Infrastructure in Video Games
MSU Affiliation
College of Arts and Sciences; Department of English
Abstract
This book will sketch the dynamics of infrastructure in video games, focusing on the relationship between game rules, fictional world, and player interaction. It will discuss a variety of commercial video games, both mainstream and somewhat niche, that use infrastructure in different ways: Control, Wolfenstein, Fallout, This War of Mine, Exocolonist, Cyberpunk, and Frostpunk.
Video games offer a particularly rich field for thinking about the relationship between narrative and infrastructure. The infrastructures that exist in the fictional worlds of these games define the experience of play in a very direct way: how players are instantiated in the game, how they move around the play space, the resources that are available, and so on. And those infrastructures in turn very directly definite the nature of the fictional world. In contrast to literary fiction, were infrastructures might remain on the periphery of some stories, by virtue of the centrality of player interaction video games are inherently infrastructural.
Publication Date
11-19-2024
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan Cham
City
Cham, Switzerland
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ISBN
9783031720918
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-72092-5
Recommended Citation
Punday, D. (2024). Infrastructure in video games. Palgrave Macmillan, an imprint of Springer Nature Switzerland.
