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The Playing Card’S Progress: A Brief History Of Cards And Card Games, Joyce Goggin

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This article takes as its point of departure the fact that playing and tarot cards have generally been ignored as a topic for scholarly research, and suggests a number of reasons as to why this might be the case. While on the one hand cards are perceived as a trivial object, their long association with the occult and gambling further exacerbates the lack of serious interest taken in them. Moreover, because playing cards were imported into Europe from the East, they have been both directly and indirectly conceptualized as signifiers of oriental otherness and treated as a threat to the …

More Than Girlfriends, Geekettes, And Gladiatixes: Women, Feminism, And Fantasy Role-Playing Games, Rebecca Borah, Inez Schaechterle

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The only function women have in D&D is to serve cookies. Gary Gygax, the most well known of the creators of Dungeons & Dragons, claims he did not make this remark (Gel214th). That he did or not is perhaps, some thirty years after the introduction of the first fantasy role-playing game, of concern only to him. The problematic position of women players is a secure feature of the RPG zeitgeist. While few male gamers may openly challenge the assumption that women can or should play fantasy role games such as Dungeons & Dragons, the function of …

The Horror Is Alive: Immersion, Spectatorship, And The Cinematics Of Fear In The Survival Horror Genre, Jay Mcroy

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

The video game genre known as survival horror resembles contemporary horror cinema in that both increasingly popular forms of entertainment allow audiences to experience fear resulting from the development of suspense coupled with the dread and shock of encountering monstrosity. One need only note the remarkable success of next generation video game franchises like Resident Evil (1996) and Silent Hill (1999) to realize that, more than ever before, game players in their late teens and beyond long to immerse themselves within interactive nightmares that offer the kind of thrills and chills once available exclusively through horror literature and films. However, …

The Game's Afoot: Images Of Infinite Games In Samuel Delany's Trouble On Triton, Marc R. Zaldivar

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Games are frequently used in speculative literature as a metaphor for real-world activities. In Trouble on Triton, Samuel Delany uses several sorts of games in order to explore complex systems of modeling and interrelationships between fiction and reality, extending a tradition in science fiction of placing games at the very center of social reality. Zaldivar's essay seeks to define some of the concepts of game theory that can be used to understand this complex novel and its representation of human social life. In particular, Zaldivar explores finite and infinite games and their uses within a deconstructive theoretical framework. A …

Multi-Player Computer Gaming: Better Than Playing (Pc Games) With Yourself, Melanie Swalwell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Based on research conducted with a multiplayer gaming group, this article introduces and critically outlines the phenomenon of lanning, the practice where computer game players get together to play each other over a local area network or LAN. The author argues that lanning presents a significant challenge to a number of ingrained assumptions about computer gaming. Primary amongst these is that lanning entails players meeting, not just in the virtual world of a game, but also face to face, dealing a blow to theories that gamers are anti-social. The author argues that the sociality of this form of gameplay also …

Role Playing Games As Interactive Fiction, John Miller

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This chapter compares the experience of gaming and the experience of reading, and explores what that comparison might tell us about each. More specifically, it applies methods of literary analysis to the study of two narrative activities situated near the border of reading and gaming: Electronic hyperfictions and role-playing games. Miller first reviews literary theories of reader response and interactivity and notes how these have informed recent critical discussions of literary hyperfiction. He then critiques these discussions and the claims made for hyperfiction's liberating or empowering effect on readers: Contrary to the claims of some critics, such narratives generally fail …

Imagined Cities, Real Futures: Simcity And The Co-Production Of Urban Dystopias, Samuel Gerald Collins

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

While the author of this chapter agrees with anthropologists who reject an urban studies predicated on postmodern surfaces and insist that we analyze cities in regional, national and global contexts of political economy, he nevertheless suggests that the urban imaginary has never been so important: Movies, television and music have proven all too useful in the continued vilification of an urban underclass. In 2001, in order to explore the role media might play in the structuring and delimitating of the ways we think about cities, Collins assigned SimCity, a computer simulation game combining models of urban development with cellular automata, …

Digital Extensions And Performed Players: A Theoretical Model For The Video/Computer Game, Ben Fisler

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Despite over twenty years of studies, scholars have yet to identify a productive theoretical model for the video game that does not depend on a fragmentary understanding of its form. Following Pierre Bourdieu's contention that the purpose of criticism is to understand cultural products as distinct scientific objects, and Marshall McLuhan's theory that the message and formative power of media are the media themselves, this study attempts to generate a foundational critical understanding of the video game. Building on the most lucrative intrinsic (such as David Myer's 1991 Computer Game Semiotics) and extrinsic (such as Jeffrey Goldstein's 1998 Immortal …

Allegorical Reductions And Social Reconstructions: An Introduction To Games, Gamers, And Gaming Cultures, Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Games have become a central metaphor in representations of society, and most people are familiar enough with Lewis Carroll's Alice to know that when she passes through the looking glass she finds herself embroiled in a game a Chess which is also much more (Carroll 1992 [1897]). This strange game of Chess is simultaneously a simulation and an enactment of social life in Wonderland, and Carroll plots out Alice 's narrative path as a series of tactical Chess moves, which can be understood as both an attempt to win the game and to navigate through Wonderland and her …

Cold War Games And Postwar Art, Claudia Mesch

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

During the Cold War both “superpowers” used games, particularly chess, in order to construct an ideology of complete conflict and irreconcilable division between East and West. This essay focuses on the broad cultural challenge to divisive Cold War zero-sum mentality issued by a number of artists—André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Öyvind Fahlström, and Fluxus artists George Maciunas, George Brecht, Robert Watts, Takako Saito and Yoko Ono. These artists, in a second wave of game-focused art, returned to the concerns of surrealist art practice and to earlier cultural game theory. Even conceptual art production was impacted by the predetermined structure of …

When A Killer Body Isn’T Enough: Cross-Gender Identification In Action-Adventure Video Games, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

While sports games try to recreate the atmosphere of a stadium or of television broadcasts of games, role-playing and action-adventure games attempt to duplicate cinematography through animation. For Tomb Raider, the virtual reality created by the cinematic animation of the game produces an environment for male-to-female cross-gender identification, a topic that has received little critical attention. The sense of identification intended in this chapter comes from psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis, who describe identification as a psychological process in which a subject assimilates an aspect, a property, a characteristic of another and transforms himself [or herself] totally or partially …

Contributors, Matthew Wolf-Meyer (Editor), Davin Heckman (Editor)

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 6 issue 1 of Reconstruction.

Alien(Ating) Naturecultures: Feminist Sf As Creative Science Studies, Helen Merrick

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

“Alien(ating) Naturecultures” examines the potential of feminist science fictions to act as “cross-cultural” narratives in encounters between the humanities and sciences. Merrick argues that the conjunction of disciplines figured by the term “science fiction” bears re-examination as a resource for science studies, and a potential mediator in science-humanities dialogues.

Specifically, Merrick asks, when we are concerned with critiquing and unpacking technoscientific practices, cultures and knowledges, what can more creative forms such as science fiction (sf) offer? Such questions about “naturecultures” are intimately connected to the ways we construct and understand “life,” the “human” and difference in the discourses of Science. …

Oy Science Fiction: On Genre, Criticism, And Alien Love: An Interview With Marleen S. Barr, Marlene S. Barr, Ximena Gallardo C., C. Jason Smith

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph of Abstract]

Marleen S. Barr is a pioneer of feminist science fiction criticism and a leader in the fight against the ghettoizing influences of genre-labeling in literary criticism. While the noteworthy Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction (University of Iowa Press, 1992) has been praised as Barr's seminal work in feminist science fiction criticism and theory, it is in Genre Fission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies (U of Iowa P, 2000) where she takes on literary critics' discriminatory practices against genre fiction in general and fantasy and science fiction in particular.

Whistler’S Fog And The Aesthetics Of Place, Bruce Janz

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

The concept of place has usually been understood as either a phenomenological, epistemological, or ethical category. An understanding of place as aesthetic or rhetorical, on the other hand, tends to focus on the widely varied uses of the concept. First, I sketch out the wide range of uses of place, that have been drawn from writings on the concept. These uses are not definitions of place, but rather functions that the term performs. Place stands in for other ideas, and allows access to different aspects of human experience. Second, I will draw from this range of uses some ideas about …

Rhetorics Of Place: The Importance Of Public Spaces And Public Spheres, Michael Benton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

This special issue's emphasis on the rhetorics of place is a claim that our physical places are shaped and understood through the public sphere by the various communities of meaning competing for attention, and, in which public opinion is formed and policy decisions are made (Sanchez-Casal and Macdonald, 10-14; Strickland,165; also see Arendt; Borradori; Calhoun; Escobar; Fraser; Glissant; Habermas).

On Ethan Watter's Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family And Commitment, Danny Mayer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Outside of the 60s generation, there are few if any generational groupings as well known and discussed as Generation X, the term coined by Douglas Copeland to describe the generation approaching adulthood in the post-Reagan boom-years of the 1990s. As the subject of books (Generation X), movies (Reality Bites, Clerks, Slacker), TV dramas and sitcoms (Seinfeld, Friends, Ally McBeal, Sex and the City), and Prime Time news specials, there is seemingly little new to say about Gen X. It has long since been tagged as a generation …

Discovering Your Cinematic Cultural Identity, John Shelton Lawrence, Marty S. Knepper

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paired set explores the experience of cultural identities constructed by and experienced through popular film. The essay “Discovering Your Cinematic Cultural Identity” reflects the authors’ decades of residence in the state of Iowa and their personal irritation with the stereotypes that Hollywood regularly calls upon in evoking the American rural. We gained a new perspective on this sort of imagery when it surfaced again in Field of Dreams (1989) and The Bridges of Madison County novel (1992) and film (1995). Each of these films triggered unprecedented film tourism for the state. Through an exploration of these films and others …

Cnning And Showdown: Iraq: News, New Media, And Popular Culture, G. Kim Blank

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Kim Blank's CNNing and Showdown Iraq, too, provides an innovative model for the interaction and mutual transfusion of case study and the work of theorizing. Although the backdrop to Blank's essay is CNN's cultural significance and the programming it ran under the SHOWDOWN: Iraq banner, it repeatedly returns to the busy intersection of media, technology, popular culture, and mass culture. Characterized by its author as restless, the piece strategically employs a non-linear discursive strategy deliberately mimicking the practices of channel surfing and the constant interruption of the commercial break. It re-contextualizes, in other words, the critical perspective by re-inventing it …

Notes On Wittgenstein’S Method, The Practice Of Cultural History, And Early Film Theory, Markus Rheindorf

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Markus Rheindorf's contribution offers some reflections on the critical potential of Ludwig Wittgenstein's uebersichtliche Darstellungor concise presentation, his self-consciously employed method of philosophical writing in the 1930s, and explores its theoretical and methodological potential for the practice of cultural history. In so doing, it articulates a substantial critique of conventional disciplinary historiography, taking as its case in point the history of (early) film theory. Rheindorf then takes up the suggestions gained from juxtaposing Wittengstein's method with conventional accounts of the history of early film theory and suggests concrete ways in which these might be put to practical use in the …

On Bill V. Mullen's Afro-Orientalism, Graham Barnfield

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

For two decades Edward Said's Orientalism has occupied a significant place in how we think through the cultural relations between what we now call ‘North’ and ‘South’. Conceived in the 1970s, Said’s model mounted a challenge to readers in the west, suggesting they should unlearn what they know of the east. Despite its influence, one weakness of this approach was the underlying suggestion that orientalism was a one-way street, constituting a fixed set of perceptions or timeless discourses. In and without the Orientalist imagination, what is to be done with those in ‘the Occident’ who find themselves treated …

Brown Meets Green: The Political Fecology Of Poopreport.Com, Marisol Cortez

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In engaging with the culture of filth, Marisol Cortez's Brown Meets Green: The Political Fecology of PoopReport.com questions contemporary cultural criticism's emphasis on shit's textual ambivalence. In order to avoid relapsing into either the Bakhtinian celebration of the grotesque or the too narrowly conceived Kristevan category of the abject, Cortez argues, and to find a way out of this theoretical dualism, one must rethink the very categories of filth and waste through an ecocritical reading of the scatological -- the meeting of brown and green -- performed at the confluence of ecology, cultural studies, and Marxist political economy. This perspective …

