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Palgrave Macmillan

Video Game Chronotopes and Social Justice

Playing on the Threshold

  • Book
  • © 2021

Overview

Authors:
  1. Mike Piero

    1. English Department, Cuyahoga Community College, Cleveland, USA

    View author publications

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  • The book adapts and updates Bakhtin’s chronotope to put in service to social justice inside and outside video games
  • The book offers provocative interpretations of most popular video games of the past 20 years
  • This is the first published book addressing and theorizing chronotopes and video games

Part of the book series: Palgrave Games in Context (PAGCON)

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiii
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction to Video Game Chronotopes

    • Mike Piero
    Pages 1-49

  3. The Chronotope of the Threshold in Medieval-Themed Role-Playing Games

    • Mike Piero
    Pages 51-83

  4. The Chronotope of the Abject in The Binding of Isaac: Gaming Under Sovereign Power

    • Mike Piero
    Pages 85-118

  5. The Chronotope of the Archipelago: Archipelagic Maps and Playing Colonial Conquest

    • Mike Piero
    Pages 119-143

  6. The Chronotope of the Fart as Pharmakon in South Park: The Fractured But Whole

    • Mike Piero
    Pages 145-194

  7. The Chronotope of Madness in Borderlands and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

    • Mike Piero
    Pages 195-230

  8. The Chronotope of Coupled Love: Compulsory Monogamy, Video Games, and Polyamorous Possibilities Beyond Belonging

    • Mike Piero
    Pages 231-268

  9. Coda: Ethics in Gaming, Here and Now

    • Mike Piero
    Pages 269-275

  10. Back Matter

    Pages 277-292
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Keywords

About this book

 Video Game Chronotopes and Social Justice examines how the chronotope, which literally means “timespace,” is an effective interpretive lens through which to understand the cultural and ideological significance of video games. Using ‘slow readings’ attuned to deconstruction along the lines of post-structuralist theory, gender studies, queer studies, continental philosophy, and critical theory, Mike Piero exposes the often-overlooked misogyny, heteronormativity, racism, and patriarchal structures present in many Triple-A video games through their arrangement of timespace itself. Beyond understanding time and space as separate mechanics and dimensions, Piero reunites time and space through the analysis of six chronotopes—of the bonfire, the abject, the archipelago, the fart as pharmakon, madness, and coupled love—toward a poetic meaning making that is at the heart of play itself, all in affirmation of life, equity, and justice.

Reviews

In Playing on the Threshold, Mike Piero carefully constructs the case that video games constitute a continuously unfolding chronotope, at the intersection not just of game time and space, but ours as well. In a field that oscillates between studies of what video games can do and what video games can be, through his painstaking pursuit of every trace of each chronotope, Piero highlights the intersection of the two, unraveling the social and cultural work that awaits at each threshold of play.

Marc A. Ouellette, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of English, Old Dominion University. 

Piero’s focus on the chronotope provides a nuanced, contextualized tool to help game studies scholars detangle the often fraught texts with which we work. Piero’s expansive work, which addresses chronotopes from the macro level of genre down to the micro level of marginalized game content, provides a robust guide for how the study of timespace can help articulate the varied ways games conveyideology, both explicitly and implicitly. 

Wendi Sierra, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Game Studies, Texas Christian University.

Through a novel application of Bakhtin's chronotope, Piero presents a stunning exploration of video games as a medium ripe with ideological meaning and intimately intertwined with questions of social justice. Weaving together slow close reading with careful consideration of the current socio-political context, this passionately written and timely book shows how gameplay can be a deeply impactful spatial, temporal, and embodied experience, making it an essential read for game scholars, developers, and players alike.

Sarah Stang, Ph.D.

 

 

 

Authors and Affiliations

  • English Department, Cuyahoga Community College, Cleveland, USA

    Mike Piero

About the author

Mike Piero is a Professor of English at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio. In addition to winning national awards for innovative teaching, his work has recently appeared in The Popular Culture Studies Journal, Transnational Literature, MediaCommons, MediaTropes, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College. He is co-editor of Being Dragonborn: Critical Essays on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2021). He teaches courses in game studies, British literature, college composition, and the humanities. 

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