Games of Empire
Title | Games of Empire PDF eBook |
Author | Nick Dyer-Witheford |
Publisher | U of Minnesota Press |
Pages | 337 |
Release | 2009 |
Genre | Business & Economics |
ISBN | 0816666105 |
Introduction : Games in the age of empire -- Game engine : labor, capital, machine -- Immaterial labor : a workers' history of videogaming -- Cognitive capitalism : electronic arts -- Machinic subjects : the XBOX and its rivals -- Gameplay : virtual/actual -- Banal war : full spectrum warrior -- Biopower play : world of warcraft -- Imperial city : grand theft auto -- New game? -- Games of multitude -- Exodus : the metaverse and the mines.
Games of Empire
Title | Games of Empire PDF eBook |
Author | Nick Dyer-Witheford |
Publisher | U of Minnesota Press |
Pages | 462 |
Release | 2013-11-30 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1452942706 |
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, video games are an integral part of global media culture, rivaling Hollywood in revenue and influence. No longer confined to a subculture of adolescent males, video games today are played by adults around the world. At the same time, video games have become major sites of corporate exploitation and military recruitment. In Games of Empire, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter offer a radical political critique of such video games and virtual environments as Second Life, World of Warcraft, and Grand Theft Auto, analyzing them as the exemplary media of Empire, the twenty-first-century hypercapitalist complex theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The authors trace the ascent of virtual gaming, assess its impact on creators and players alike, and delineate the relationships between games and reality, body and avatar, screen and street. Games of Empire forcefully connects video games to real-world concerns about globalization, militarism, and exploitation, from the horrors of African mines and Indian e-waste sites that underlie the entire industry, the role of labor in commercial game development, and the synergy between military simulation software and the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan exemplified by Full Spectrum Warrior to the substantial virtual economies surrounding World of Warcraft, the urban neoliberalism made playable in Grand Theft Auto, and the emergence of an alternative game culture through activist games and open-source game development. Rejecting both moral panic and glib enthusiasm, Games of Empire demonstrates how virtual games crystallize the cultural, political, and economic forces of global capital, while also providing a means of resisting them.
Empire Games
Title | Empire Games PDF eBook |
Author | Charles Stross |
Publisher | |
Pages | 0 |
Release | 2017 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
Game of Empire
Title | Game of Empire PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | |
Pages | |
Release | 1970 |
Genre | Business |
ISBN |
Empire De/Centered
Title | Empire De/Centered PDF eBook |
Author | Maxim Waldstein |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 362 |
Release | 2016-05-06 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1317144376 |
In 1991 the Soviet empire collapsed, at a stroke throwing the certainties of the Cold War world into flux. Yet despite the dramatic end of this 'last empire', the idea of empire is still alive and well, its language and concepts feeding into public debate and academic research. Bringing together a multidisciplinary and international group of authors to study Soviet society and culture through the categories empire and space, this collection demonstrates the enduring legacy of empire with regard to Russia, whose history has been marked by a particularly close and ambiguous relationship between nation and empire building, and between national and imperial identities. Parallel with this discussion of empire, the volume also highlights the centrality of geographical space and spatial imaginings in Russian and Soviet intellectual traditions and social practices; underlining how Russia's vast geographical dimensions have profoundly informed Russia's state and nation building, both in practice and concept. Combining concepts of space and empire, the collection offers a reconsideration of Soviet imperial legacy by studying its cultural and societal underpinnings from previously unexplored perspectives. In so doing it provides a reconceptualization of the theoretical and methodological foundations of contemporary imperial and spatial studies, through the example of the experience provided by Soviet society and culture.
Videogames and Postcolonialism
Title | Videogames and Postcolonialism PDF eBook |
Author | Souvik Mukherjee |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 126 |
Release | 2017-07-24 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 3319548220 |
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.
Gaming Utopia
Title | Gaming Utopia PDF eBook |
Author | Claudia Costa Pederson |
Publisher | Indiana University Press |
Pages | 281 |
Release | 2021-04-06 |
Genre | Games & Activities |
ISBN | 0253054508 |
In Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media, Claudia Costa Pederson analyzes modernist avant-garde and contemporary video games to challenge the idea that gaming is an exclusively white, heterosexual, male, corporatized leisure activity and reenvisions it as a catalyst for social change. By looking at over fifty projects that together span a century and the world, Pederson explores the capacity for sociopolitical commentary in virtual and digital realms and highlights contributions to the history of gaming by women, queer, and transnational artists. The result is a critical tool for understanding video games as imaginative forms of living that offer alternatives to our current reality. With an interdisciplinary approach, Gaming Utopia emphasizes how game design, creation, and play can become political forms of social protest and examines the ways that games as art open doors to a more just and peaceful world.