Among them is the game’s plot, its nostalgic retrofuturistic aesthetic, its ruins and ecology as evocative spaces, its stylization of the gameworld as frontier through its mechanics, and tangible neoliberal ideologies present in its levelling system.
Drawing from various theoretical approaches, salient narrative and ludic aspects of the games are investigated. Tracing arguments from the fronts of the ludology/narratology debate, this paper adds the conception of videogames as commodities of a culture industry to provide a critical perspective on the meanings and ideologies negotiated in Fallout 4, one of the most successful games of the last decade.
Addressing these lacunae, this paper draws on in-depth interviews conducted amongst male players of first-person shooters to explore how the hyper competitive, skill-based, and team-oriented characteristics of online gamespaces provide opportunities for them to experiment with, and develop, a more integrated sense of the masculine self.Īs videogames are set to become the dominant pop-cultural medium of the 21st century, this paper aims to provide approaches to a critical reading of Bethesda’s Fallout 4, informed by perspectives of cultural studies. Similarly, whilst research has considered the triggers and effects of toxic playing behaviors within online gamespaces, lacking is an understanding of how these behaviors intersect with the formation of more masculine subject positions. Whilst existing masculinities research has explored how technological mastery can lead to expressions of ‘geek’ masculinity, it does not consider the beneficial effects of online competition and collaboration.
In doing so, it advances an understanding of the interconnected nature of players’ online and offline worlds, and their ‘actual’ and ‘ideal’ selves. This paper explores how and why first-person shooter games can enable players to forge a more masculine sense of self. To demonstrate the usefulness of this analytical approach, a study of an influential antifeminist blogosphere in the Swedish context is used as an illustrative case. Two analytical dimensions are introduced that help to specify how the design and governance of online platforms, as well as the social composition of antifeminist groups, enable these to come together online and influence mainstream publics. In particular, it suggests that in addition to analyzing the content of antifeminist discourses we need to pay attention to how the design and governance of online platforms, as well as the resources among antifeminist activists, shape online resistance to feminist politics. This article argues that new analytical perspectives are needed to understand how antifeminist discourses are successfully produced and promulgated online. Online platforms present new challenges to feminist politics since they provide antifeminist groups with additional possibilities to come together and advocate their claims towards wider publics. It suggests that a public lens is useful for understanding contemporary atheism, and that the nature of publics and counterpublics helps explain the dynamics of atheist disagreement on social issues. By utilizing Michael Warner’s theory of ‘publics’ and ‘counterpublics,’ spaces that exists only for the circulation of discourse, this study approaches the drama not as an interpersonal conflict, but as a battle over the norms of discourse within the atheist community. Through critical discourse analysis of 157 YouTube videos, published between the end of March and the end of November, it identifies six different discursive formations, which affected the development of the drama and offer competing conceptions of the community. This article uses the controversy, an instance “YouTube drama,” as an opportunity to investigate the ways in which an imagined “atheist community” is constructed through internal atheist conflict. Accused of transphobia, he was denounced by a prominent atheist organization, which led to intense arguments in Anglophone atheist spaces on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, lasting throughout the year. In late March 2019, British atheist YouTuber “Rationality Rules” published a video in which he argued that trans women should be excluded from women’s sports.