Soraya Murray is an Associate Professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), USA, where she is also affiliated with the Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program, and the Art + Design: Games + Playable Media Program. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of visual culture, with a particular interest in cultural studies, contemporary art, film and video games. Murray holds a PhD in the History of Art and Visual Studies from Cornell University.

Uses examples of blockbusting contemporary games that will be familiar to students

1. Is the 'Culture' in Game Culture the
'Culture' of Cultural Studies?
Video Games and the Matter of Culture
Games in the Academy
Which Games?
On the Importance of Cultural Studies for Game Studies
Cultural Studies Meets Game Studies
Form and/as Identity Politics in Games
Being Critical
GamerGate, Games Criticism and Gender Problems
Looking Ahead
Poetics of Form and Politics of Identity; Or, Games
as Cultural Palimpsests
2. A Digital Politics of Identity
Introduction
The Poetics of Form in Liberation
Aveline as Queered, Creole, Intersectional
Playability and Phantasms
'History is Our Playground'
Conclusion: Embracing the Mess
3. Aesthetics of Ambivalence and Whiteness in Crisis
Introduction
Cultural Context: Whiteness in Crisis, Racial
Violence and Games
The Last of Us
Critical Whiteness Studies and Whiteness After 9/11
The Last of Us and Imperiled Whiteness
Spec Ops: Th e Line and the White Hero Interrupted
Tomb Raider, Whiteness and the Female Heroine
in Peril
Conclusion: A Trauma Narrative of Whiteness
4: The Landscapes of Games as Ideology
Introduction
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Game Spaces and World- Building: Formalism
Studying Game Space in a Cultural Context
Theorizing Game Space as Ideological Landscape
There is No Such Place: Afghanistan in The Phantom
Pain
Conclusion: A Particular View of a Particular World
5: The World is a Ghetto: Imaging the Global
Metropolis in Playable Representation
Introduction: Speculative Futures, Genre and the
Global Metropolis
Max Payne 3 : Noir Figure, Exotic Ground
Remember Me and Urban Amnesia
Play in the Fourth World City
Bullet Time, Memory Remixing and Harvey's
Space- Time Compression
Two Playable Cities: The Favela and the Cyberpunk
Metropolis
Conclusion: Playing Possible Futures