Description
Book SynopsisTransnational Play approaches gameplay as a set of practices and a global industry that includes diverse participation from players and developers located within the global South, in nations outside of the First World. Players experience play in game cafes, through casual games for regional and global causes like environmentalism, through piracy and cheats, via cultural localization, on their mobile phones, and through urban playful art in Latin America. This book offers a reorientation of perspective on the global developers who make games, as well as the players who consume games, while still acknowledging geographically distributed socioeconomic, racial, gender, and other inequities. Over the course of the inquiry, which includes a chapter dedicated to the cartography of the mobile augmented reality game
Pokémon Go, the author develops a theoretical line of argument critically informed by gender studies and intersectionality, postcolonialism, geopolitics, and game studies, problematizing play as a diverse and contested transnational domain.
Trade Review"Anne Marie Schleiner’s
Transnational Play: Piracy, Urban Art, and Mobile Games (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) makes steps to shift and broaden the ways in which videogames and videogame play are approached and understood within game studies. [...]
Transnational Play remains timely and relevant."
- John Sharp,
Game Studies, Volume 21, Issue 1, May 2021"Anne Marie Schleiner’s
Transnational Play: Piracy, Urban Art, and Mobile Games (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) makes steps to shift and broaden the ways in which videogames and videogame play are approached and understood within game studies. [...]
Transnational Play remains timely and relevant."
- John Sharp,
Game Studies, Volume 21, Issue 1, May 2021
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Transnational Play
Section One: Reorienting Player Geographies
Chapter 1: Tilting the Axis of Global Play: From East/West to South/North
Chapter 2: Venues for Ludoliteracy: Arcades, Game Cafes, and Street Pirates
Chapter 3: The Free-to-play Time of Women in Brazil: Localized Mobile and Casual Games
Section Two: Ludic Perspectives from South of the Border
Chapter 4: Ludic Recycling in Latin American Art: From Remixing the City to Sampling Nature
Chapter 5: The Geopolitics of Pokémon Go: Navigating Bordering Cities with a Mobile Augmented Reality Game
Section Three: From Global to Local Game Development
Chapter 6: The Absence of the Oppressor: Games for Change and Californian Happiness Engineers
Chapter 7: Game Studios in Southeast Asia: Outsourced to Culturally Customized Games
Conclusion: Play Privilege
Bibliography
Index
