Playing American : Open-World Videogames and the Reproduction of American Culture
(eBook)

English

10.1515/9783111317755

Diss. 2022 FU Berlin.

Open Access https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2 d star

Videogames have always depicted representations of American culture, but how exactly they feed back into this culture is less obvious. Advocating an action-based understanding of both videogames and culture, this book delineates how aspects of American culture are reproduced transnationally through popular open-world videogames. Playing American proposes an analytic focus on open-world videogames' "ambient operations" and traces practices of "playing American" through the stages of videogame development, gameplay, and reception. Three case studies - concentrating on the Grand Theft Auto, Watch Dogs, and Red Dead Redemption franchises, respectively - highlight different figurations of "playing American." Thematic foci range from public discourses on systemic racism and neoliberal capitalism to the justification of real-world surveillance practices and to the reconfiguration of the Western in the digital age. Playing American provides those interested in either videogames or American culture with a fresh angle and new concepts regarding its subject matters. It demonstrates that videogames are agents of cultural reproduction that do distinct cultural work for American culture in the twenty-first century.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

In English.