Border Games

Yet the unprecedented buildup of border policing has taken place in an era otherwise defined by the opening of the border, most notably through NAFTA. This contrast creates a borderless economy with a barricaded border.".

Private Bill Savery lands right in the middle of the Cold War when he is assigned to a US military base in Germany in the 1960s. As a linguist, it is his job to transcribe and translate intelligence coming in from the Russians, and hes looking forward to the challenge. Its a lot more exciting than anything he ever did in his home state of Vermont. When hes transferred to the small town of Schningen that borders East Germany, he meets Christine, a beautiful girl who dreams of becoming a reporter. It doesnt take long for the two to start spending all their free time together, and soon their friendship blossoms into love. Christine is often sad, though, and Bill wonders what causes it, though he never asks. Then one day, it becomes all too clear. Christine is engaged to marry another man, a marriage both families have already agreed upon. Breaking the betrothal will be nearly impossible, but Bill isnt about to give up. He loves Christine, and he knows she feels the same. Yet two days before the wedding, Bill receives an urgent assignment. A border incident is brewing way up north on the Elbe river, and he must put aside his personal feelings for his duty. Will he and Christine find out a way to be together, or is it already too late?

Career Army Sergeant Sterling Archer is a respected military man who suddenly finds himself out of a job, out of luck, and penniless on the mean streets of Las Vegas. When an old Army buddy presents him with an opportunity to make more money than he ever imagined, Archer jumps at the chance, unaware of incoming catastrophe. Soon, the pyramid scheme goes sour, and Archer ends up behind bars in federal prison. His only way out is to turn government informant. As if things could get any worse, his new partnership with the FBI places him square in the sights of a Mexican drug cartel, and Archer's life is turned upside down as he fights to stay alive, no matter the cost. He must now desperately weave his way through the dark underworld of gunrunning, human trafficking, and the illegal narcotics trade. But Archer's troubles don't end there as the investigative trail leads him across international borders and into the high stakes world of espionage and political intrigue.

Globalization in the United States can seem paradoxical: free trade coincides with fortification of the southern border, while immigration is reimagined as a national-security threat. US politics turn aggressively against Latinx migrants and subjects even as post-NAFTA markets become thoroughly reliant on migrant and racialized workers. But in fact, there is no incongruity here. Rather, anti-immigrant politics reflect a strategy whereby capital uses specialized forms of violence to create a reserve army of the living, laboring dead. Visible Borders, Invisible Economies turns to Latinx literature, photography, and films that render this unseen scheme shockingly vivid. Works such as Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends and Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer crystallize the experience of Latinx subjects and migrants subjugated to social death, their political existence erased by disenfranchisement and racist violence while their bodies still toil in behalf of corporate profits. In Kristy L. Ulibarri’s telling, art clarifies what power obscures: the national-security state performs anti-immigrant and xenophobic politics that substitute cathartic nationalism for protections from the free market while ensuring maximal corporate profits through the manufacture of disposable migrant labor.

Approx.538 pages Approx.538 pages

In The Game Culture Reader, editors Jason C. Thompson and Marc A. Ouellette propose that Game Studies—that peculiar multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary field wherein international researchers from such diverse areas as rhetoric, computer science, literary studies, culture studies, psychology, media studies and so on come together to study the production, distribution, and consumption of games—has reached an unproductive stasis. Its scholarship remains either divided (as in the narratologists versus ludologists debate) or indecisive (as in its frequently apolitical stances on play and fandom). Thompson and Ouellette firmly hold that scholarship should be distinguished from the repetitively reductive commonplaces of violence, sexism, and addiction. In other words, beyond the headline-friendly modern topoi that now dominate the discourse of Game Studies, what issues, approaches, and insights are being, if not erased, then displaced? This volume gathers together a host of scholars from different countries, institutions, disciplines, departments, and ranks, in order to present original and evocative scholarship on digital game culture. Collectively, the contributors reject the commonplaces that have come to define digital games as apolitical or as somehow outside of the imbricated processes of cultural production that govern the medium itself. As an alternative, they offer essays that explore video game theory, ludic spaces and temporalities, and video game rhetorics. Importantly, the authors emphasize throughout that digital games should be understood on their own terms: literally, this assertion necessitates the serious reconsideration of terms borrowed from other academic disciplines; figuratively, the claim embeds the embrace of game play in the continuing investigation of digital games as cultural forms. Put another way, by questioning the received wisdom that would consign digital games to irrelevant spheres of harmless child’s play or of invidious mass entertainment, the authors productively engage with ludic ambiguities.

In Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media, Claudia Costa Pederson analyzes modernist avant-garde and contemporary video games to challenge the idea that gaming is an exclusively white, heterosexual, male, corporatized leisure activity and reenvisions it as a catalyst for social change. By looking at over fifty projects that together span a century and the world, Pederson explores the capacity for sociopolitical commentary in virtual and digital realms and highlights contributions to the history of gaming by women, queer, and transnational artists. The result is a critical tool for understanding video games as imaginative forms of living that offer alternatives to our current reality. With an interdisciplinary approach, Gaming Utopia emphasizes how game design, creation, and play can become political forms of social protest and examines the ways that games as art open doors to a more just and peaceful world.