Soraya Murray
Biographic Data
| ID | 3867161 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Soraya Murray |
| GIVEN NAMES | Soraya |
| FAMILY NAME | Murray |
| SIGNATURE | MURRAY S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Vicissitudes of Representation: Critical Game Studies, Belonging, and Anti-Essentialism
Video games are enjoying a flourishing of critical studies; they are finally taken as consequential forms of visual culture worthy of historical, theoretical, and cultural attention. At one time, their scholarship was largely overdetermined by issues of medium and treated largely as an entertainment product. But with the complexifying of the form, combined with a new generation of dynamic scholars and an expanded understanding of how to write abo…
“Raji's Burden”
This article uses a visual culture studies approach to examine how video games invoking non‐Western cultural specificities face heightened pressures to completely and “authentically” represent their cultures. Focusing on the independent Indian video game Raji: An Ancient Epic (Nodding Heads 2020) as a key example, I employ art historian Kobena Mercer's concept of the “burden of representation” to show how race, ethnicity, and gender intersect in …
America is Dead. Long Live America! Political Affect in Days Gone
This essay models a method for understanding political affect in video games by analyzing the American action-adventure survival horror game Days Gone (SIE Bend Studio, 2019). Through an examination of its rendering of the Pacific Northwest landscape as ideology, much is revealed about a deeply troubled and oppositional worldview. While this research addresses matters of representation—particularly notions of fraught masculinity and a struggle fo…
‘In this game that we’re playing’: Nineteen Eighty-Four and Video Games
Traces of George Orwell’s critiques of totalitarian society, in both blunt and subtle forms, exist throughout video games. Major themes of dystopia, surveillance culture, technologies of control, authoritarianism, and the oppression of a large underclass exist in innumerable game narratives and environments. Do games like the BioShock series (2007– ), Remember Me (2013), Watch Dogs series (2014– ), We Happy Few (2018), Orwell (2016–), Inside (201…
Artist’s Project: Harun Farocki’s Parallel
Harun Farocki’s last completed work before his death, Parallel I–IV (2012–14), is a multichannel inquiry into video-game images in terms of their evolution toward photorealism and the peculiar qual
Horizons Already Here: Video Games and Landscape
“you are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. around you is a forest. a small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.”So begins Adventure, developed by computer p
Video Games and Playable Media
As video games constitute a relatively new medium of expression without an agreed-upon history, any attempt at a genealogy of the form is necessarily provisional in nature. A feminist subfield of the genealogy is even less codified, but recent frictions around gender and inclusivity in games have revealed key stakes in video games connected to larger issues of women in technology and the sciences, issues of gender and representation, and the broa…
On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space
Today over half of all American households own a dedicated game console and gaming industry profits trump those of the film industry worldwide. In this book, Soraya Murray moves past the technical discussions of games and offers a fresh and incisive look at their cultural dimensions. She critically explores blockbusters likeThe Last of Us, Metal Gear Solid, Spec Ops: The Line, Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed to show how they are deeply entangled…
The Work of Postcolonial Game Studies in the Play of Culture
This article considers larger methodological questions of what political work is undertaken when scholars engage in postcolonial critiques of video games within academic intellectual frameworks. What is postcolonial game studies, and what is its purpose, within the context of larger issues of inclusion, representation, diversity, and the challenging of hegemonic power structures? After surveying some of the key literature in postcolonial game stu…
Landscapes of Empire inMetal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts
Landscapes of Empire inMetal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
The Work of Postcolonial Game Studies in the Play of Culture
This article considers larger methodological questions of what political work is undertaken when scholars engage in postcolonial critiques of video games within academic intellectual frameworks. What is postcolonial game studies, and what is its purpose, within the context of larger issues of inclusion, representation, diversity, and the challenging of hegemonic power structures? After surveying some of the key literature in postcolonial game stu…
Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts
Video Games and Playable Media
As video games constitute a relatively new medium of expression without an agreed-upon history, any attempt at a genealogy of the form is necessarily provisional in nature. A feminist subfield of the genealogy is even less codified, but recent frictions around gender and inclusivity in games have revealed key stakes in video games connected to larger issues of women in technology and the sciences, issues of gender and representation, and the broa…
On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space
Today over half of all American households own a dedicated game console and gaming industry profits trump those of the film industry worldwide. In this book, Soraya Murray moves past the technical discussions of games and offers a fresh and incisive look at their cultural dimensions. She critically explores blockbusters likeThe Last of Us, Metal Gear Solid, Spec Ops: The Line, Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed to show how they are deeply entangled…
The Work of Postcolonial Game Studies in the Play of Culture
This article considers larger methodological questions of what political work is undertaken when scholars engage in postcolonial critiques of video games within academic intellectual frameworks. What is postcolonial game studies, and what is its purpose, within the context of larger issues of inclusion, representation, diversity, and the challenging of hegemonic power structures? After surveying some of the key literature in postcolonial game stu…
Landscapes of Empire inMetal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
‘In this game that we’re playing’: Nineteen Eighty-Four and Video Games
Traces of George Orwell’s critiques of totalitarian society, in both blunt and subtle forms, exist throughout video games. Major themes of dystopia, surveillance culture, technologies of control, authoritarianism, and the oppression of a large underclass exist in innumerable game narratives and environments. Do games like the BioShock series (2007– ), Remember Me (2013), Watch Dogs series (2014– ), We Happy Few (2018), Orwell (2016–), Inside (201…
Artist’s Project: Harun Farocki’s Parallel
Harun Farocki’s last completed work before his death, Parallel I–IV (2012–14), is a multichannel inquiry into video-game images in terms of their evolution toward photorealism and the peculiar qual
Horizons Already Here: Video Games and Landscape
“you are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. around you is a forest. a small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.”So begins Adventure, developed by computer p
America is Dead. Long Live America! Political Affect in Days Gone
This essay models a method for understanding political affect in video games by analyzing the American action-adventure survival horror game Days Gone (SIE Bend Studio, 2019). Through an examination of its rendering of the Pacific Northwest landscape as ideology, much is revealed about a deeply troubled and oppositional worldview. While this research addresses matters of representation—particularly notions of fraught masculinity and a struggle fo…
The Vicissitudes of Representation: Critical Game Studies, Belonging, and Anti-Essentialism
Video games are enjoying a flourishing of critical studies; they are finally taken as consequential forms of visual culture worthy of historical, theoretical, and cultural attention. At one time, their scholarship was largely overdetermined by issues of medium and treated largely as an entertainment product. But with the complexifying of the form, combined with a new generation of dynamic scholars and an expanded understanding of how to write abo…
“Raji's Burden”
This article uses a visual culture studies approach to examine how video games invoking non‐Western cultural specificities face heightened pressures to completely and “authentically” represent their cultures. Focusing on the independent Indian video game Raji: An Ancient Epic (Nodding Heads 2020) as a key example, I employ art historian Kobena Mercer's concept of the “burden of representation” to show how race, ethnicity, and gender intersect in …
Art (8 works) · Digital Games and Media (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Media studies (5 works)