Introduction: Is the 'Culture' in Game Culture the
'Culture' of Cultural Studies? 1
Video Games and the Matter of Culture 2
Games in the Academy 7
Which Games? 14
On the Importance of Cultural Studies for
Game Studies 17
Cultural Studies Meets Game Studies 22
Form and/as Identity Politics in Games 27
Being Critical 30
GamerGate, Games Criticism and Gender Problems 35
Looking Ahead 42
1 Poetics of Form and Politics of Identity; Or, Games
as Cultural Palimpsests 47
Introduction 48
A Digital Politics of Identity 55
Th e Poetics of Form in Liberation 61
Aveline as Queered, Creole, Intersectional 68
Playability and Phantasms 76
'History is Our Playground' 81
Conclusion: Embracing the Mess 86
2 Aesthetics of Ambivalence and Whiteness in Crisis 89
Introduction 89
Cultural Context: Whiteness in Crisis, Racial
Violence and Games 96
Th e Last of Us 99
Critical Whiteness Studies and Whiteness After 9/11 104vi
The Last of Us and Imperiled Whiteness 109
Spec Ops: Th e Line and the White Hero Interrupted 121
Tomb Raider , Whiteness and the Female Heroine
in Peril 131
Conclusion: A Trauma Narrative of Whiteness 137
3 The Landscapes of Games as Ideology 141
Introduction 141
Metal Gear Solid V: Th e Phantom Pain 146
Game Spaces and World- Building: Formalism 152
Studying Game Space in a Cultural Context 160
Th eorizing Game Space as Ideological Landscape 167
Th ere is No Such Place: Afghanistan in Th e Phantom
Pain 176
Conclusion: A Particular View of a Particular World 180
4 The World is a Ghetto: Imaging the Global
Metropolis in Playable Representation 183
Introduction: Speculative Futures, Genre and the
Global Metropolis 183
Max Payne 3 : Noir Figure, Exotic Ground 188
Remember Me and Urban Amnesia 197
Play in the Fourth World City 203
Bullet Time, Memory Remixing and Harvey's
Space- Time Compression 212
Two Playable Cities: Th e Favela and the Cyberpunk
Metropolis 216
Conclusion: Playing Possible Futures 225