Hollywood Gamers: Digital Convergence in the Film and Video Game Industries [Paperback]

For years, major film studios have licensed products related to their most popular films; video game spin-offs have become an important part of these licensing practices. Where blockbuster films are concerned, the video game release has become the rule rather than the exception. InHollywood Gamers,Robert Alan Brookey explores the business conditions and technological developments that have facilitated the convergence of the film and video game industries. Brookey treats video games as rhetorical texts and critically examines several games to determine how specific industrial conditions are manifest in game design. Among the games (and films) discussed areLord of the Rings, The Godfather, Spider-Man,andIron Man.

Brookey (communication, Northern Illinois Univ.) offers an expansive book that does much more than its modest title promises. Applying, extending, and interrogating ideas from Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (CH, Jun'07, 44-5465), he looks at the economic, aesthetic, industrial, rhetorical, technological, and narrative implications related to the synergistic practices of film and video-game industries. In doing so, he provides a comprehensive transdisciplinary history of ideas, performing a necessary critical convergence in order to encompass the complexity of his topic. Focusing on the Lord of the Rings and Godfather franchises, and also using the Marvel and Disney corporations as touchstones, Brookey successfully harnesses media and cultural studies approaches to create an evolutionary, next-generation game-studies methodologyone that carefully seeks to understand the processes and products of this industrial cross-pollination. Among the important ideas this book explores: the connection between game interactivity and incorporation and consumption practices; author/auteur tensions and reconfigurations within studio systems; and the relationship between intertextuality, fan cultures, 'glocalc