This book argues that videogames address contemporary, middle-class anxieties about poverty in the United States. The early chapters consider gaming as a modern form of slumming and explore the ways in which titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and World of Warcraft thematize poverty. The argument turns to the field of literary studies to identify analytical frameworks for addressing and understanding these themes. Throughout, the book considers how the academic area of inquiry known as game studies has developed over time, and makes use of such scholarship to present, frame, and value its major claims and findings. In its conclusion, the book models how poverty themes might be identified and associated for the purpose of gaining greater insights into how games can shape, and also be shaped by, the player’s economic expectations.
Author(s): Adam Crowley
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 167
City: London
Acknowledgments
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
Game Studies and Poverty
Poverty in Woke Game Studies Discourse
Critical Contexts of Poverty in Game Studies Scholarship
Virtual Poverty and Congruence
Authoritative Dispatches from the Field
Specifying Poverty for Future Game Studies Investigations
The Player’s Act of Play: Slumming as Transmedia Context
The Intersection of Player and Played: Slumming in Skyrim
The Intersection of Player and Played: Thematizing Poverty
Bibliography
Chapter 2: Relative Poverty and Slumming Simulations
Behavior Scripts and Ethical Imperatives
Specifying Poverty for Analysis: Relative Poverty
Relative Poverty in World of Warcraft
Contextualizing World of Warcraft’s Poverty Themes
The Player’s Acts of Play: Relative Poverty and Reordered Experience
World of Warcraft Poverty Thematics
Beyond the Slums: The Player’s Act of Play as Context for Poverty Thematics
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Player Identity and the Conditions of Play
Playing at Poor
The Impoverished at Play: Assessing the Technomasculine
Representing Impoverished Communities in Videogames
Bibliography
Chapter 4: The Player and Game Studies’ Rhetoric of Inclusion
The Player’s Acts of Play: Identity in Gaming Cultures
Contexts for Play: Identity and Poverty
A Struggle for Definition: Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Games Research
A Struggle for Terminology: First Person Scholar and “Middle State” Publications
A Struggle for Recognition: Not Your Mama’s Gamer’s Transition from Blog to Journal
Bibliography
Chapter 5: Human Subjects and Digital Poverty
Game Studies: The Player and The Played
Game Studies: Addressing the Proper Subject—Opportunities for Growth
Game Studies’ Postmodern Economics: The Avant-Pop Rides Again
Game Studies’ Postmodern Economics: From Avant-Pop to Social Realism
Bibliography
Chapter 6: Conclusion
Literary Contexts for Digital Slumming
Literary Studies: Game Studies’ Coalmine Canary
Gentility and the Intersection of Game Studies and Literary Studies
An Aesthetic Tradition for Literary Considerations of the Player’s Act of Play
A Point of Departure for Literary Considerations of the Player’s Act of Play: “Lore”
Assessing Lore’s Significance to Relative Poverty
Bibliography
Bibliography
Index
