Julian Bleecker Getting The Reality You Deserve

After a decade of idleness, it is useful to contrast the similarities and differences of the cultural and political markers relevant to the topics of this chapter — video gaming, the city, and representation of racial, ethnic and class-based conflict therein — over the time between when this chapter was first researched and written in the early 1990s and the early post-millennium of " now " — around 2004. In the next few pages, I would like to provide an introductory framework for this chapter by briefly sketching out what I see to be relevant changes in the nature of the city and video games over these years. I have two reasons for doing this. The first is to note the ways both video games and the city have become expansive, growing in significance and consequence over this time. It is generally well-known that the city has grown, most obviously in terms of population densities and the sheer volume of people migrating into them on a daily basis. It is also well-known that video games have become an enormously popular and economically prodigious cultural artifact. More relevant in the context of this chapter, though, video games have also become a mechanism for critical cultural expression and scholarship that scarcely existed if at all when I first researched and wrote 2 this material. At the time of the original writing and publication in 1995, it felt necessary to move toward a critical analysis of a video game by going through film criticism, hence the sections on dystopic science-fiction films that have as their backdrop an urban setting (Bleecker 1995). Today, critical studies of video games are a growing cottage industry for academic publishing houses, and there are curriculums within many university critical theory, film theory and media studies departments worldwide where video games are analyzed with the rigor of other credible cultural artifacts. 1 My second reason for this introduction is to help contextualize the core of the chapter in the odd case where an anachronism may appear. Rather than doing extensive revisions to bring the material " up to date " , I think it is useful that there remain certain political and cultural signposts that serve as useful reminders as to the writing's original milieu. States was just emerging from fear of nuclear destruction by missiles fired from Communist Russia. In 2004, the fears that envelope cities worldwide are …