The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto

Author: Nate Garrelts
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786483482
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
The immensely popular Grand Theft Auto game series has inspired a range of reactions among players and commentators, and a hot debate in the popular media. These essays from diverse theoretical perspectives expand the discussion by focusing scholarly analysis on the games, particularly Grand Theft Auto III (GTA3), Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (GTA:VC), and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA:SA). Part One of the book discusses the fears, lawsuits, legislative proposals, and other public reactions to Grand Theft Auto, detailing the conflict between the developers of adult oriented games and various new forms of censorship. Depictions of race and violence, the pleasure of the carnivalistic gameplay, and the significance of sociopolitical satire in the series are all important elements in this controversy. It is argued that the general perception of digital changed fundamentally following the release of Grand Theft Auto III. The second section of the book approaches the games as they might be studied absent of the controversy. These essays study why and how players meaningfully play Grand Theft Auto games, reflecting on the elements of daily life that are represented in the games. They discuss the connection between game space and real space and the many ways that players mediate the symbols in a game with their minds, computers, and controllers.

Rockstar Games and American History

Author: Esther Wright
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110716615
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
For two decades, Rockstar Games have been making games that interrogate and represent the idea of America, past and present. Commercially successful, fan-beloved, and a frequent source of media attention, Rockstar’s franchises are positioned as not only game-changing, ground-breaking interventions in the games industry, but also as critical, cultural histories on America and its excesses. But what does Rockstar’s version of American history look like, and how is it communicated through critically acclaimed titles like Red Dead Redemption (2010) and L.A. Noire (2011)? By combining analysis of Rockstar’s games and a range of official communications and promotional materials, this book offers critical discussion of Rockstar as a company, their video games, and ultimately, their attempts at creating new narratives about U.S. history and culture. It explores the ways in which Rockstar’s brand identity and their titles coalesce to create a new kind of video game history, how promotional materials work to claim the "authenticity" of these products, and assert the authority of game developers to perform the role of historian. By working at the intersection of historical game studies, U.S. history, and film and media studies, this book explores what happens when contemporary demands for historical authenticity are brought to bear on the way we envisage the past –– and whose past it is deemed to be. Ultimately, this book implores those who research historical video games to consider the oft-forgotten sources at the margins of these games as importance spaces where historical meaning is made and negotiated.

Playing American

Author: Sören Schoppmeier
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111317757
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Book Description
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.

Extra Lives

Author: Tom Bissell
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307474313
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
In Extra Lives, acclaimed writer and life-long video game enthusiast Tom Bissell takes the reader on an insightful and entertaining tour of the art and meaning of video games. In just a few decades, video games have grown increasingly complex and sophisticated, and the companies that produce them are now among the most profitable in the entertainment industry. Yet few outside this world have thought deeply about how these games work, why they are so appealing, and what they are capable of artistically. Blending memoir, criticism, and first-rate reportage, Extra Lives is a milestone work about what might be the dominant popular art form of our time.

Everything Bad is Good for You

Author: Steven Johnson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101158018
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now and Farsighted Forget everything you’ve ever read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture. In this provocative, unfailingly intelligent, thoroughly researched, and surprisingly convincing big idea book, Steven Johnson draws from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and media theory to argue that the pop culture we soak in every day—from Lord of the Rings to Grand Theft Auto to The Simpsons—has been growing more sophisticated with each passing year, and, far from rotting our brains, is actually posing new cognitive challenges that are actually making our minds measurably sharper. After reading Everything Bad is Good for You, you will never regard the glow of the video game or television screen the same way again. With a new afterword by the author.

Gaming

Author: Alexander R. Galloway
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452908680
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
Video games have been a central feature of the cultural landscape for over twenty years and now rival older media like movies, television, and music in popularity and cultural influence. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to understand the video game as an independent medium. Most such efforts focus on the earliest generation of text-based adventures (Zork, for example) and have little to say about such visually and conceptually sophisticated games as Final Fantasy X, Shenmue, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and The Sims, in which players inhabit elaborately detailed worlds and manipulate digital avatars with a vast—and in some cases, almost unlimited—array of actions and choices. In Gaming, Alexander Galloway instead considers the video game as a distinct cultural form that demands a new and unique interpretive framework. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, particularly critical theory and media studies, he analyzes video games as something to be played rather than as texts to be read, and traces in five concise chapters how the “algorithmic culture” created by video games intersects with theories of visuality, realism, allegory, and the avant-garde. If photographs are images and films are moving images, then, Galloway asserts, video games are best defined as actions. Using examples from more than fifty video games, Galloway constructs a classification system of action in video games, incorporating standard elements of gameplay as well as software crashes, network lags, and the use of cheats and game hacks. In subsequent chapters, he explores the overlap between the conventions of film and video games, the political and cultural implications of gaming practices, the visual environment of video games, and the status of games as an emerging cultural form. Together, these essays offer a new conception of gaming and, more broadly, of electronic culture as a whole, one that celebrates and does not lament the qualities of the digital age. Alexander R. Galloway is assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University and author of Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization.

