Games, Gamers and Posthumanism

Krzywinska, Tanya ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0744-4144 and Brown, Douglas ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6662-6629 (2015) Games, Gamers and Posthumanism. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillian UK, London, pp. 192-201. ISBN 9781137430328 (online) 9781349577019 (print)

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Abstract / Summary

Anthony Vidler wrote that William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer ‘voiced a peculiarly contemporary sense of haunting: that provoked by the loss of traditional bodily and locational references by the pervasive substitution of the simulated for the real in the computer’s virtual reality’ (Vidler 1992, 10). Published in 1984, Neuromancer provided a narrative that intensified, and gave a subcultural twist, to the buzz of possibility surrounding computing technology. Gibson’s novel rode on the entry of computer-based games into the domestic marketplace, working a populist seam to create an accessible, plot-driven tech-noir fiction through which games become synonymous with virtual reality. Central to this is the fantasy of escaping the bodily and spatio-temporal confines that construct the human condition. If the TV show Star Trek helped to make funding for NASA palatable by creating a desire for space exploration (Penley 1997), then Neuromancer contributed to the creation of a sensationalizing mythos that transformed computational technology into, at once, a new frontier and a seductive means of escaping entropy and acquiring superpowers. Fuelled by the power of this mythos, science fiction (SF), art, philosophy and critical theory have found a point of convergence, occupying a shared domain that Steve Nicholls (1988) claimed as posthuman.

Item Type:	Book Section
ISBN:	9781137430328 (online) 9781349577019 (print)
Subjects:	Technology > Digital Works > Digital Games
Courses by Department:	The Games Academy > Digital Games
Depositing User:	Tanya Krzywinska
Date Deposited:	02 Mar 2017 13:27
Last Modified:	23 Nov 2023 13:24
URI:	https://falmouth-test.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/1928

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