Lexington Books
Pages: 162
•
Trim: 6½ x 9
978-1-7936-0130-8 • Hardback • December 2019 • $111.00 • (£85.00)
978-1-7936-0131-5 • eBook • December 2019 • $105.50 • (£82.00)
Aaron A. Toscano is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Introduction: Video Games and American Ideology
Chapter 1: Approaches to Video Game Studies
Chapter 2: The Specious Link Surrounding Video Games and Violence
Chapter 3: The Video Game as Political Scapegoat: Anxieties, Contradictions, and Hyperbole
Chapter 4: Games of Conquest
Chapter 5: The Male Gaze in Gaming
Chapter 6: Video Games and the Neoliberal Hero
Conclusion: Video Game Studies and Culture
This cultural analysis of video games shows how video games reflect underlying American values and tastes. Aaron A. Toscano does not focus on children’s video games, but he does carefully analyze the notion that the playing of video games causes children to behave in violent ways.
— Children's Literature Association Quarterly
Video games have been an influential (and profitable) part of the American media landscape for decades now. Video Games and American Culture makes the argument that they also provide a crucial canvas for navigating the dichotomies and contradictions often at the core of American cultural beliefs. By working through many of the major concerns about games deliberated in our society (connections between violence and video games, the male gaze, neoliberal heroes, etc.) Toscano provides an insightful introduction to readers hoping to comprehend the rhetorical messages at work within all those games people play.— Matthew Wysocki, Flagler College
Taking an expanded cultural studies approach, Aaron Toscano is a gamer and critic. His commendable study provides a incisive, thorough-going investigation of video games as a rhetoric of technology. Toscano's book invites rhetoric/composition and technical communication studies to not only put careful analysis front and center but also to be wary of uncritical investments in digital Stockholm syndrome.— Aaron Jaffe, Florida State University