Jacked

Author: David Kushner
Publisher: Wiley
ISBN: 9780470936375
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
Inside the making of a videogame that defined a generation: Grand Theft Auto Grand Theft Auto is one of the biggest and most controversial videogame franchises of all time. Since its first release in 1997, GTA has pioneered the use of everything from 3D graphics to the voices of top Hollywood actors and repeatedly transformed the world of gaming. Despite its incredible innovations in the $75 billion game industry, it has also been a lightning rod of debate, spawning accusations of ethnic and sexual discrimination, glamorizing violence, and inciting real-life crimes. Jacked tells the turbulent and mostly unknown story of GTA's wildly ambitious creators, Rockstar Games, the invention and evolution of the franchise, and the cultural and political backlash it has provoked. Explains how British prep school brothers Sam and Dan Houser took their dream of fame, fortune, and the glamor of American pop culture and transformed it into a worldwide videogame blockbuster Written by David Kushner, author of Masters of Doom and a top journalist on gaming, and drawn from over ten years of interviews and research, including firsthand knowledge of Grand Theft Auto's creators and detractors Offers inside details on key episodes in the development of the series, including the financial turmoil of Rockstar games, the infamous "Hot Coffee" sex mini-game incident, and more Whether you love Grand Theft Auto or hate it, or just want to understand the defining entertainment product of a generation, you'll want to read Jacked and get the real story behind this boundary-pushing game.

Philosophy Through Video Games

Author: Jon Cogburn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113585968X
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
How can Wii Sports teach us about metaphysics? Can playing World of Warcraft lead to greater self-consciousness? How can we learn about aesthetics, ethics and divine attributes from Zork, Grand Theft Auto, and Civilization? A variety of increasingly sophisticated video games are rapidly overtaking books, films, and television as America's most popular form of media entertainment. It is estimated that by 2011 over 30 percent of US households will own a Wii console - about the same percentage that owned a television in 1953. In Philosophy Through Video Games, Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox - philosophers with game industry experience - investigate the aesthetic appeal of video games, their effect on our morals, the insights they give us into our understanding of perceptual knowledge, personal identity, artificial intelligence, and the very meaning of life itself, arguing that video games are popular precisely because they engage with longstanding philosophical problems. Topics covered include: * The Problem of the External World * Dualism and Personal Identity * Artificial and Human Intelligence in the Philosophy of Mind * The Idea of Interactive Art * The Moral Effects of Video Games * Games and God's Goodness Games discussed include: Madden Football, Wii Sports, Guitar Hero, World of Warcraft, Sims Online, Second Life, Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, Elder Scrolls, Zork, EverQuest Doom, Halo 2, Grand Theft Auto, Civilization, Mortal Kombat, Rome: Total War, Black and White, Aidyn Chronicles

Encyclopedia of Video Games [2 volumes]

Author: Mark J. P. Wolf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 991

Book Description
This encyclopedia collects and organizes theoretical and historical content on the topic of video games, covering the people, systems, technologies, and theoretical concepts as well as the games themselves. This two-volume encyclopedia addresses the key people, companies, regions, games, systems, institutions, technologies, and theoretical concepts in the world of video games, serving as a unique resource for students. The work comprises over 300 entries from 97 contributors, including Ralph Baer and Nolan Bushnell, founders of the video game industry and some of its earliest games and systems. Contributing authors also include founders of institutions, academics with doctoral degrees in relevant fields, and experts in the field of video games. Organized alphabetically by topic and cross-referenced across subject areas, Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming will serve the needs of students and other researchers as well as provide fascinating information for game enthusiasts and general readers.

Law, Video Games, Virtual Realities

Author: Dale Mitchell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000987833
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
This edited volume explores the intersection between the coded realm of the video game and the equally codified space of law through an insightful collection of critical readings. Law is the ultimate multiplayer role-playing game. Involving a process of world-creation, law presents and codifies the parameters of licit and permitted behaviour, requiring individuals to engage their roles as a legal subject – the player-avatar of law – in order to be recognised, perform legal actions, activate rights or fulfil legal duties. Although traditional forms of law (copyright, property, privacy, freedom of expression) externally regulate the permissible content, form, dissemination, rights and behaviours of game designers, publishers, and players, this collection examines how players simulate, relate, and engage with environments and experiences shaped by legality in the realm of video game space. Featuring critical readings of video games as a means of understanding law and justice, this book contributes to the developing field of cultural legal studies, but will also be of interest to other legal theorists, socio-legal scholars, and games theorists.