On Video Games

Soraya Murray is an Associate Professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), USA, where she is also affiliated with the Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program, and the Art + Design: Games + Playable Media Program. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of visual culture, with a particular interest in cultural studies, contemporary art, film and video games. Murray holds a PhD in the History of Art and Visual Studies from Cornell University.

Weaving together insights drawn from visual culture studies, media studies, and cultural studies, On Video Games offers penetrating analyses into the textual poetics of blockbuster titles. Soraya Murray demonstrates the utility of careful interpretation to reveal how games function as popular vessels of ideology and political identity, and—as importantly—the necessity to take these playthings seriously.

• 1. Is the ‘Culture’ in Game Culture the‘Culture’ of Cultural Studies? Video Games and the Matter of Culture Games in the Academy Which Games? On the Importance of Cultural Studies for Game Studies Cultural Studies Meets Game Studies Form and/as Identity Politics in Games Being Critical GamerGate, Games Criticism and Gender Problems Looking Ahead Poetics of Form and Politics of Identity; Or, Gamesas Cultural Palimpsests 2. A Digital Politics of IdentityIntroduction The Poetics of Form in Liberation Aveline as Queered, Creole, Intersectional Playability and Phantasms ‘History is Our Playground’ Conclusion: Embracing the Mess 3. Aesthetics of Ambivalence and Whiteness in Crisis Introduction Cultural Context: Whiteness in Crisis, RacialViolence and Games The Last of Us Critical Whiteness Studies and Whiteness After 9/11 The Last of Us and Imperiled Whiteness Spec Ops: Th e Line and the White Hero Interrupted Tomb Raider, Whiteness and the Female Heroinein PerilConclusion: A Trauma Narrative of Whiteness 4: The Landscapes of Games as Ideology Introduction Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Game Spaces and World- Building: Formalism Studying Game Space in a Cultural Context Theorizing Game Space as Ideological Landscape There is No Such Place: Afghanistan in The PhantomPain Conclusion: A Particular View of a Particular World 5: The World is a Ghetto: Imaging the GlobalMetropolis in Playable Representation Introduction: Speculative Futures, Genre and theGlobal Metropolis Max Payne 3 : Noir Figure, Exotic Ground Remember Me and Urban Amnesia Play in the Fourth World City Bullet Time, Memory Remixing and Harvey’sSpace- Time Compression Two Playable Cities: The Favela and the CyberpunkMetropolis Conclusion: Playing Possible Futures