Intermedia Games

An international group of contributors discuss not only intermedial phenomena in video games but also the intermedial networks surrounding them.

Description
While all media are part of intermedial networks, video games are often at the nexus of that network. They not only employ cinematics, embedded books, and in-world television screens for various purposes, but, in our convergence culture, video games also play a vital role in allowing players to explore transmedia storyworlds. At the same time, video games are frequently thematized and remediated in film, television, and literature. Indeed, the central role video games assume in intermedial networks provides testament to their significance in the contemporary media environment.

 
Reviews
“The volume offers a careful introduction to the topic as well as a compilation and discussion of various inter- and transmedial phenomena that have so far remained relatively unnoticed in the scholarly discourse” (MEDIENwissenschaft 38, nos. 2-3, 2020)

“Overall, the collection contributes to the scholarship on intermediality and games, and some essays such as Summers’s make new and generative claims. [...] Ultimately, the sum of the collection’s parts may be just as valuable as the whole.” (American Journal of Play 12, no. 2, 2020)

Table of Contents

Introduction (Jeff Thoss & Michael Fuchs)

I.Video Games' Incorporation of Other Media

The Spectacular Design of First-Person Shooters: Remediating Cinematic Spectacle in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Battlefield 4 (Håvard Vibeto)
The Discourse Community’s Cut: Video Games and the Notion of Montage (Bernard Perron, Hugo Montembeault, Andréane Morin-Simard, and Carl Therrien)
Camera Ludica: Reflections on Photography in Video Games (Sebastian Möring & Marco de Mutiis)
Inscribing the Lone and Level Sands: Technoromanticism at Play in Elegy for a Dead World (Jason I. Kolkey)
Lost in the Static? Comics in Video Games (Armin Lippitz)

II.Intermedial Exchanges Between Video Games and Other Media

Game and Watch: Machinimas, Let’s Plays, Streams, and the Linearization of Digital Play (Riccardo Fassone)
Videogaming in(to) Literature: Virtual CorpoReality in Chloé Delaume’s Corpus Simsi (Laurent Milesi)
Edgar Allan Poe Simulators: On Dream Logic, Game Narratives, and Poesque Atmospheres (Marco Caracciolo)
Interference as Artistic Strategy: Video Game Art between Transparency and Opacity (Stephan Schwingeler)

III.Video Games and their Transmedial Environments

Music across the Transmedial Frontier: Star Trek Video Games (Tim Summers)
Transmediality and the Brick: Differences and Similarities between Analogue and Digital Lego Play (Mattia Thibault)
Transfictionality, Thetic Space, and Doctrinal Transtexts: The Procedural Expansion of Gor in Second Life’s Gorean Role-Playing Games (Christophe Duret)

Freely accessible through Bloomsbury Collections (thanks to funding by the Land Steiermark, Referat für Wissenschaft und Forschung)