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"Games of Empire: GlobalCapitalism and Video Games" byNick Dyer-Witheford and Greigde PeuterAdam Paul Rafinski aa University of Art and Design Karlsruhe, Institutefor Postdigital Narratives , Lorenzstraße 15, 76135,Karlsruhe, GermanyPublished online: 03 May 2011.

To cite this article: Adam Paul Rafinski (2011) "Games of Empire: Global Capitalism andVideo Games" by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Information, Communication& Society, 14:5, 754-755

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2011.556657

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BOOK REVIEWS

Sharon Kleinman (ed.), The Culture of Efficiency: Technology in Everyday Life(New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2009), 390 pp., ISBN 978-1-4331-0420-6 (pbk),US$34.95.

This book offered me an unexpected, albeit not surprising, insight to begin with:that book titles create expectations that are not always met. This is not, becausethe book’s title – The Culture of Efficiency: Technology in Everyday Life (edited bySharon Kleinman) – was a bad or wrong description of its content – quitethe opposite – but because I thought I knew enough about ‘the field’ in orderto know what to expect from the title. As it turned out, I was very wrong.

This serves to underline an important point concerning ‘The Culture of Effi-ciency’: it is indeed an insightful, at times surprising, book, which does notnecessarily just cover the ‘usual’ topics related to the question of technologyin everyday life. Instead, it is a book that is very good at raising issues that areotherwise often overlooked. Hence, there are articles about stalking (Leisring),about disabilities (Benarska) and about communication in catastrophic situations(Marlow & Giles). Other articles deal with issues such as the McDonald’s SnackWrap in Japan (Maynard) or architecture, transport and other such issues, i.e. awide range of technologies and everyday situations come into play.

This list is simply to illustrate not only the range of technologies, but therebyalso of contributions. One aspect that many of them share is that they are oftenempirically based – and even practical. The range of approaches is also reflectedin the choice of titles for the different parts: ‘Birth Eat Connect’; ‘Work PlayRest’; ‘Speed Multitask Displace’ and ‘Balance Breathe Renew’. My ‘mis-reading’ of the title was based on my emphasis on the second part rather thanthe first. Instead, this is in fact a book about the culture of efficiency.

The overtone of the book as a whole is critical towards the notion ofefficiency and many of the diverse versions of its culture that the authors haveanalysed. This overtone is both appropriate and useful in this context. One canfeel the personal engagement that many authors bring to the topic – not a verycommon feature in academic writing, but one that seems suitable in this context.

Overall, the edited collection left me with the feeling of having read some-thing a bit out of the ordinary. Not every contribution was as good as the other

Information, Communication & Society Vol. 14, No. 5, August 2011, pp. 751–757

ISSN 1369-118X print/ISSN 1468-4462 online

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

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(the usual problem of an edited collection) nor did every contribution speak tome (again, this is not surprising). The unusual nature of the book meant that italso left me slightly puzzled at times, helping to question my own standpoint (andalso my ‘expertise’ – as indicated above). Overall, it is a stimulating book. As ahandbook for students, however, it seemed to me slightly too specific and withtoo little basic overview or theoretical grounding.

Maren Hartmann# 2011 Maren Hartmann

DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2011.556655

Maren Hartmann is an Associate Professor for media and communication soci-

ology at the University of the Arts (UdK) Berlin. Before she has worked at several

universities in the UK, Belgium and Germany. Her main fields of research

include media in everyday life, appropriation concepts (esp. domestication),

non-use, cyberculture, youth and media. Amongst her publications are

Technologies and Utopias: The cyberflaneur and the experience of being online

(Reinhard Fischer, 2004) as well as the co-edited Domestication of Media and

Technologies (Open University Press, 2005) and After the Mobile Phone? (Frank &

Timme, 2008). She is a member of the Executive Board of ECREA as well as the

chair of the DGPuK Media sociology section. Address: University of the Arts

Berlin, GWK, Mierendorffstraße 28-30, Berlin, 10589 Germany. [email:

hartmann@udk-berlin.de]

Colin J. Bennett, The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 254 pp., ISBN 978-0-262-02638-3(hbk), £10.95.

This book unveils the importance of the confounded issue of privacy through analarming account of the contemporary state of privacy activism against thenormalization of surveillance. It presents a great review of literature which ident-ifies a visible gap in the study of privacy advocacy. Through a thorough investi-gation and a coherent framing of the issue, Bennett manages to shed light on thedark area of social, political and economic arena of control through monitoring.A typology of surveillance practices unravels the complexity of the issue at handand preludes a highly informative study. The book is structured in a meticulousand engaging manner, while it is soberly concerned with the essential concept of‘privacy advocacy’ in an unprecedented level of visibility, exposure and datastorage in the information society.

