Cambridge Digital Humanities presents
Gaming at War: The Rise of the First-Person Military Shooter
Dr Nathaniel Zetter, University of Cambridge
Wednesday 23 February 2022
4.00pm–5.30pm GMT on Zoom
Tickets from: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/gaming-at-war-the-rise-of-the-first-person-military-shooter-tickets-249209772137
The cultural form of the video game began life in Cold War experiments with military computers. The legacy of this curious birthplace persists in video game culture today, and it is particularly visible in ‘first-person shooter’ (FPS) war games, where players take on the role of an individual soldier. This talk traces the development of the military FPS and locates its complex place in digital culture today. Video games’ military origins have not prevented sport from coursing through their emerging culture: communal play and contest shaped early gaming, and today ‘esports’ – competitive, often professionalized video gaming – have converted war games into sports tournaments. Taken seriously, these competitions reveal the centrality of embodiment in video game culture, and its novel intersection of war culture with sport.
The talk starts by isolating the presence of military aesthetics in the FPS: the organization of vision and action the genre has inherited from weapons’ targeting interfaces and that it continues to share with military drones. The present culture of esports wargaming is then examined to theorize how the digital representation of war has been converted into a competitive sport.
The seminar Respondent and Chair will be Dr Siddharth Soni (University of Cambridge).
About the speaker:
Dr Nathaniel Zetter is a College Teaching Associate at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His writing on literature, media theory, and digital culture has appeared in Textual Practice, Humanities, and Critical Quarterly, and in the collection Surveillance, Architecture and Control: Discourses on Spatial Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Articulating Media: Genealogy, Interface, Situation, a collection of essays examining media and language co-edited with James Gabrillo, is due out this year with Open Humanities Press. He is currently at work on his first monograph, a cultural history of the modern intersections between war and sport.
--------------------------------------------------------
MeCCSA mailing list
--------------------------------------------------------
To manage your subscription or unsubscribe from the MECCSA list, please visit:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=MECCSA&A=1
-------------------------------------------------------
MeCCSA is the subject association for the field of media, communication and cultural studies in UK Higher Education.
This mailing list is a free service and is not restricted to members. It is an unmoderated list and content reflect the views of those who post to the list and not of MeCCSA as an organisation.
MeCCSA recommends that the list be used only for posting of information (for example about events, publications, conferences, lectures) of interest to members or to promote discussion of current issues of wide general interest in the field. Posts to the MeCCSA mailing list are public, indexed by Google, and can be accessed from the JISCMail website (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/meccsa.html).
Any messages posted to the list are subject to the JISCMail acceptable use policy, which states that users should avoid engaging in unreasonable behaviour, or disrupting the general flow of discussion on a list.
For further information, please visit: http://www.meccsa.org.uk/
--------------------------------------------------------
|