In Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media, Claudia Costa Pederson analyzes modernist avant-garde and contemporary video games to challenge the idea that gaming is an exclusively white, heterosexual, male, corporatized leisure activity and reenvisions it as a catalyst for social change.
By looking at over fifty projects that together span a century and the world, Pederson explores the capacity for sociopolitical commentary in virtual and digital realms and highlights contributions to the history of gaming by women, queer, and transnational artists. The result is a critical tool for understanding video games as imaginative forms of living that offer alternatives to our current reality.
With an interdisciplinary approach, Gaming Utopia emphasizes how game design, creation, and play can become political forms of social protest and examines the ways that games as art open doors to a more just and peaceful world.
Autorentext
Claudia Costa Pederson is Associate Professor of Art History at Wichita State University and Curator of New Media for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival at Ithaca College. She has contributed to multiple journals and edited volumes on film and media.
Klappentext
- A strong contribution to IU Press's offering in digital game and media studies by an up-andcoming scholar. - Focuses on a global collection of digital games made by non-western countries and native communities to challenge the narratives about gaming as white, heterosexual, male, corporatized leisure-time activity. - Explores games as cites for social protest and connects well with previous IU Press titles, such as Gaming Representation. - Written in accessible language, this book will have appeal in undergraduate courses in game studies and game design.
Inhalt
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Avant-Garde Plays
2. Action, Participation, and the Digital Avant-Garde
3. Cybernetic Ecologies of Art and Counterculture
4. Gaming Electronic Civil Disobedience
5. A Dreampolitik of Persuasive and Other Queer Games
Conclusion: Unfinished Processes
References
Index