attention to men and masculinities, offering vital and productive avenues for both practical and theoretical intervention.
Pocket Directory
None
Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens
Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens is a collection of scholarly essays that seeks to represent the far-reaching scope and implications of digital role-playing games as both cultural and academic artifacts. As a genre, digital role playing games have undergone constant and radical revision, pushing not only multiple boundaries of game development, but also the playing strategies and experiences of players. Divided into three distinct sections, this premiere volume captures the distinctiveness of different game types, the forms of play they engender and their social and cultural implications. Contributors examine a range of games, from classics like Final Fantasy to blockbusters like World of Warcraft to obscure genre bending titles like Lux Pain. Working from a broad range of disciplines such as ecocritism, rhetoric, performance, gender, and communication, these essays yield insights that enrich the field of game studies and further illuminate the cultural, psychological and philosophical implications of a society that increasingly produces, plays and discourses about role playing games.
The Keystone Farmer
None
Queerness in Play
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.
Being Dragonborn
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is one of the bestselling and most influential video games of the past decade. From the return of world-threatening dragons to an ongoing civil war, the province of Skyrim is rich with adventure, lore, magic, history, and stunning vistas. Beyond its visual spectacle alone, Skyrim is an exemplary gameworld that reproduces out-of-game realities, controversies, and histories for its players. Being Dragonborn, then, comes to signify a host of ethical and ideological choices for the player, both inside and outside the gameworld. These essays show how playing Skyrim, in many ways, is akin to "playing" 21st century America with its various crises, conflicts, divisions, and inequalities. Topics covered include racial inequality and white supremacy, gender construction and misogyny, the politics of modding, rhetorics of gameplay, and narrative features.
Playing with the Guys
A lot of work has been done talking about what masculinity is and what it does within video games, but less has been given to considering how and why this happens, and the processes involved. This book considers the array of daily relationships involved in producing masculinity and how those actions and relationships translate to video games. Moreover, it examines the ways the actual play of the games maps onto the stories to create contradictory moments that show that, while toxic masculinity certainly exists, it is far from inevitable. Topics covered include the nature of masculine apprenticeship and nurturing, labor, fatherhood, the scapegoating of women, and reckoning with mortality, among many others.
