Summary:
McAllister's Game Work employs critical theories to investigate the computer (including all digital media mediums) game industry. His work reviews the history of the industry, the impact of economics and capitalism on society,gaming, and gamers, industry trends, balances of power, and the power struggles of the workers and the businesses producing games. He uses extensive examples from the industry to invite scholars to discuss and exploy the computer game industry and its impact on social transformation and change.
Citation-worthy:
"The 'grammar of gameworks' proposes that one way to make meaning out of an artifact like a computer games is to see how it 'works' in five integral areas of power: agents... functions... influence... manifestation... transformative locals" (McAllister, 2004, p. 1).
“The fact that games always teach players something, makes for a conundrum: How does one comprehend the role rhetoric plays within the computer game complex when rhetoric seems to simultaneously fail and succeed in the same context? How is it, in other words, that both anecdotal wisdom and scientific investigation conclude that computer games are both healthful and harmful? (McAllister, 2004, p. 16)
“The answer… is that the computer game complex [or any number of other circumstances] is dialectical, a complicated and ever-changing system constructed out of innumerable relationships among people, things, and symbols, all of which are in turn connected to other vast dialectical system: the entertainment industry, the high-tech business, capitalism, articulations of democracy and freedom, and so on. By recognizing that the computer game complex is dialectical, those who set out to make sense of how meanings are constructed within and about it –that is, people who are investigating the computer game complex’s rhetorics –will necessarily do this work mindful of the fact that their perspectives may be very different than others’. This does not mean that all perspectives are equally valid; some people are better informed than others (McAllister, 2004, p. 16).”
"Agent/developes, as we have seen, regularly negotiate at some level of consciousness at least three contradictions inherent in the computer gaming industry: 1. Computer games are an art form based on mass production; 2. Computer games often seem to encourage unhealthy kinds of play; 3. Computer games require developers to design realistic games that aren't really realistic" (McAllister, 2004, p. 129).
"Computer games do real work in the world. They change lives, not just those of game players, marketers, and developers, but increasingly those of everyone. ... As globalization ... pries open international borders in order to capture new markets, radical social transformations follow close behind. Gratuitous and grpahic representations of violence in computer games are disturbing, there is no doubt. The hypersexualization adn objectification of the human form in games is similarly problematical, as are the multitude of racial and cultural stereotypes that are designed into the. ... But as long as those agents who participate in the process of how games mean--developers, marketers, adn player--ignore the long-range implications of their work and fail to ask about the interests being served by the making, selling, and playing of artifacts like computer games, then the small redresses that are made to lend credibility to the computer game complex... will accomplish little in the way of enabling a spirit of play to flourish in the lives of everyone who works within it (McAllister, 2004, p. 169).
