Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Playing American: Open-World Videogames and the Reproduction of American Culture

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

Schoppmeier, Sören

Hardcover

Series: Video Games and the Humanities, Book 14

Games & Activities General20th Century United States HistoryGeneral World History

ISBN10: 3111244849
ISBN13: 9783111244846
Publisher: de Gruyter Oldenbourg
Published: Oct 4 2023
Pages: 240
Weight: 1.23
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

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.

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