Notes
Notes
- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Anns (London: Grafton, 1977 [1929]), p. 133.
- Jon Covey (ed.), Fractal Dreams: New Media in Social Context (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996), p. xii. See also Kevin Robins ‘Cyberspace and the World We Live In’ in the same volume, pp. 1-30.
- A useful introduction to narratological theory can be found in Steven Cohan and Linda M. Shires, Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988). For an account that then takes narratological analysis to film, and which is therefore of much relevance in the examination of such a visually dependent medium as the computer game, see Jakob Lothe, Narrative in Fiction and Film: An Introduction (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
- Jean Baudrillard, ‘Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual Reality’ in Reading Images, ed. Julia Thomas (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 198-206.
- Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (London: Cape, 1970), pp. 211-44.1 will return to a consideration of Benjamin’s essay in Chapter 6.
- Baudrillard, ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’ in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto, 1985), pp. 126-34, p. 127.
- Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture, pp. 111-25. As Jameson notes in an all too often ignored, and still relevant, opening statement, ‘The concept of postmodernism is not widely accepted or even understood today* (p. 111). That the postmodern is the site of debate rather than certainty and has been misrepresented as a straightforward category statement in popular usage has also been reiterated recently in Simon Malpas’s introduction to his Postmodern Debates (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), a valuable book that includes many of the key essays that have contributed to our understanding of what the multiple meanings of the postmodern might be.
- Ihab Hassan, ‘Towards a Concept of Postmodernism’ in Thomas Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader (New York and London: Harvester, 1995), pp. 146-56, p. 152. See also Hassan’s The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Towards a Postmodern Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
- And yet I would not want to make any easy moves to accommodate theoretical models that have a superficial correspondence because they have discussed other ‘games’ in other contexts. For those conversant with psychoanalytic theory, for example, Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the ‘fort/da game provides a case in point. See James Strachey (ed.), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Norton, 1961). I can imagine an attractive and potentially elegant argument that really does little more than ignore Freud’s grounding of his conclusions about the child’s game of the disposal and recovery of a toy in observation, and simply substitutes the loss/recovery of the cherished object with the loss (‘death’)/recovery (reload) of the protagonist of the game-fiction. One can then simply move from the discussion of what is specific to gameplay within game-fictions to making more general assertions about the form. This is not the case in this study.
- The terms are Roland Barthes from S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975). Barthes is, like Benjamin, another‘absent presence’ beneath much of the argument in this work: as a champion of semiology; as an exceptionally astute reader of popular culture texts (see Mythologies trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1972); and as author of The Pleasure of the Text> trans. Richard Miller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 1 do not have space to tease out the significance of his arguments in the last of these works in full here, but would recommend that any reader interested in pursuing the prioritisation of the pleasure of reading in game-fiction consult this volume.
- Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). See also Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
Temukan Games Yang anda sukai disini
