Overview

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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9783111244846

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Sören Schoppmeier, independent scholar, Berlin, Germany.

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