The volume at hand should be read by any scholar with a vibrant interest inthe grey areas of information privacy and social movements, such as communi-cation and law studies, social and political sciences. Advanced undergraduate and

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postgraduate students involved in legal, social and political issues in the infor-mation society will also find this account engaging. Bennett beautifully illustratesthe various dynamics of agencies in the field of privacy advocacy, as predomi-nantly based in the United States, Europe and Australia. The author succeedsin diligently discussing both the public (political) and the private (economic)forms of information seeking, gathering and storing or disseminating. Beyondpointing out the lack of coherent academic argumentation on the issue,Bennett reviews a series of success stories while also alluding to the lack of coher-ent privacy advocacy. Concurrently, he offers a sympathetic overview of the issuein its variant modes of resistance to all forms of surveillance.

In this light, the discussion of good privacy protection as good business prac-tice (pp. 45–47) could be furthermore developed with regard to the democraticethics of such practice and the repercussions of the distribution of political power.Moreover, the discussion on symbolic politics (pp. 106–122) can be expanded interms of further engagement with literature on cultural politics (cf. Stevenson2003; Isin & Nielsen 2008) and at the same time contribute to the criticalongoing debate on notions of media power and mediated politics (cf. Bennett& Entman 2001; Couldry & Curran 2003). However, the task which thisbook set out to fulfil has been addressed; the key questions on the existenceof privacy advocates are addressed in terms of their background, form, organiz-ation and strategies.

Overall, Bennett’s vigorous engagement with the thorny theme of privacyand resistance to its finale has resulted in the production of an accurate acknowl-edgement of various peripheral and central issues related to it. It is part of awidening flow of arguments on the crucial legal (Brownsword & Yeung 2009),societal (Lyon 2006) and increasingly political (Haggerty & Samatas 2010)timely topic of surveillance. The book’s substantive concern with privacy as apublic good which should be protected as such illuminates a series of actors,formations, directions, tensions and practicalities in advocating privacy. Thisbook answers all the novel and the fundamental questions which it poses andthus comprises an essential read which opens up the field for a substantial disqui-sition on how to interrogate, analyse and regulate privacy.

Eleftheria Lekakis# 2011 Eleftheria Lekakis

DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2011.570773

References

Bennett, W. L. & Entman, R. (eds) (2001) Mediated Politics: Communication in theFuture of Democracy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA.

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Brownsword, R. & Yeung, K. (eds) (2009) Regulating Technologies, Hart Publishing,Oxford.

Couldry, N. & Curran, J. (eds) (2003) Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in aNetworked World, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD.

Haggerty, K. & Samatas, M. (eds) (2010) Surveillance and Democracy, Routledge,London.

Isin, E. F. & Nielsen, G. M. (eds) (2008) Acts of Citizenship, Zed Books, London.Lyon, D. (2006) Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond, Willan Publishing,

Portland, OR.Stevenson, N. (2003) Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Questions, Open University

Press, Berkshire.

Eleftheria Lekakis is currently a Visiting Tutor in the Department of Media and

Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London. She holds a BSc in

Political Science from the University of Crete, an MSc in Media and Communi-

cations from the London School of Economics and a PhD in Media and Communi-

cations from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her research interests

include political communication, cultural citizenship, civic engagement, alterna-

tive media, cyberactivism, corporate culture, and the politics of consumption.

Address: Goldsmiths College, University of London, Department of Media and

Communications, London, UK. [email: e.lekakis@gold.ac.uk]

Nick Dyer-Witheford & Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 2009), 320 pp., ISBN 978-0-8166-6610-2 (pbk), US$19.95.

Games of Empire aims for an ambitious goal: melting the culture of digital gameswith the post-Marxist theory of ‘Empire’ by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt.It is well written: well investigated, pointed, and overall entertaining. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter indeed raise important questions, but fail in providinganswers. They use the highly discussed anti-globalization manifesto ‘Empire’ andthe theoretical ambient noise behind it as an intellectual grid for their analysis ofthe connection between video game industry and contemporary global capitalism– mixing popular psychological arguments with empirical data and their owninterpretation of Empire. Their basic argument is that: ‘Video games are a paradig-matic media of Empire – planetary, militarized hypercapitalism – and of some ofthe forces presently challenging it’ (p. XV). The book does not go any further.Questions like ‘What does this mean for the aesthetic of games?’ or ‘How does itaffect our understanding of Empire?’ are hardly touched upon.

The book itself reads more like a collection of essays than coherent research.Although each chapter contains obvious references to other chapters, they could

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easily have been published separately without any connection to each other.Additionally, the language changes significantly from chapter to chapter: someare readable without any background knowledge, e.g. the convincing retellingof the history of video games in the context of immaterial labour (one of thebook’s highlights), while others are clearly addressed to professionals with abackground in political and economic theory. While sometimes the authors’use and selection of quotes is excellent and convincing, the overall impressionof their judgement is very subjective and lurid due to their design. Forexample, the authors come out as huge fans of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,quoting them in every important introduction of a new connection betweenphilosophy and video game culture. Besides establishing an obvious pattern,here Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter are clearly legitimatizing them-selves on an intellectual level, often without explaining the actual quote or evenmentioning its context.

