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Die Tryin’: Videogames, Masculinity, Culture
Die Tryin’ traces the cultural connections between videogames, masculinity, and digital culture. It fuses feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and poststructuralist theory to analyze the social imaginary that is produced by – and produces – a particular form of boyhood. The author asserts that digital culture is a culturally and historically situated series of practices, products, and performances, all coalescing to produce a real and imagined masculinity that exists in perpetual adolescence, and is reflective of larger masculine edifices at work in politics and culture. Thus, videogames form the central object of study as consumer technologies of control and anxiety as well as possibility and subversion. Moving away from current games research, the book favors a game-specific approach that unites visual culture, cultural studies, and performance studies, instead of a sociological/structural inspection of the form.
169 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2008
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June 16, 2011
It's more like a 3.5, for what that's worth. Though Burrill does discuss some videogames directly, the text is more about using games as a metaphor for digital activity and practices in general. Burrill's central thesis is that the current "digital imaginary" encourages its users to adopt the subject position of the gamer boy--a permanent adolescent male who seeks to readdress his lacking masculinity through constant triumph in play. The videogame, then, forms a great object for such a study. I think Burrill spends a little too much time unpacking the theories he's using in the book (given that he doesn't use most in any great detail) and not enough on actual game analysis. I also think he paints game playing in general with too broad a brush. Though it's not a great text for masculinity in videogames per se, it is an interesting examination of masculinity issues in wider digital-related practices, including hacking, super arcades, and virtual-reality-themed movies.
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