Video Gaming in Science Fiction A Critical Study
Product details
Biographical note
Jason Barr is an associate professor at Blue Ridge Community College. His work has appeared in African American Review, Explicator, The Journal of Continuing Higher Education, and The Journal of Caribbean Literatures, among others. He lives in Weyers Cave, Virginia. Series editor Matthew Wilhelm Kapell teaches American studies, anthropology, and writing at Pace University in New York.“Thoughtful, judicious, and enhanced with chapter notes and an index, <i>Video Gaming in Science Fiction</i> is a welcome addition”—<i>Midwest Book Review</i>.
As video gaming and gaming culture became more mainstream in the 1970s, science fiction authors began to incorporate aspects of each into their work. This study examines how media-fueled paranoia about video gaming--first emerging almost fifty years ago--still resonates in modern science fiction. The author reveals how negative stereotypes of gamers and gaming have endured in depictions of modern gamers in the media and how honest portrayals are still wanting, even in the "forward thinking" world of science fiction.
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
1: The Game and the Gamespace
2: Geekdom and the Gamer as Social Outcast
3: We’re All Grown Up Now: The “Maturation” and Insularity of Video Gaming and Science Fiction
4: Gender and the Body Politic
5: Fighting “the Man”: Against Governments and Corporations
6: Juvenile Science Fiction and the Future
Afterword: The Origins of Video Gaming in Science
Fiction Cinema
Chapter Notes
Bibliography
Index