Description
Book SynopsisAt a time when print and film have shown the classic Western and noir genres to be racist, heteronormative, and neocolonial, Sara Humphreys’s Manifest Destiny 2.0 asks why these genres endure so prolifically in the video game market. While video games provide a radically new and exciting medium for storytelling, most game narratives do not offer fresh ways of understanding the world.
Video games with complex storylines are based on enduring American literary genres that disseminate problematic ideologies, quelling cultural anxieties over economic, racial, and gender inequality through the institutional acceptance and performance of Anglo cultural, racial, and economic superiority. Although game critics and scholars recognize how genres structure games and gameplay, the concept of genre continues to be viewed as a largely invisible power, subordinate to the computational processes of programming, graphics, and the making of a multimillion-dollar best seller
Trade Review
“[Sara Humphreys] demonstrates the ways in which games and, more specifically, reward systems are aligned with troubling ideological positions related to race, class, and gender. . . . [She] draws on a broad range of scholars and theorists of narrative [with the result being] a rich network of sources that help connect the functioning of game-based storytelling to a broader understanding of narrative.”—Holly Willis, author of Fast Forward: The Future(s) of the Cinematic Arts
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Game and the Nation: Legacies of the Frontier Western
2. Manifest Memory: The Role of Mexico in Red Dead Redemption
3. Virtual Indian Removal: Why Indigenous Knowledge Matters in Game Development
4. “He’s Everything”: Making the Man in L.A. Noire
5. Blanching Noire: The Performance of White Womanhood and Middle-Class Identity
6. Burning Down the House: Murder, Corruption, and the Middle Class
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index
