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The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sexuality, and Culture is an intersectional, diverse, and comprehensive collection essential for students and researchers examining the intersection of sexuality and culture. The book seeks to reflect established theories while anticipating future developments within gender, sexuality, and cultural studies. A range of international contributors, including leaders in their field, provide insights into dominant and marginalised subjects. Comprising over 30 chapters, the volume is comprised into five thematic parts: Identifying, Embodying, Making, Doing, and Resisting. Topics explored include homonormativity, poetry, video games, menstruation, fatness, disability, sex toys, sex work, BDSM, dating apps, body modifications, and politics and activism. This is an important and unique collection aimed at scholars, researchers, activists, and practitioners across cultural studies, gender studies and sociology.
Videogames and Metareference is the first edited collection to investigate the rise of metareference in videogames from an interdisciplinary perspective. Bringing together a group of distinguished scholars from various geographic and disciplinary backgrounds, the book combines in-depth theoretical reflection with a diverse selection of case studies in order to explore how metareference manifests itself in and around a broad range of videogames (from indie to AAA), while also asking what cultural work the videogames in question accomplish in the process. The carefully curated chapters not only provide much-needed expansions and revisions of a concept that was at least initially derived mainly...
Games create worlds made of many different elements, but also of rules, systems and structures for how we act in them. So how can we make sense of them? Mytholudics: Games and Myth lays out an approach to understanding games using theories from myth and folklore. Myth is taken here not as an object but as a process, a way of expressing meaning. It works to naturalise arbitrary constellations of signs, to connect things in meaning. Behind the phrase ‘just the way it is’ is a process of mythologization that has cemented it. Mytholudics lays out how this understanding of myth works for the analysis of games. In two sections each analysing five digital games, it then shows how this approach ...
Despite numerous publications on the philosophy of technology, little attention has been paid to the relationship between being and value in technology, two aspects which are usually treated separately. This volume addresses this issue by drawing connections between the ontology of technology on the one hand and technology’s ethical and aesthetic significance on the other. The book first considers what technology is and what kind of entities it produces. Then it examines the moral implications of technology. Finally, it explores the connections between technology and the arts.
The Handbook of Japanese Games and Gameplay showcases the rich variety of games in Japan, placing them in the context of industry, development processes, and a broader media ecology. We trace Japanese games through history, including card games, board games, pachinko and digital games, as well as how games are connected to toys and animation, and how analog and mechanical games connect to the virtual world. Analyzing some of the largest and most successful games ever published, including Final Fantasy, Nobunaga’s Ambition, Virtua Fighter, Resident Evil and Animal Crossing, we see how different audiences have interpreted them around the globe. We follow players from the living room to the a...
Taking an original, in-depth approach, this book investigates the forms and functions of metareference in videogames. Drawing on a rich body of research in game studies, transmedial narratology, and neighbouring disciplines, the author combines detailed close-reading-style analyses of the indie games What Remains of Edith Finch, The Magic Circle and OneShot with a breadth of examples and systematic analyses that span multiple genres as well as several decades of videogaming. In doing so, the book maps different metareferential elements that can be found in videogames and proposes an original model for their analysis, while showcasing the complex interrelations among different metareferential elements in contemporary videogames. This book will appeal to videogame researchers and transmedial narratologists as well as to those interested in metaization in media and popular culture across disciplines.
Aesthetics and Video Games introduces current issues and ideas in philosophical aesthetics that help us to better understand why video games are different from cinema, animation and other types of fiction. Addressing two foundational issues, the notion of the aesthetic and the value of play, it asks what the aesthetic is and investigates how value arises from different forms of play. Introducing the history and theory surrounding these questions, this book: - Offers an account of the value of games that places gameplay and interactivity at its core - Acknowledges the importance of both ethical and feminist criticisms of games - Offers a novel account of how video games can be valued as competitions, narratives, and toys - Suggests ways in which a theory of the aesthetics of games must move beyond traditional approaches in aesthetics. Drawing from work in philosophy, media studies, psychology, and gender studies, it not only demonstrates how theories from these areas can helpfully come into conversation with each other, it explores new paradigms, models, and concepts that aid our knowledge of video games in today's culture.
Metagames: Games about Games scrutinizes how various meta devices, such as breaking the fourth wall and unreliable narrator, change and adapt when translated into the uniquely interactive medium of digital games. Through its theoretical analyses and case studies, the book shows how metafictional experimentation can be used to both challenge and push the boundaries of what a game is and what a player’s role is in play, and to raise more profound topics such as those describing experiences of people of oppressed identities. The book is divided into six chapters that deal with the following meta devices: breaking the fourth wall, hypermediation, unreliable narrator, abusive game design, fragmentation, and parody. The book will predominantly interest scholars and students of media studies and game studies as it continues discourses held in the discipline regarding the metareferential character of digital games.
Delicious Pixels: Food in Video Games introduces critical food studies to game scholarship, showing the unique ways in which food is utilized in both video game gameplay and narrative to show that food is never just food but rather a complex means of communication and meaning-making. It aims at bringing the academic attention to digital food and to show how significant it became in the recent decades as, on the one hand, a world-building device, and, on the other, a crucial link between the in-game and out-of-game identities and experiences. This is done by examining specifically the examples of games in which food serves as the means of creating an intimate, cozy, and safe world and a close relationship between the players and the characters.
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