Video Gaming in Science Fiction

As video gaming and gaming culture became more mainstream in the 1970s, science fiction authors began to incorporate aspects of each into their work. This study examines how media-fueled paranoia about video gaming—first emerging almost fifty years ago—still resonates in modern science fiction. The author reveals how negative stereotypes of gamers and gaming have endured in depictions of modern gamers in the media and how honest portrayals are still wanting, even in the “forward thinking” world of science fiction.

Jason Barr is an associate professor at Blue Ridge Community College. His work has appeared in African American Review, Explicator, The Journal of Continuing Higher Education, and The Journal of Caribbean Literatures, among others. He lives in Weyers Cave, Virginia.

Series editor Matthew Wilhelm Kapell teaches American studies, anthropology, and writing at Pace University in New York.

Jason Barr

Series Editor Matthew Wilhelm Kapell
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 194
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2018
pISBN: 978-1-4766-6637-2
eISBN: 978-1-4766-3429-6
Imprint: McFarland
Series: Studies in Gaming

Acknowledgments vi
Preface 1
Introduction 7
1: The Game and the Gamespace 31
2: Geekdom and the Gamer as Social Outcast 53
3: We’re All Grown Up Now: The “Maturation” and Insularity of Video Gaming and Science Fiction 78
4: Gender and the Body Politic 91
5: Fighting “the Man”: Against Governments and Corporations 126
6: Juvenile Science Fiction and the Future 133
Afterword: The Origins of Video Gaming in Science
Fiction Cinema 157
Chapter Notes 173
Bibliography 181
Index 187

• “Thoughtful, judicious, and enhanced with chapter notes and an index, Video Gaming in Science Fiction is a welcome addition”—Midwest Book Review