Playing the Field

Video Games and American Studies

Sascha Pöhlmann

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110655728
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: 21st Century History

American Studies has only gradually turned its attention to video games in the twenty-first century, even though the medium has grown into a cultural industry that is arguably the most important force in American and global popular culture today. There is an urgent need for a substantial theoretical reflection on how the field and its object of study relate to each other. This anthology, the first of its kind, seeks to address this need by asking a dialectic question: first, how may American Studies apply its highly diverse theoretical and methodological tools to the analysis of video games, and second, how are these theories and methods in turn affected by the games? The eighteen essays offer exemplary approaches to video games from the perspective of American cultural and historical studies as they consider a broad variety of topics: the US-American games industry, Puritan rhetoric, cultural geography, mobility and race, urbanity and space, digital sports, ludic textuality, survival horror and the eighteenth-century novel, gamer culture and neoliberalism, terrorism and agency, algorithm culture, glitches, theme parks, historical guilt, visual art, sonic meaning-making, and nonverbal gameplay.

Index of Subjects

• 1980s
• 9/11
• AAA video games
• affordances
• agency
• Agnus dei
• Alan Wake
• algorithm
• Alone in the Dark
• Also sprach Zarathustra
• Amadeus
• ambiguity
• American Civil War
• American exceptionalism
• American Revolution
• American Studies
• apocalypse
• Apocalypse Now
• arbitrary
• arcade game
• Asian American
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Assassin’s Creed
• authenticity
• Avatar
• Babylon 5
• baptism
• Bible
• BioShock
• BioWare
• Black Tiger
• Boxer Revolt
• Call of Duty
• Candy Crush
• choices
• Christianity
• City upon a Hill
• class
• classical music
• Clock Tower III
• closed systems
• code
• Cold War
• Command & Conquer
• commemorative culture
• Commodore 64
• Commodore Amiga
• convergence culture
• cooperation
• Crown, The
• cultural capital
• culture industry
• cybernetics
• cyberpunk
• Dear Esther
• deep learning
• defamiliarization
• Deliverance
• DeLorean
• Detroit: Become Human
• deus ex machina
• didactic Fiction
• diegesis
• Dies irae
• digital culture
• Dino Crisis
• disability
• Disney
• disruption
• Dragon Age
• dystopia
• Eine kleine Nachtmusik
• Elder Scrolls III, The: Morrowind
• Elder Scrolls V, The: Skyrim
• Electronic Arts (EA)
• electr...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Video Games and American Studies
• Video Games and the American Cultural Context
• The end is nigh! Bring forth the Shepard! Mass Effect, the Apocalypse, and the Puritan Imagination
• The Last of the US: The Game as Cultural Geography
• Mobility and Choices in Role-Playing Games
• Playing the Urban Future: The Scripting of Movement and Space in Mirror’s Edge (2008)
• Playing on Fields: Seasonal Seriality, Tele-Realism, and the Bio-Politics of Digital Sports Games
• Narrative and Play in American Studies: Ludic Textuality in the Video Game Alan Wake and the TV Series Westworld
• Toward a Reconsideration of Hypermediacy: Immersion in Survival Horror Games and Eighteenth-Century Novels
• Ludic Literature: Ready Player One as Didactic Fiction for the Neoliberal Subject
• Strategies against Structure: Video Game Terrorism as the Ultimate American Agency Narrative
• Why We Play Role-Playing Games
• Narrative Glitches: Action Adventure Games and Metaleptic Convergence
• Time Travelling to the American Revolution — Why Immersive Media Need American Studies
• A Shining City and the Sodom Below: Historical Guilt and Personal Agency in BioShock Infinite
• The Art of BioShock Infinite: Identity, Race, and Manifest Destiny
• Sounds of Tears: Mozart’s Lacrimosa in Different Media
• Unspoken Adventures: On Sound, Story, and Nonverbal Gameplay in Journey and Inside
• Contributors
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects