Soraya Murray: Video Games as Visual Culture

From her website:

“Soraya Murray is an interdisciplinary scholar of contemporary visual culture, with particular interest in art, film, digital media and video games. Murray holds a Ph.D. in art history and visual studies from Cornell University, and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine. She is an Associate Professor in the Film + Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her writings may be found in journals in the areas of contemporary art, film and digital culture, including venues such as Art Journal, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Public Art Review, Third Text, Open Library of Humanities, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Feminist Media Histories, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, the European Journal of American Studies, Film Quarterly and Critical Inquiry.”

Dr. Murray also happened to be one of my professors and mentors at UC Santa Cruz.

I had a front row seat to her forward-thinking scholarship on video games as visual culture, whereby she frames video games as a cultural form as worthy of critical study as painting or film.

In 2018, we as a Film & Digital Media department celebrated the publication of Murray’s first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender, and Space, Bloomsbury Press. The paperback version was published in 2021.

In this work, Murray examines popular games including The Last of Us, Metal Gear Solid, Spec Ops: The Line, Tomb Raider and Assassin’s Creed through a visual cultural studies lens. In so doing, she demonstrates how these games dialogue with the contemporary political, cultural, and economic conflicts that are dominating American popular discourse.

Murray unpacks for the reader how mainstream games can reveal societal hopes, fears, ideologies, and struggles for voice. Characters and worldbuilding vis-à-vis built environments and/or landscapes can and do reflect ideas about race, gender, globalisation, and cultural uncertainty. As a pioneer in the field of critical game studies, Murray establishes a theoretical framework for taking games seriously as cultural artifacts. She argues that video games can be a “place where dominant values are conveyed and contested, alternatives produced and resistances generated.”

More about this novel work on Murray’s website: https://sorayamurray.com/on-video-games/

Purchase the book through Bloomsbury: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/on-video-games-9781350217706/