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JUST RELEASED: Dangerous Gamers by Xavier Lastra – castaliahouse.com

JUST RELEASED: Dangerous Gamers by Xavier Lastra

Saturday , 3, June 2017 11 Comments

You already know who these commentators are, and you have seen their works everywhere. They thrive in the worlds of on-line journalism, blogging, news aggregators, click-bait journalism, and social media. Their ranks have swollen, and they have problematized everything under the sun. And without more worlds to conquer, they have set their eyes on entertainment and video games.

In this book, I outline the nature of a new class of so-called social commentators that has become widespread (and widely despised) during the last few years. Using their manufactured controversies concerning videos games and their violent, sexist, and racist “pernicious messages” as an example, I explain their antics as a performance for social visibility, prestige, and attention. This process, which first manifested in the domain of Criticism, has trickled down and stifled creativity and imagination, pathologized games, fun, and normalcy, and transformed “politics” and “cultural analysis” into a self-aggrandizing and endogamous game of one-upmanship.

11 Comments
  • Hooc Ott says:

    “Xavier Lastra”

    Wait a second…

    *looks at credits of the best SFF zine on the planet

    No one tells me anything.

  • NARoberts says:

    The reason I mostly just buy Japanese games now.

  • Ron Van Wegen says:

    You had me at “endogamous”!

    • Jeffro says:

      You gotta read this. And you gotta get this guy onto Geek Gab.

      I’m on chapter 3 and I want to pull-quote something from every other page.

  • I hope the author sees this comment:

    There should not be a period at the end of the Kindle book subtitle. It looks odd.

    Also, probably through no fault of the author’s, there’s no indication of how many pages the Kindle book is. Normally it is shown, but not for this one. Perhaps put the approximate number of pages in the description on Amazon. Maybe it will show up later.

    • Frisky says:

      You are right about the subtitle, and I also have removes all the other spurious periods. And I have no idea why the number of pages doesn’t show. Probably I’ll do what you say and add it to the description.

      Thanks.

      (the new updated version should appear in a few hours)

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