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GAMEPLAY MODE: WAR, SIMULATION, AND TECHNOCULTURE

Patrick Crogan



 

From flight simulators and first-person shooters to MMPOG and innovative strategy games like 2008's Spore, computer games owe their development to computer simulation and imaging produced by and for the military during the Cold War. To understand their place in contemporary culture, Patrick Crogan argues, we must first understand the military logics that created and continue to inform them. Gameplay Mode situates computer games and gaming within the contemporary technocultural moment, connecting them to developments in the conceptualization of pure war since the Second World War and the evolution of simulation as both a technological achievement and a sociopolitical tool.


Crogan begins by locating the origins of computer games in the development of cybernetic weapons systems in the 1940s, the U.S. Air Force's attempt to use computer simulation to protect the country against nuclear attack, and the U.S. military's development of the SIMNET simulated battlefield network in the late 1980s. He then examines specific game modes and genres in detail, from the creation of virtual space in fight simulation games and the co-option of narrative forms in gameplay to the continuities between online gaming sociality and real-world communities and the potential of experimental or artgame projects like September 12th: A Toy World and Painstation, to critique conventional computer games.


Drawing on critical theoretical perspectives on computer-based technoculture, Crogan reveals the profound extent to which today's computer games-and the wider culture they increasingly influence-are informed by the technoscientific program they inherited from the military-industrial complex. But, Crogan concludes, games can play with, as well as play out, their underlying logic, offering the potential for computer gaming to anticipate a different, more peaceful and hopeful future.

 

PUBLICATION DETAILS

LANGUAGE

BINDING

EDITION

ISBN

YEAR

PAGES

English

Hardcover


9780816653348

2011

248

English

Paperback

9780816653355

2011

248

English

eBook

N/A

2011

248


 

TAGS


Publishers: #UniversityofMinnesotaPress (University of Minnesota Press)

Languages: #English

Accessibility: #TextToSpeech

Year: #Year2011

Genres: #MilitaryWar


Companies:

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Public Figures:

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Games: N/A


Misc:

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