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Dragon's Lair and the Fantasy of Interactivity
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2022
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
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
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Dedication No access
Contents No access
Acknowledgments No access
Introduction No access Pages 1 - 4
Dragon’s Lair as Hybrid Platform No access
Dragon’s Lair and Timing No access
Timing and Turbulence No access
Dragon’s Lair and Non-linearity No access
Dragon’s Lair and Filmic Puzzles No access
Notes No access
Don Bluth and Full Animation No access
The Videogame Crash in the Film and Toy Businesses No access
Dragon’s Lair and the “Lazer Craze” No access
The After-life of Dragon’s Lair and the Lure of Computerization No access
Notes No access
The Aesthetics of Interactivity, or Why Dragon’s Lair “Sucked” No access
The “Paper World” of Early Screen Interactivity No access
Interactivity as Strategy: CubeQuest and Editdroid No access
The Political Economy of the Interactive Videodisc No access
Notes No access
Videogames and the Neoliberal Subject No access
“What Is Life but Greed in Action?”—Sword-and-Sorcery’s Adventuring Hero No access
“Nearly Every Room in My House Is a Trap”—Sword-and-Sorcery’s Perilous Spaces No access
“To Die Dealing Death”—Sword-and-Sorcery’s Grim Mood No access
