[Commlist] Open World Empire by Christopher B. Patterson

*Open World Empire***

Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games

*Christopher B. Patterson***

*_https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781479895908/open-world-empire/_*

*__*

*Receive a 20% discount online:*

*CSLS2020*

“By centering race and sexuality, Christopher Patterson argues that 
critiques about stereotypes and representation are inadequate for 
understanding the erotic, emotional, and corporeal effect of video games 
on their players. Engaging the Asiatic alongside eros and the Other, 
/Open World Empire/offers first-rate scholarship that doesn’t sacrifice 
the complexity and depth of the idea of play. Readers will be guided 
forward by Patterson’s skillful tutorial.”*—LeiLani Nishime, author of 
**/Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture/*

“In considering the resistant, playful, and unexpected things that can 
happen through our engagements with video games, Christopher Patterson 
provocatively details productive fissures between affect theory and 
games studies. In placing the Asiatic and the erotic in harmony, /Open 
World Empire/challenges an often-thorny politics of representation, and 
in so doing, he reminds us why gaming is still so fun.”*—TreaAndrea 
Russwurm, co-editor of **/Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and 
Sexuality in Video Games/*

Seeking ways to understand video games beyond their imperial logics, 
Patterson turns to erotics to re-invigorate the potential passions and 
pleasures of play

Video games vastly outpace all other mediums of entertainment in revenue 
and in global reach. On the surface, games do not appear ideological, 
nor are they categorized as national products. Instead, they seem to 
reflect the open and uncontaminated reputation of information technology.

Video games are undeniably imperial products. Their very existence has 
been conditioned upon the spread of militarized technology, the 
exploitation of already-existing labor and racial hierarchies in their 
manufacture, and the utopian promises of digital technology. Like 
literature and film before it, video games have become the main artistic 
expression of empire today: the open world empire, formed through the 
routes of information technology and the violences of drone combat, 
unending war, and overseas massacres that occur with little scandal or 
protest.

Though often presented as purely technological feats, video games are 
also artistic projects, and as such, they allow us an understanding of 
how war and imperial violence proceed under signs of openness, 
transparency, and digital utopia. But the video game, as Christopher B. 
Patterson argues, is also an inherently Asian commodity: its hardware is 
assembled in Asia; its most talented e-sports players are of Asian 
origin; Nintendo, Sony, and Sega have defined and dominated the genre. 
Games draw on established discourses of Asia to provide an “Asiatic” 
space, a playful sphere of racial otherness that straddles notions of 
the queer, the exotic, the bizarre, and the erotic. Thinking through 
games like /Overwatch/, /Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare/, /Shenmue II/, 
and /Alien: Isolation/, Patterson reads against empire by playing games 
erotically, as players do—seeing games as Asiatic playthings that afford 
new passions, pleasures, desires, and attachments.

*Christopher B. Patterson*is Assistant Professor in the Social Justice 
Institute at the University of British Columbia. His previous books 
include /Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the 
Transpacific/(2018), and /Stamped: an Anti-Travel Novel /(2018), written 
under his pen name Kawika Guillermo.

With all best wishes,

Combined Academic Publishers

*New York University Press**| Postmillennial Pop | April 2020 | 344pp 
| 9781479895908 | PB | £27.99**

*Price subject to change.

---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------