“Games of Empire” Contains Knowledge, Big Words

If you’ve ever hunted for deep reading material on the gaming industry, you know it’s a challenge to find anything other than a bastardized novelization of your favorite game or a pithy coffee table book filled with useless factoids. “Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games” is an unflinching critique of video games’ affect on relevant political issues. If you’d like to learn about the far-reaching influence of your favorite entertainment medium with all the rich, analytical language of a college textbook, this might be for you.

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter take a close look at games such as Second Life, Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft, and America’s Army to expose how these games play into the hypercapitalistic theory of Empire. Serious issues such as globalization, militarism, and exploitation are all touched on, with links being established with video games.

To give you a brief taste of the writing style used in the book, along with the overarching theory in the authors’ own words, here’s a quote:

“Our hypothesis, then, is that video games are a paradigmatic media of Empire – planetary, militarized hypercapitalism – and of some of the forces presently challenging it.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if you were sitting in a media-focused college sociology course and this book popped up on the syllabus. There is some interesting and revealing insight into our industry within this text, but it’s going to take some serious commitment and a working knowledge of the theories to find the value within. This isn’t exactly a Super Mario Bros. manual.

Grab the University of Minnesota-published book off bookstore shelves now. Or, you could just keep playing Bayonetta, which boasts a story equally as confusing.