My dissertation historicizes the emergence of the video game medium in terms of the theory and history of modernity and postmodernity. Each chapter—whether focusing on gender in games, the relationship between indie games and the ideology of innovation, or the subject positioning of the gamer—seeks to enrich and complicate the scholarly analysis of video games by examining the continuities and discontinuities that arise between the video game medium and older historical media forms, between debates surrounding video games today and the historical contexts which inform and shape these debates. Through a framework of ideology critique this dissertation uses the video game as a medium which registers continuations of problems that emerged in capitalist modernity—focusing primarily on questions of commodification, ideology, labor, representation, temporality, and interactivity—while providing a locus for tracing transformations of these problems within contemporary culture. This dissertation not only broadens the interpretation of video games within the field but assembles an interdisciplinary approach that uses video games to investigate mutations within modernity itself.
