Digital Game Studies

Recent years have seen an increase in public attention to identity and representation in video games, including journalists and bloggers holding the digital game industry accountable for the discrimination routinely endured by female gamers, queer gamers, and gamers of color. Video game developers are responding to these critiques, but scholarly discussion of representation in games has lagged far behind. Gaming Representation examines portrayals of race, gender, and sexuality in a range of games, from casuals like Diner Dash, to indies like Journey and The Binding of Isaac, to mainstream games from the Grand Theft Auto, BioShock, Spec Ops, The Last of Us, and Max Payne franchises. Arguing that representation and identity function as systems in games that share a stronger connection to code and platforms than it may first appear, the contributors to this volume push gaming scholarship to new levels of inquiry, theorizing, and imagination.

Gaming the System takes continental philosophical traditions out of the ivory tower and into the virtual worlds of video games. In this book, author David J. Gunkel explores how philosophical traditions―put forth by noted thinkers such as Plato, Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, and Žižek―can help us explore and conceptualize recent developments in video games, game studies, and virtual worlds. Furthermore, Gunkel interprets computer games as doing philosophy, arguing that the game world is a medium that provides opportunities to model and explore fundamental questions about the nature of reality, personal identity, social organization, and moral conduct. By using games to investigate and innovate in the area of philosophical thinking, Gunkel shows how areas such as game governance and manufacturers' terms of service agreements actually grapple with the social contract and produce new postmodern forms of social organization that challenge existing modernist notions of politics and the nation state. In this critically engaging study, Gunkel considers virtual worlds and video games as more than just "fun and games," presenting them as sites for new and original thinking about some of the deepest questions concerning the human experience.

The growth in popularity and complexity of video games has spurred new interest in how games are developed and in the research and technology behind them. David Heineman brings together some of the most iconic, influential, and interesting voices from across the gaming industry and asks them to weigh in on the past, present, and future of video games. Among them are legendary game designers Nolan Bushnell (Pong) and Eugene Jarvis (Defender), who talk about their history of innovations from the earliest days of the video game industry through to the present; contemporary trailblazers Kellee Santiago (Journey) and Casey Hudson (Mass Effect), who discuss contemporary relationships between those who create games and those who play them; and scholars Ian Bogost (How to Do Things With Videogames) and Edward Castronova (Exodus to the Virtual World), who discuss how to research and write about games in ways that engage a range of audiences. These experts and others offer fascinating perspectives on video games, game studies, gaming culture, and the game industry more broadly.

Shaman, paragon, God-mode: modern video games are heavily coded with religious undertones. From the Shinto-inspired Japanese video game Okami to the internationally popular The Legend of Zelda and Halo, many video games rely on religious themes and symbols to drive the narrative and frame the storyline. Playing with Religion in Digital Games explores the increasingly complex relationship between gaming and global religious practices. For example, how does religion help organize the communities in MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft? What role has censorship played in localizing games like Actraiser in the western world? How do evangelical Christians react to violence, gore, and sexuality in some of the most popular games such as Mass Effect or Grand Theft Auto? With contributions by scholars and gamers from all over the world, this collection offers a unique perspective to the intersections of religion and the virtual world.

In this era of big media franchises, sports branding has crossed platforms, so that the sport, its television broadcast, and its replication in an electronic game are packaged and promoted as part of the same fan experience. Editors Robert Alan Brookey and Thomas P. Oates trace this development back to the unexpected success of Atari's Pong in the 1970s, which provoked a flood of sport simulation games that have had an impact on every sector of the electronic game market. From golf to football, basketball to step aerobics, electronic sports games are as familiar in the American household as the televised sporting events they simulate. This book explores the points of convergence at which gaming and sports culture merge.

Preserving, pausing, slowing, rewinding, replaying, reactivating, reanimating Has the ability to manipulate video game timelines altered our cultural conceptions of time? Video game scholar Christopher Hanson argues that the mechanics of time in digital games have presented a new model for understanding time in contemporary culture, a concept he calls "game time." Multivalent in nature, game time is characterized by apparent malleability, navigability, and possibility while simultaneously being highly restrictive and requiring replay and repetition. When compared to analog tabletop games, sports, film, television, and other forms of media, Hanson demonstrates that the temporal structures of digital games provide unique opportunities to engage players with liveness, causality, potentiality, and lived experience that create new ways of experiencing time Featuring comparative analysis of key video games titles-including Braid, Quantum Break, Battle of the Bulge, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Passage, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, Lifeline, and A Dark Room.

How do we make space for video games in the places where we live, work, and play-and who is allowed to feel welcome there? Despite attempts to expand games beyond their conventional audience of young men, the physical contexts of gameplay and production remain off-limits and unsafe for so many. The Grounds of Gaming explores the physical places where games are played and how they contribute to the persistence of gaming's problematic politics. Drawing on fieldwork in an array of sites, author Nicholas Taylor explores the real-world settings where games are played, watched, discussed and designed. Sometimes these places are sticky, dark, and stinky; other times they are pristine and well appointed. Situating its chapters in such scenes as domestic gaming setups, campus computer labs, LAN parties, esports arenas, and convention centers, Taylor maps the infrastructural connections between games, place, masculinity, and whiteness. By inviting us to reconsider gaming's cultural politics from the ground up, The Grounds of Gaming offers new theoretical insights and practical resources regarding how to make game cultures and industries more inclusive.

Video games are both physically and cognitively demanding-so what does that mean for those with a disability or mental illness? Though they may seem at odds, Ability Machines illuminates just how vital video games are to understanding our bodies and abilities. In Ability Machines, Sky LaRell Anderson shows us how video games can help us imagine what our abilities mean and how they engage us physically, behaviorally, and cognitively to envision our agency beyond limitations. On the surface, this can mean games provide power fantasies; more profoundly, games can fundamentally reshape cultural and personal understandings of mental health, illness, disability, and accessibility. Video games are indeed ability machines that produce a reimagined state of agency. Featuring a comparative analysis of key video game titles, including Metal Gear Solid V, Wolfenstein II, Celeste, Devil May Cry 5, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Hades, Nier: Automata, and more, Ability Machines tackles larger questions of ability and how our bodies relate to interactive media.