Dragon's Lair and the Fantasy of Interactivity
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A01=MJ Clarke
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animation
arcade games
Author_MJ Clarke
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Category1=Non-Fiction
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fantasy games
game design
interactive games
interactivity
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Price_€50 to €100
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sword and sorcery
video game history
video game studies
videodiscs
Product details
- ISBN 9781793636034
- Weight: 413g
- Dimensions: 160 x 227mm
- Publication Date: 21 Jun 2022
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Perhaps no arcade game is so nostalgically remembered, yet so critically bemoaned, as Dragon’s Lair. A bit of a technological neanderthal, the game implemented a unique combination of videogame components and home video replay, garnering great popular media and user attention in a moment of contracted economic returns and popularity for the videogame arcade business. But subsequently, writers and critics have cast the game aside as a cautionary tale of bad game design. In Dragon’s Lair and the Fantasy of Interactivity, MJ Clarke revives Dragon’s Lair as a fascinating textual experiment interlaced with powerful industrial strategies, institutional discourse, and textual desires around key notions of interactivity and fantasy. Constructing a multifaceted historical study of the game that considers its design, its makers, its recording medium, and its in-game imagery, Clarke suggests that the more appropriate metaphor for Dragon’s Lair is not that of a neanderthal, but a socio-technical network, infusing and advancing debates about the production and consumption of new screen technologies. Far from being the gaming failure posited by evolutionary-minded lay critics, Clarke argues, Dragon’s Lair offers a fascinating provisional solution to still-unsettled questions about screen media.
MJ Clarke is associate professor in TV, film, and media studies at California State University, Los Angeles.
