Reviewed by:

• Video Games and American Culture: How Ideology Influences Virtual Worlds by Aaron A. Toscano
• Mark T. DiMauro (bio)

Aaron A. Toscano's newest book, Video Games and American Culture, is an excellent, wide-ranging text discussing two important aspects of game studies. The first concept Toscano explores is the narrative and ludological¹ systems present in immersive digital text (or, by their popular moniker, video games). This type of criticism is both well-known and informative, appearing in works from various authors like Jesper Juul, Ian Bogost, and Henry Jenkins, amongst numerous others. The second concept, for which Toscano deserves immense credit, and which tends to aim his text toward a different target than that of his aforementioned contemporaries, is his tendency to denote the cultural origin (and resultant impact) of themes, ideas, concepts, characters, and metaphors that inhabit his chosen medium of video games.

Video Games and American Culture takes a survey-based approach, not necessarily digging extraordinarily deeply into any one particular topic, but rather serving to examine a large quantity of them in adequate detail. The examined topics include a dissection of the ongoing debate about violence in gaming (and its increasingly tenuous link to societal decay and/or crime, found in chapter 2); games as political scapegoat (and the tendency of politicians to gravitate to and employ the same spectacles video games employ as marketing tools instead as weapons of cultural criticism, the subject of chapter 3); and, as in the title of Toscano's chapter 6, "Games and the Neoliberal Hero," classic systems of heroism and protagonist character development described through the lens of monster theory and literary inversion. Toscano should be credited for giving each of these various topics adequate space within the text while maintaining his evidently broader goal of examining (as the book's title indicates) video games and American culture.

It can be readily envisioned that, in pedagogy, this text would function superbly as an introductory text for a games studies course, offering a strong yet succinct rebuttal [End Page 190] of the common refrain that typically positions itself against such course offerings, essentially some version of "Video games don't matter," "Video games are unserious," or "Video games are not worth scholarly resources." Toscano's tendency to relate both game mechanics and motifs to real-world events, offering incisive political commentary alongside that of well-established scholars in the field, demonstrates—even to the lay reader, or the video game newcomer—that game texts do indeed matter as much as classical literature. At no point, it must be noted, does Toscano veer into territory that feels "defensive" of video games scholarship; rather, by approaching the topic in an organized, documented, well-sequenced manner, he generates powerful ethos to the existence of the argument's position itself.

I particularly enjoyed, and found particularly useful, his first chapter, titled "Approaches to Video Game Studies." This chapter acts as a strong framing device for the text itself, including, in about 12 pages, a dissection of other invaluable games scholarship from primary names like the aforementioned Juul and Bogost, as well as Simon Egenfeldt-Nielson, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares. In this author's opinion, this section should be required reading for anyone seeking to add a games scholarship course to their own institution, as the discussions herein range from procedural rhetoric (in light of the Iraq War from early in the millennium) to a discussion of the same concept within everything from Tomb Raider to The Sims to, as Bogost examines, Madame Bovary. Toscano takes care to situate each critique of his chosen literature within a broader context of cultural import, including feminist critique, classism, and racism. On page 31, for example, he notes, during a discussion of Jesper Juul's Half Real (2011): "Unfortunately, Juul's work does not even hint at negative cultural values such as racism, classism, sexism, etc. Focusing on rules and procedures are an important component, but they do not address the ways culture influences these 'fictional worlds' or the characters in them" (31). Toscano repeatedly notes these...

审核人：

• 电子游戏和美国文化：意识形态如何影响虚拟世界作者：Aaron A. Toscano
• Mark T. DiMauro（生平）

亚伦 A. 托斯卡诺 (Aaron A. Toscano) 的最新著作《电子游戏与美国文化》(Video Games and American Culture ) 是一本内容丰富的优秀著作，讨论了游戏研究的两个重要方面。Toscano 探索的第一个概念是沉浸式数字文本（或者，用他们流行的绰号，视频游戏）中呈现的叙事和游戏^系统). 这种类型的批评既广为人知又内容丰富，出现在 Jesper Juul、Ian Bogost 和 Henry Jenkins 等众多作家的作品中。第二个概念，托斯卡诺值得称赞，并且倾向于将他的文本瞄准与上述同时代人不同的目标，即他倾向于表示主题，思想，概念，人物的文化起源（以及由此产生的影响） , 以及他选择的视频游戏媒介中的隐喻。

电子游戏与美国文化采用基于调查的方法，不一定非常深入地挖掘任何一个特定主题，而是用于足够详细地检查大量主题。审查的主题包括对正在进行的关于游戏暴力的辩论的剖析（及其与社会衰败和/或犯罪的日益微弱的联系，见第 2 章）；游戏作为政治替罪羊（以及政治家倾向于使用电子游戏作为营销工具而不是文化批评武器的相同眼镜，这是第 3 章的主题）；并且，正如托斯卡诺第 6 章的标题“游戏与新自由主义英雄”，通过怪物理论和文学倒置的镜头描述了英雄主义和主人公性格发展的经典系统。

可以很容易地设想，在教育学中，这篇文章将作为游戏研究课程的介绍性文本发挥出色的作用，提供强有力而简洁的反驳[结束第 190 页]通常将自己定位为反对此类课程的常见说法的一部分，本质上是某种版本的“视频游戏无关紧要”、“视频游戏不严肃”或“视频游戏不值得学术资源”。托斯卡诺倾向于将游戏机制和主题与现实世界事件联系起来，与该领域知名学者一起提供敏锐的政治评论，证明——即使是对外行读者或视频游戏新手——游戏文本确实很重要和古典文学一样。必须指出的是，托斯卡诺在任何时候都没有转向对视频游戏奖学金感到“防御”的领域；相反，通过以有组织的、有记录的、有条理的方式处理这个话题，他为论点的存在产生了强大的精神气质”

我特别喜欢，并且发现特别有用的是他的第一章，标题为“视频游戏研究的方法”。本章作为文本本身的一个强大的框架装置，包括在大约 12 页中对其他宝贵的游戏奖学金的剖析，这些主要名字来自前面提到的 Juul 和 Bogost，以及 Simon Egenfeldt-Nielson、Jonas Heide Smith 和苏珊娜·帕哈雷斯。作者认为，任何想在自己的机构中增加游戏奖学金课程的人都应该阅读本节，因为这里的讨论范围从程序性修辞（鉴于千禧年初期的伊拉克战争）到讨论从《古墓丽影》到《模拟人生》，从《古墓丽影》到《模拟人生》，再到博格斯特所研究的一切，都采用了相同的概念，包法利夫人。托斯卡诺小心翼翼地将对他所选择的文学的每一次批评都置于更广泛的文化输入背景下，包括女权主义批评、古典主义和种族主义。例如，在第 31 页，他在讨论 Jesper Juul 的《Half Real》（2011 年）时指出：“不幸的是，Juul 的作品甚至没有暗示种族主义、阶级主义、性别歧视等负面文化价值观。专注于规则和程序是一个重要的组成部分，但它们没有解决文化影响这些‘虚构世界’或其中人物的方式”（31）。托斯卡诺反复注意到这些……