Being Dragonborn: Critical Essays on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
McFarland & Co., 2021, co-edited with Marc A. Ouellette, Ph.D.
Being Dragonborn: Critical Essays on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (forthcoming from McFarland Press) takes the massive video game hit, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, as its site of multidisciplinary, scholarly interrogation. This epic fantasy role playing game hails its player as “dragonborn,” a calling that merges political, social, and religious narratives in the game toward the player’s assumption of the dragonborn identity position: savior of Skyrim. Our collection identifies and explores these positions within the cultural ecology of the game. The outstanding authors featured in this collection unpack Skyrim as a topological space that encodes and extends cultural ideologies in the game’s design, gameplay experience, modding tradition, and online game forums. In other words, the dragonborn player is interpellated into a series of ideological roles that mirror the gendered, racially inscribed, neoliberal, and colonialist attitudes and subject positions proffered to players in their out-of-game-existence. For a game like Skyrim that goes to great lengths to construct a fantasy world that is detailed and immersive, the hidden ideologies encoded into the game are important to understanding how a game this popular—and by extension, the video game medium itself—reinscribes the familiar in ostensibly unfamiliar ways.
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Video Game Chronotopes and Social Justice: Playing on the Threshold
Palgrave Macmillan, 2021
Video Game Chronotopes and Social Justice examines how the chronotope, which literally means “timespace,” is an effective interpretive lens through which to understand the cultural and ideological significance of video games. Using ‘slow readings’ attuned to deconstruction along the lines of post-structuralist theory, gender studies, queer studies, continental philosophy, and critical theory, Mike Piero exposes the often-overlooked misogyny, heteronormativity, racism, and patriarchal structures present in many Triple-A video games through their arrangement of timespace itself. Beyond understanding time and space as separate mechanics and dimensions, Piero reunites time and space through the analysis of six chronotopes―of the bonfire, the abject, the archipelago, the fart as pharmakon, madness, and coupled love―toward a poetic meaning making that is at the heart of play itself, all in affirmation of life, equity, and justice.
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