Beyond the sea : navigating BioShock

Responsibility
edited by Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred.
Publication
Montreal : McGill-Queen's University Press, [2018]
Physical description
1 online resource

Online

Available online

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Description

Creators/Contributors

Contributor
Parker, Felan, 1984- editor.
Aldred, Jessica, 1976- editor.

Contents/Summary

Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents
  • Cover; Beyond the Sea; Title; Copyright; Contents; Preface; Acknowledgments; There's Always an Introduction; Part One
  • Unity and Metamorphosis: Making and Breaking Family Bonds in Bioshock; 1 Big Daddies and Their Little Sisters: Postfeminist Fatherhood in the Bioshock Series; 2 Big Daddies and Monstrous Mommies: Bioshock's Maternal Abjection, Absence, and Annihilation; 3 Bioshock as the Infinite Parent: Parenting and Play in the Bioshock Series; Part Two
  • To Seduce the Ear and Delight the Spirit: Bioshock, Gender, and Sexuality
  • 4 "Look at Me, Boy!": Carnivalesque, Masks, and Queer Performativity in Bioshock5 "Your Life? Your Family? They're a Fairy Tale, Kid": Queering Timelines and Reproduction in Bioshock; 6 Bioshock's Paranoid States: The Gamer within a History of White Male Victimization; Part Three
  • The Flesh Becomes Clay: Technology, Humanity, and Embodiment in Bioshock; 7 Bioshock's Little Sisters and a Legacy of Posthuman Agency; 8 What or Who Is behind Rapture? Experimentation, Social Engineering, and Bio-Hacking in Bioshock 2; 9 Decaying Bioshock
  • 2: Videogames, Assemblages, Rot
  • Part Four
  • There's Always a City: The Many Histories of Bioshock10 We Take Our Hopes up to the Skies: The Cruel Optimism of Rapture and Columbia; 11 Bioshock Infinite and Against the Day as Intermedia Twins: Exploring the American National Project; 12 Building Broken Worlds: The Alien Franchise, Failed Utopias, and Other Bio-Shocks; Part Five
  • All That's Left Is the Choosing: Rethinking Agency in Bioshock and Beyond; 13 Branching Out: Narrative Decision Systems after Bioshock; 14 The Hands of the Other: Media Allegory in Bioshock and The Hands of Orlac
  • 15 Playing Your Role: Bioshock Infinite's Burial at Sea and the Function of the PlayerContributors; Index
Summary
The Bioshock series looms large in the industry and culture of video games for its ambitious incorporation of high-minded philosophical questions and retro-futuristic aesthetics into the ultraviolent first-person shooter genre. Beyond the Sea marks ten years since the release of the original game with an interdisciplinary collection of essays on Bioshock, Bioshock 2, and Bioshock Infinite. Simultaneously lauded as landmarks in the artistic growth of the medium and criticized for their compromised vision and politics, the Bioshock games have been the subject of significant scholarly and critical discussion. Moving past well-trodden debates, Beyond the Sea broadens the conversation by putting video games in dialogue with a diverse range of other disciplines and cultural forms, from parenting psychology to post-humanism, from Thomas Pynchon to German expressionist cinema. Offering bold new perspectives on a canonical series, Beyond the Sea is a timely contribution to our understanding of the aesthetics, the industry, and the culture of video games. Contributors include Daniel Ante-Contreras (Miracosta), Luke Arnott (Western Ontario), Betsy Brey (Waterloo), Patrick Brown (Iowa), Michael Fuchs (Graz), Jamie Henthorn (Catawba), Brendan Keogh (Queensland), Cameron Kunzelman (Georgia), Cody Mejeur (Michigan State), Matthew Thomas Payne (Notre Dame), Gareth Schott (Waikato), Karen Schrier (Marist), Sarah Stang (York/Ryerson), Sarah Thorne (Carleton), John Vanderhoef (California State, Dominguez Hills), Matthew Wysocki (Flagler), Jordan R. Youngblood (Eastern Connecticut State), and Sarah Zaidan (Emerson).
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Bibliographic information

Publication date
2018
ISBN
9780773555556 (electronic bk.)
0773555552 (electronic bk.)
9780773555563
0773555560
9780773554979
077355498X
9780773554986
Librarian view | Catkey: 13507226