Associate Professor, Film + Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz / semurray[at]ucsc[dot]edu
…for a wonderful visit! On 1 February 2021, I was pleased to share some of my forthcoming writing on video games, aesthetics and political affect with UCSC’s Computational Media PhD students and faculty. Special thanks to Samantha Conde for hosting.
From this essay, forthcoming in the European Journal of American Studies:
“Days Gone becomes useful not as a literal political perspective, but as an object of concentrated political intensity of feeling.”
A belated but very heartfelt thanks to my colleagues in the U.K., especially Dr. Irene Fubara-Manuel, for the kind invitation to speak as part of the research seminars series at the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex. Given the topic, it was definitely intense sharing this particular research one day after the U.S. election…
America is Dead. Long Live America!: Political Affect in Days Gone
Abstract:
In this presentation, Murray considers political affect in the open world action-adventure survival horror game Days Gone (SIE Bend Studios, 2019). Through its rendering of the Pacific Northwest landscape as ideology, much is revealed about a deeply troubled and oppositional worldview. While her research addresses matters of representation—particularly notions of fraught masculinity and a struggle for recognition—Murray’s focus is on how the game functions as a window onto a fantasy of American self-reliance and populism that strongly resonates with a Trump-era nationalist turn in the U.S. The work also gestures toward a methodology of experiential close-reading, one focused on working-through and sitting with a difficult aesthetic object that may at first seem entirely generic. In this essay, Murray reaches through the offending, formulaic image to grasp the political affect that emanates from a sustained aesthetic experience of playing Days Gone.
GAME OVER. Critica della ragione videoludica (GAME OVER. Critique of Video Game Rationality) is now published with Mimesis Edizioni and includes an Italian translation of my essay “Playing Whiteness in Crisis in The Last of Us and Tomb Raider“
Edited by Matteo Bittanti
Publisher: Mimesis Edizioni
Release date: December 15 2020
ISBN: 978-88-5756-384-8
Cover design: Marco Goran Romano
Synopsis: What happens when video games break the screen and enter the “real world”? Game Over. Critica della ragione videoludica is the first book published in Italy to critically examine the most controversial – and yet often overlooked – aspects of contemporary video game culture, including gamers’ identity politics, fanboy tribalism, trolls’ tactics, racism, sexism and homophobia in online multiplayer games, the side effects of gamification, the GamerGate campaign, and the commodification of game practices in the context of streaming practices, through the contributions of international scholars whose research is situated at the intersection of game studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology. This book argues that the video game imaginary is dominated by two complementary rather than divergent, but equally toxic, ideologies: cryptofascism and neoliberalism.
Contributors: Matteo Bittanti, Andrea Braithwaite, Kurt Borchard, Claudio Cugliandro, Suzanne de Castell, Daniel Dooghan, Peter Frase, Jonathan Glover, Daniel Harley, Renyi Hong, Jennifer Jenson, Sarah Mason, Torill Elvira Mortensen, Soraya Murray, Ulysses Pascal, Gregory P. Perreault, Michael Salter and Tim Vos.
