Video games and the zeitgeist

Dr Stephen Mallory is assistant professor of game design at Lawrence Technical University in Southfield, Michigan. After a career in the video game industry, Stephen turned his considerable intellect to analysing games as an aspect of digimodernism - the contemporary cultural phenomenon where much of our lived experience, indeed, our reality and even sense of self, is mediated through digital technologies, artifacts, and environments. His research is especially concerned with the intersection of digimodernism and digi-fascism, and how these cultural forces relate to things like the economics of the games industry. If you want to know more about how the largest and fasting growing media industry in the world - that's video games - affects you whether you interact with it or not, tune in to this episode. 08:30Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators, Casey O’Donnell (2014) https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/4469/Developer-s-DilemmaThe-Secret-World-of-Videogame 10:45The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond, Alan Kirby (2006) https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase26?openform&fp=philnow&id=philnow_2006_0058_0000_0034_0037 13:15Jesper Juul’s “Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds”https://half-real.net/ 14:30Homo Ludens: a study of the play element in culture, Johan Huizinga (1950)https://radioparasita.org/sites/default/files/Gong/052013/johan_huizinga_homo_ludens_1949_pdf_17266.pdf 20:30Disco Elysium (2019)https://store.steampowered.com/app/632470/Disco_Elysium__The_Final_Cut/ 23:45Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and reconfigure Our Culture, Alan Kirby (2009) https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/digimodernism-9781441175281/