Game Work: Language, Power, And Computer Game Culture (Rhetoric, Culture & Social Critique) - Hardcover

McAllister, Ken S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0817314180 ISBN 13: 9780817314187

Verlag: The University of Alabama Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Video and computer games in their cultural contexts.

As the popularity of computer games has exploded over the past decade, both scholars and game industry professionals have recognized the necessity of treating games less as frivolous entertainment and more as artifacts of culture worthy of political, social, economic, rhetorical, and aesthetic analysis. Ken McAllister notes in his introduction to Game Work that, even though games are essentially impractical, they are nevertheless important mediating agents for the broad exercise of socio-political power.

In considering how the languages, images, gestures, and sounds of video games influence those who play them, McAllister highlights the ways in which ideology is coded into games. Computer games, he argues, have transformative effects on the consciousness of players, like poetry, fiction, journalism, and film, but the implications of these transformations are not always clear. Games can work to maintain the status quo or celebrate liberation or tolerate enslavement, and they can conjure feelings of hope or despair, assent or dissent, clarity or confusion. Overall, by making and managing meanings, computer games—and the work they involve and the industry they spring from—are also negotiating power.

This book sets out a method for "recollecting" some of the diverse and copious influences on computer games and the industry they have spawned. Specifically written for use in computer game theory classes, advanced media studies, and communications courses, Game Work will also be welcome by computer gamers and designers.

Ken S. McAllister is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona and Co-Director of the Learning Games Initiative, a research collective that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ken S. McAllister is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona and Co-Director of the Learning Games Initiative, a research collective that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Ken McAllister notes in his introduction to Game Work that, even though computer games are essentially entertainment, they are in fact important mediating agents for the broad exercise of socio-political power. In considering how the languages, images, gestures, and sounds of video games influence those who play them, McAllister highlights the ways in which ideology is coded into games. Computer games, he argues, have transformative effects on the consciousness of players, like poetry, fiction, journalism, and film, but the implications of these transformations are not always clear. Games can work to maintain the status quo or celebrate liberation or tolerate enslavement, and they can conjure feelings of hope or despair, assent or dissent, clarity or confusion. Overall, by making and managing meanings, computer games--and the work they involve and the industry they spring from--are also negotiating power. Ken S. McAllister is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona and Co-Director of the Learning Games Initiative, a research collective that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games.

Aus dem Klappentext

Ken McAllister notes in his introduction to Game Work that, even though computer games are essentially entertainment, they are in fact important mediating agents for the broad exercise of socio-political power. In considering how the languages, images, gestures, and sounds of video games influence those who play them, McAllister highlights the ways in which ideology is coded into games. Computer games, he argues, have transformative effects on the consciousness of players, like poetry, fiction, journalism, and film, but the implications of these transformations are not always clear. Games can work to maintain the status quo or celebrate liberation or tolerate enslavement, and they can conjure feelings of hope or despair, assent or dissent, clarity or confusion. Overall, by making and managing meanings, computer games--and the work they involve and the industry they spring from--are also negotiating power. Ken S. McAllister is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona and Co-Director of the Learning Games Initiative, a research collective that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games.

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Game Work

Language, Power, and Computer Game CultureBy Ken S. McAllister

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 2004 The University of Alabama Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1418-7

Contents

Preface......................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments..............................................................................................................xiiiPART 1 INTRODUCTION TO PART 11. Studying the Computer Game Complex........................................................................................5Computer Games as Mass Culture...............................................................................................9Computer Games as Mass Media.................................................................................................13Computer Games as Psychophysiological Force..................................................................................14Computer Games as Economic Force.............................................................................................18Computer Games as Instructional Force........................................................................................24So, Why Study Computer Games?................................................................................................252. A Grammar of Gamework.....................................................................................................27Rhetoric and Dialectic.......................................................................................................29Propositions of the Gamework.................................................................................................31The Problematic of Play......................................................................................................34The Grammar of Gameworks: Analyzing the Computer Game Complex................................................................41PART 2 INTRODUCTION TO PART 23. Capturing Imaginations: Rhetoric in the Art of Computer Game Development..................................................71Rhetorical Functions Revisited...............................................................................................78Rhetoric in the Discourse of Game Developers.................................................................................80Working Through the Grammar of Gameworks: Agents, Influences, Manifestations, and Transformative Locales.....................1144. Making Meanings Out of Contradictions: The Work of Computer Game Reviewing................................................118Computer Game Reviewing Online...............................................................................................120Computer Game Reviewing in Print.............................................................................................126Playing Up Influence to Influence Play.......................................................................................129Reviewing the Meanings of the Computer Game Complex..........................................................................1395. The Economies of Black & White............................................................................................140Defining Economies...........................................................................................................144The "Purchase" of Natural Resources..........................................................................................149The "Purchase" of Spiritual Resources........................................................................................154The "Purchase" of Temporal Resources.........................................................................................156The Work of Black & White....................................................................................................157Transformative Locales: Economic Force as Game Work..........................................................................166Epilogue.....................................................................................................................169Appendices...................................................................................................................171Notes........................................................................................................................205Works Cited..................................................................................................................219Index........................................................................................................................227

Chapter One

Studying the Computer Game Complex

Steve, a happily married forty-four-year-old man with two kids, sits before a nineteen-inch flat-screen computer monitor, a joystick in his hand. And not just any joystick. Steve grips the award-winning Logitech Wingman Force, a game controller modeled after the joysticks in the latest fighter jets. It has nine buttons, a throttle mechanism, and a "POV" hat switch that allows him to look sideways, above, and behind his simulated "Warthog," a U.S. Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II. The Intel Pentium 4 processor (3.2 GHz) and NVIDIA GeForce Ultra 5950 video card with 256 MB of onboard RAM render the ground below the aircraft with amazing realism, and because Steve has activated the simulator's "weather effects," the joystick shakes in his hand when he flies through turbulence. The stick also gives him a jolt when he kicks in the afterburners and vibrates when he pulls the trigger. The vibrations are rapid but dull in his palm, just how Steve expects it would feel to fire off thirty-millimeter rounds loaded into a real nose-mounted General Electric GAU-8/A Avenger seven-barrel cannon. And though Steve is only a casual player of Jane's USAF-five to ten hours a week-he has already played this simulation for more than fifty hours (and he's still working on the training missions). Tonight he plans to focus his training on air-to-ground attacks, especially moving targets like tanks and supply convoys. Lieutenant Colonel "Scooter" Davis, the simulator's training persona, warns Steve that today's practice is going to be a tough one but wishes him "Happy Flying" just the same. Steve smiles and tightens his grip on the joystick. "Bring it on," he says, and moments later he loses touch with the real world as he works the sluggish virtual Warthog down runway 22R of Nellis Air Force Base and takes to the sky.

* * *

In the media wake of the Littleton, Colorado, high school shooting in 1999, news coverage quickly turned to finger-pointing as people struggled to understand what could have motivated such youth violence. Within twenty-four hours, national TV news programs were reporting that the young men who had walked into their school and shot thirteen classmates to death had two unsavory pastimes: listening to Goth music and playing computer games. Within forty-eight hours, dozens of newspapers had printed stories specifically on these two elements of this tragic event.

Nothing about these stories, which seemed most interested in scapegoating the band Marilyn Manson and computer games like Doom, was very revealing. Music has been blamed for corrupting youth for centuries. And despite the fact that at the beginning of the twenty-first century they are arguably little more than a hybrid medium extending the genres of film, TV, fiction, and comic books, computer games...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: The University of Alabama Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0817314180
• ISBN 13: 9780817314187
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 2
• Anzahl der Seiten: 232
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar