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Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Revenge Of The Nerds: Tech Masculinity And Digital Hegemony, Benjamin M. Latini
Revenge Of The Nerds: Tech Masculinity And Digital Hegemony, Benjamin M. Latini
Doctoral Dissertations
Revenge of the Nerds provides a cultural history of the evolution of white nerd masculinities in American culture through interpretations of a wide variety of texts and representations using the methods of literary studies and American studies. The dissertation is organized around four overlapping stages of nerd masculinity based on changes in technology and their effects on culture, as well as white male nerds’ efforts to remain culturally relevant and gain the benefits of being close to hegemonic masculinity. The four nerd types are the computer nerd, the gamer, the gatekeeper nerd, and the maladaptive nerd which reflect the following …
The Library Wants To Kill You: Places Of Information As Battleground And Sanctum In Halo, Mackenzie Streissguth
The Library Wants To Kill You: Places Of Information As Battleground And Sanctum In Halo, Mackenzie Streissguth
Proceedings from the Document Academy
Video games are often a widespread access point for studying information-seeking behaviors, as a large portion of the population (and its youth) play them. Understanding how real-world analogues, like libraries, are portrayed in games can give us insights into how they mirror conflicts of reality. By examining the depictions of information systems and accompanying curators in Halo: Combat Evolved (2001), we can begin to investigate the perceptions of libraries and their antagonism in ludonarratives. Resulting analysis reveals multiple layers of archival hostility that are ultimately upended in later iterations in the game series, changing the nature of the library itself. …
Virtual Wastelands: Reframing Nuclear Representation In Video Games, Francesca Crocker
Virtual Wastelands: Reframing Nuclear Representation In Video Games, Francesca Crocker
Global Honors Theses
This thesis utilizes a comparative textual analysis of two popular video games series that feature heavy nuclear themes and representation of nuclear weapons/war in combination with applied critical theory to build a framework of game design elements that lead towards more thoughtful and considerate representation of this particular real, active, and global threat. The analysis of these two series in particular -- Fallout and Metal Gear Solid -- provides a comparative look at how nuclear politics in popular media is represented and consumed in both the United States and Japan, with consideration of history, regulation, and audience interactivity.
Good Game, Greyory Blake
Good Game, Greyory Blake
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …
(Re)Mediating The Spirit: Evangelical Christian Young Adult Media, Tamara Watkins
(Re)Mediating The Spirit: Evangelical Christian Young Adult Media, Tamara Watkins
Theses and Dissertations
"We are in the world, but not of the world," a maxim frequently spoken in evangelical Christian culture, provides insight into how these individuals view their relationship with secular culture. They presume to share the same temporal plane with secular culture, but do not participate in it. In this dissertation, I explore whether the division between evangelical Christian culture and secular culture is as clear as this aphorism implies. To facilitate this investigation, I examine media Christian content creators created for an American evangelical Christian young adult audience in the early twenty-first century, specifically focusing on novel-length fiction, comics and …
Free To Play/Pay To Win: Consuming Competition Through Online Gaming In The Neoliberal Age, Brandon Jones
Free To Play/Pay To Win: Consuming Competition Through Online Gaming In The Neoliberal Age, Brandon Jones
Honors Projects
This project examines online gaming in the context of decades of deregulation and privatization. In the piece, I examine American culture’s infatuation with the value of competition through a historical and hegemonic scope. Throughout the piece, I make connections between online gaming and the illusion that the populace must compete for unnecessarily scarce resources. The goal of this project is to illustrate how micro-transactions in online gaming is not beneficial for the consumer, but rather coercive reinforcements of the spontaneous philosophy of competition prevalent in the Neoliberal age.
Married, With Children And An Xbox: Compromise In Video Games Play, Marc A. Ouellette
Married, With Children And An Xbox: Compromise In Video Games Play, Marc A. Ouellette
English Faculty Publications
(First paragraph) In a home with two children under six, managing to find the time and the games that allow for play with a partner who has completely different tastes and capabilities produces compromises both inside and outside the game, as well as a hybrid form that spans the two. This last point highlights the fact that compromise remains a popularly studied topic in considerations of games, but only within very discrete boundaries that do not necessarily have anything to do with play or with players. Said another way, compromise appears in studies that foreground games as promoting aggression and …
"We Should Have Brought The Tank": Hypermediated Interactivity In Red Vs. Blue, Marc A. Ouellette
"We Should Have Brought The Tank": Hypermediated Interactivity In Red Vs. Blue, Marc A. Ouellette
English Faculty Publications
Machinima, the practice of adapting recorded video game play into short films, highlights an often unacknowledged but significant shift in the consumption of video games and represents a key and underexplored intersection between the two leading theoretical camps. Considering the landmark series Red vs. Blue through the lens of Bolter and Grusin's propositions about "new" media's relationships with other forms offers an entry point for theorizing not only machinima but also the intersections between the ludology and narratology positions in games studies.