This book investigates the parallel cultural histories of the rise and increasing dominance of the video game medium and the changing tides of U.S. drug policy, enforcement, and rhetorics. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to this cultural history of drugs in video games in the U.S., I leverage theories from media studies, history, cultural studies, queer theory, and critical theory to analyze how complex and changeful intersections of drugs, medicine, industry, law, and enforcement appear in video games and are experienced by U.S. players. By analyzing game mechanics, narratives, sounds, imagery, and haptics, I pursue a cultural history of how games appropriate drug cultures to engage players, challenge and reinforce dominant norms, provoke controversy, sidestep political responsibility, and even tell authentic stories about drug use, addiction, and recovery. While the representation of drugs in new media has received extended scholarly attention with regard to popular forms like film and television, analysis of drugs in games remains relegated mostly to passing reference or an occasional article. Whether popping power pellets in Pac-Man (1980) or pills in The Binding of Isaac (2011), shooting Med-X in Fallout 3 (2008) or injectable plasmids in Bioshock (2007), downing potions or elixirs in Super Mario Bros. 2 (1988), The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017), and Diablo III (2012), or tripping on Skooma in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), Peyote in Grand Theft Auto V (2013), or LSD in LSD: Dream Emulator (1998), video games represent drugs and immerse players in mechanics of consuming drugs, often for performance enhancement but sometimes in more contextually-embedded and nuanced ways.

In this first book-length study of drugs in games, I aim to provide a largely missing cultural context that impacts players and their play experiences: namely, how covert and overt drug representations and the phenomenology of virtual highs map onto out-of-game lived, material realities as mediated by drug cultures, rhetorics, and law enforcement. This cultural context is crucial because the well-known “war on drugs”—as declared by President Richard Nixon in June 1971, and amplified by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s—has touched (and harmed) nearly every aspect of modern life and culture in the U.S., including video games. As such, video games have also been integrally tied to these disparate, changing, and oftentimes oppressive narratives concerning drugs, addiction, medicine, and policing, the medium itself even being publicly charged with—in a sense—being an addictive drug. By analyzing the various imbrications between drug culture(s) and video games, players and scholars alike can begin to see how these cultural narratives shape the experience of an entertainment medium that has grown up, as it were, during one of the most profound periods of change in recreational drug use, policy, and enforcement.