Dragon&#039;s Lair and the Fantasy of Interactivity

MJ Clarke

doi:10.5771/9781793636041

Summary

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.

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Bibliographic data

Edition: 1/2022
Copyright Year: 2022
ISBN-Print: 978-1-7936-3603-4
ISBN-Online: 978-1-7936-3604-1
Publisher: Lexington, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 140
Product Type: Monograph

1. Dedication No access
2. Contents No access
3. Acknowledgments No access
Introduction No access Pages 1 - 4
1. Dragon’s Lair as Hybrid Platform No access
2. Dragon’s Lair and Timing No access
3. Timing and Turbulence No access
4. Dragon’s Lair and Non-linearity No access
5. Dragon’s Lair and Filmic Puzzles No access
6. Notes No access
1. Don Bluth and Full Animation No access
2. The Videogame Crash in the Film and Toy Businesses No access
3. Dragon’s Lair and the “Lazer Craze” No access
4. The After-life of Dragon’s Lair and the Lure of Computerization No access
5. Notes No access
1. The Aesthetics of Interactivity, or Why Dragon’s Lair “Sucked” No access
2. The “Paper World” of Early Screen Interactivity No access
3. Interactivity as Strategy: CubeQuest and Editdroid No access
4. The Political Economy of the Interactive Videodisc No access
5. Notes No access
1. Videogames and the Neoliberal Subject No access
2. “What Is Life but Greed in Action?”—Sword-and-Sorcery’s Adventuring Hero No access
3. “Nearly Every Room in My House Is a Trap”—Sword-and-Sorcery’s Perilous Spaces No access
4. “To Die Dealing Death”—Sword-and-Sorcery’s Grim Mood No access
5. Notes No access
References No access Pages 121 - 132
Index No access Pages 133 - 138
About the Author No access Pages 139 - 140