Media Discourse: Social Semiotics And The Study Of Multimodal Discourse. An Interview With Theo Van Leeuwen, Theo Van Leeuwen, Judith Reitstaetter, Markus Rheindorf

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph of Abstract]

This interview article is intended to provide both an overview of the contribution Theo van Leeuwen has made to the field of semiotics and approach his work from an unconventional angle. The first aspect of our aim is covered in the form of an introduction comprised of a short biographical note, a list of recent publications and short reviews of van Leeuwen’s major works. The second aspect of what we hope to accomplish is tackled in the form of the interview itself. In this, we have tried to balance general questions – e.g. about the epistemological …

Nothing's Gonna Give? Age, Gender, And Cultures Of The Screen, Christine Scodari, Becky Mulvaney

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Christine Scodari's and Becky Mulvaney's Nothing's Gonna Give? Age, Gender, and Cultures of the Screen investigates the 2003 romantic comedy Something's Gotta Give, written and directed by Nancy Meyers as exceptional in its featuring a fifty-something woman as leading actress. Beginning with an analysis of the filmic text itself, the authors do not confine themselves to it, but go on to critically engage with its reception in both the press and academia. While the focus is thus shifted from the film to the meta- and para-texts produced in the course of its reception and promotion, the underlying questions asked …

An Editorial Introduction To Reconstructing Media, Markus Rheindorf

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Media [pl. of medium, from the Latin noun medium, meaning ‘the middle’ or ‘the public eye’]. Although no longer one of the top buzzwords in the humanities or cultural criticism, if you prefer, ‘the media’ are still around, in the sense of both an ever more elusive and ramified empirical reality and as a conceptual field marked by the theoretical debates of several decades. Whether dealing with synchronic analysis or historical change, a specific medium or the media in general, a singular text, a group of texts or genre, studies relying on – or should we say, …

Contributors, Davin Heckman (Editor)

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 5 issue1 of Reconstruction.

But Who Is Any Longer Interested In The Possible?: Kathy Acker In Hell Failing Fuck You, Jake Kennedy

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In 'But who is any longer interested in the possible?': Kathy Acker in Hell Failing Fuck You I explore and celebrate Acker's use of a tropics of failure (plagiarism, pain, terror, gender-play, bad jokes, dumbness) as an inimitable strategy for achieving counter-cultural art and community. The prose style and scholarly apparatus of my article reflect not only my position as a poet/academic but also attempt to model an ethical, non-authoritative, Acker-informed critical language.

One-Way Street In A Global City: Don Delillo And The Lugubrious Boredom Of The New Economy, Samuel Gerald Collins

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

few of the things we have fought against in cultural studies include the erroneous perceptions that the forces associated with globalization are 1) benefiting the world's peoples and 2) producing a homogeneous global culture. Against this, we have proffered endless texts documenting the sufferings of the world's peoples and critiquing the underlying assumptions regarding U.S. and Western hegemony as well as more hopeful tracts charting a more equitable future as an alternative to crushing regimes of neo-liberalism. In this, we have been joined by countless activists as well as others in women's studies, Latino/a studies, international relations and …

Spivak After Marx After Derrida, Philip Leonard

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Spivak is often viewed as an unequivocally deconstructive theorist, and she frequently reinforces this impression by proclaiming her allegiance to Derrida's ideas. Recent comments by her suggest, however, that there are limits to her deconstructive convictions. This essay considers some of Spivak's debts to Derrida's work, though it is primarily concerned with those occasions when she states her misgivings about his ability to understand postcoloniality, global power, and resistance movements. Reading Marx more accurately would, she insists, have allowed Derrida both to grasp capitalism's complex logic and to consider the effects of subaltern interventions upon capitalism's global authority. Such an …

I Connect Therefore I Am: Connectivity And Networking In Bodies, Technologies, Communities, And Selves, Anthony Lambert

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The notion of connection refers to both metaphorical and material practices informing our understandings of the flows of energy and information within human bodies, communities, geographies, and technological networks. Cranny-Francis offers a definition of connection which accounts for the term's significance in the contexts of both Cultural Studies and multimedia literacy:

It refers to the ways in which texts generate meanings through their relationship with other texts, to the development of multimedia technologies that are characterized by their connectivity (the web, the net), and to the ways in which meanings are generated crucially by the connection between texts …