Critical and Cultural Studies Commons^™

Making Happiness In West Egg And Simburbia: An Inquiry Into Consumption In The Great Gatsby And The Sims, Shawn Thomson

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First two paragraphs]

At the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway reflects of his journey to the East: “this has been a story of the West” (184). Nick never explains exactly how this is the case, particularly odd since all the action takes place between Manhattan and Long Island. Nick’s hesitant explanation for this puzzling conclusion lies in the western origin of the central characters of the novel and their inability to adapt “to Eastern Life” (184). But the characters seem a part of, if not overshadowed by, the riotous world of West Egg. Only …

Film And Television After 9/11 [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

One of the necessary compromises a book such as Film and TV After 9/11 must make is the amount and variety of examples it can provide. In order to be the first book to cover the subject, the book sacrifices the types of materials covered and the variety of themes they depict. Although the editor, Wheeler Winston Dixon, does not do so, the book’s twelve essays slot into four basic categories: analogies, productions altered to suit the "post-9/11" mindset, post-9/11 productions with metaphorical rather than literal linkages to the event and pre-9/11 productions whose viewing must now take that day …

Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Recognizing the growing importance (at least for consumers) of video games as a popular form of narrative fiction, Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska situate their collection, ScreenPlay: cinema/videogames/interfaces as a text which is corrective, informative and explorative. In the first case, the editors sought essays which would move the critical discourse on video games away from the more familiar but reductive debates surrounding the "effects" of video games (especially on children) and their modes of representation (especially of the female form and violence). Indeed, these have become the sine qua non of video game criticism and one feeds the other …

Constructing A New Game: J.K. Rowling’S Quidditch And Global Kid Culture, Terri Toles Patkin

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

As part of her wildly popular Harry Potter fantasy series, author J.K. Rowling created a setting of magical characters to populate magical towns, perform magical jobs, purchase magical products -- and play a magical game called Quidditch. This fast-paced team sport played on broomsticks is both a participant and a spectator sport, and forms a nucleus of leisure activity and discourse in the Harry Potter books. From preschoolers to professionals, wizards in Rowling's world incorporate this virtual sport into their everyday lives. Rowling's development of Quidditch -– some have suggested that Rowling's intense dislike of school hockey practices sparked the …

You Need Love And Friendship For This Mission!: The Final Fantasy Series As Social Education For Japanese Youth, Ben Hourigan

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

From the mid to late 1990s, popular and academic discourse on video games, particularly in the United States, has focused on their supposed capacity to engender violent and otherwise anti-social behavior in youth. Much like ludologists' recent claims that video games are not a narrative medium, at least one reason for this is that commentators have too narrow an understanding of the diverse range of games that exist. In addition to this, game demonizers have demonstrated an inadequate understanding of the ways games are related to real life. In order to combat these misunderstandings, this chapter analyzes the role of …

Little Gods And Little Heroes: Hyperreal Ethics In God Games And Online Gaming, G. Christopher Williams

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Media critics, notably Jean Baudrillard, have suggested that the environment of simulations are to be defined as something more real than the real, or, in his terms, hyperreal. If hyperrealities are indeed the way that we can define the environment of multimedia technologies like video games, what sorts of ethical considerations should exist in a place that gamers conceive as more real than the real? This essay considers what ethical considerations are worth contemplating as gamers begin to take on the roles of gods and heroes in multiplayer video games. The little gods and heroes whose identities gamers have begun …

The Everyday Life Of Playing Cards, Ruralism, And The Case Of Russian Peasantry, Anna N. Kushkova

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This chapter addresses the issue of card playing in the Russian village of the second half of the nineteenth century. The author challenges a widely spread stereotype that Russian peasants did not play in any other way that merely for fun or for entertainment, but rather shows that this view is inconsistent with historical reality, which places card play at the center of daily social life. Social changes of village life after peasants' emancipation (1861) brought about systematic contacts of rural and urban population in many provinces of the country. As a result, a number of city habits and practices …

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 …

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 …

The Kiosk Culture: Reconciling The Performance Support Paradox In The Postmodern Age Of Machines, Thomas Cavanagh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Do you remember the first time you used an Automatic Teller Machine (ATM)? Or a pay-at-the-pump gas station? Or an airline e-ticket kiosk? How did you know what to do? Although you never received any formal instruction in how to interact with the self-service technology, you were likely able to accomplish your task (e.g., withdrawing or depositing money) as successfully as an experienced user. However, not so long ago, to accomplish that same task, you needed the direct mediation of a service professional who had been trained how to use the required complex technology. What has changed? In short, the …

Cultivating Identities And Differences : A Case Study Of The Hong Kong Junior Secondary Economic And Public Affairs Curriculum, Yuen Fun, Muriel Law

Lingnan Theses

This thesis studies the junior secondary EPA curriculum and the complex cultural process of teaching and learning of the curriculum. It draws on theoretical frameworks developed in the field of cultural studies and critical pedagogy, particularly works by Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg and Paulo Freire. It investigates how the EPA curricular texts attempt to produce the identity characteristic of "rational, sensitive and active citizens" in contemporary Hong Kong through constructing differences that negate the Other. Through analyzing classroom discursive practices, the thesis examines how the curricular knowledge "interpellates" teachers into subject position to talk about the "rational, sensitive …