The book should be read as an ambitious and important experiment in bring-ing together the aesthetic and socio-political dimensions of computer games froma left wing perspective. It fails in providing a big picture, but deserves credit forraising the following question: What is the connection between playing a game,the interactive entertainment industry and the hacking and do-it-yourself cultureon an ontological level? Finding an answer to this question will be necessary inorder to understand the enormous popularity of video games, which, asDyer-Witheford and de Peuter show, goes beyond mere entertainment andescapism from reality. In this sense, Games of Empire is not only a rich fondueof material for scholars to work with, but also a highly necessary statement inthe field of Game Studies concerning the possibilities and different means ofdigital games.

Adam Paul Rafinski# 2011 Adam Paul Rafinski

DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2011.556657

Adam Paul Rafinski (∗1983 Chorzow, Poland) is a researcher, philosopher, art

and media theorist, and media artist. His work focuses on the aesthetics of digital

culture, the role and embodiment of the subject, playfulness in culture and art, as

well as the issue of presence in performance art. Since 2010 he has been a lec-

turer at the Media Art Department and Institute for Postdigital Narratives of

the University of Art and Design in Karlsruhe (Germany) and co-founder

of their GameLab. He conducts theory classes on digital games and the

culture of play. Address: University of Art and Design Karlsruhe, Institute for

Postdigital Narratives, Lorenzstraße 15, 76135 Karlsruhe, Germany. [email:

adamrafinski@online.de]

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Linda Leung (ed.), Digital Experience Design: Ideas, Industries, Interaction (Bristoland Chicago, IL: Intellect, 2008), 128 pp., ISBN 978-1-8415-0209-0 (hbk),US$60.00.

The so-called ‘digital age’ seems to be cause for confusion and debate, not only inthe hard sciences, but also within the Humanities. By design, the digital itselftranscends the ‘interdisciplinary-craze’ of the late 1990s. Rather than tryingto define it by various methods from various disciplines, the opposite approachwould probably seem more fitting since we are talking about concepts which allstem from the idea of a universal machine, a machine that can emulate anyother, even itself. Furthermore, the notion of the ‘digital’ we have today doesincorporate abstract as well as material concepts and brings them to alignmentunder the auspices of a certain task.

The task or teleology that is discussed in this book by Linda Leung is thenotion of ‘experience’, mostly in the context of web design and its applications.The former also being a term or concept that may contain many differentinterpretations as to what exactly it pertains. But for the sake of argument,let us assume that methodically, the last frontier of this notion of experienceis the human perception apparatus in connection with its emotional landscape.

Many different approaches are introduced in this rather short collection ofessays, ranging from various contexts, such as storytelling, fashion, gender, disabil-ity, sound design and architecture in an attempt to map movements of methodologyonto the ‘digital experience’. The chapters are structured in a clear and usablemanner, also providing short bullet-point-style summaries at the end of eacharticle. Giving this choice of layout, the book seems to aim to cater to younger,i.e. undergraduate, students, trying to serve as an introduction into the subjectmatter of digital technology and its discourse within the Humanities and the Arts.

Assuming that this was the intended aim of the book, it executes its goalwell. For students and scholars interested in more profound research,however, maybe the only thing worthwhile here are the respective bibliographiesof the articles, since most of the authors are merely trying to outline ideas to mapestablished practices of scientific thinking and applied arts (i.e. design and archi-tecture) onto a digital context and its experience by the users.

However, with the ‘digital sciences’ themselves being so young as a disciplinewhereas at the same time introducing and ever-increasing complexity in itsmethods and points of view, it truly is hard – if not impossible – to offer aconcise description about its scope and definition of its methods. In short, thisbook might contribute to the ongoing debate about the ‘digital’ as well asbeing a good starting point for students interested in the subject.

Deniz Yenimazman# 2011 Deniz Yenimazman

DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2011.556656

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Deniz Yenimazman graduated from the University of Cologne (Germany) in

Philosophy, English and German and holds a masters’ degree from Goldsmiths

College, London in Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice. Yenimazman

is currently enrolled as a PhD student in Philosophy & Aesthetics at the Univer-

sity for Arts and Design in Karlsruhe, Germany. Research interests include:

Philosophy, History of Science, Economics, Automata Theory, Cybernetics,

Aesthetics, Art Theory, Media Theory. Address: Hochschule fur Gestaltung,

Philosophy and Aesthetics, c/o Monika Theilmann, Lorenzstr. 15, Karlsruhe,

D-76135 Germany. [email: dyenimazman@hfg-karlsruhe.de]

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