The Counterfeit Coin
216 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
14 color
Paperback
Release Date:12 May 2023
ISBN:9781978825505
Hardcover
Release Date:12 May 2023
ISBN:9781978825512
The Counterfeit Coin
Videogames and Fantasies of Empowerment
Rutgers University Press
The Counterfeit Coin argues that games and related entertainment media have become almost inseparable from fantasy. In turn, these media are making fantasy itself visible in new ways. Though apparently asocial and egocentric—an internal mental image expressing the fulfillment of some wish—fantasy has become a key term in social contestations of the emerging medium. At issue is whose fantasies are catered to, who feels powerful and gets their way, and who is left out. This book seeks to undo the monolith of commercial gaming by locating multiplicity and difference within fantasy itself. It introduces and tracks three broad fantasy traditions that dynamically connect apparently distinct strata of a game (story and play), that join games to other media, and that encircle players in pleasurable loops as they follow these connections.
Christopher Goetz’s The Counterfeit Coin: Videogames and Fantasies of Empowerment is a triumphant theoretical leap forward for game studies. The Counterfeit Coin invites readers to go on an adventure in game and media studies by unlocking how games and media let us play through our fantasies, whether those fantasies are what tether us into a safe spot, let us exceed and transcend bodily limitations, or just accrue more and more loot. Reading across a wide range of games, film, anime and television series, Goetz’s The Counterfeit Coin illuminates how and why players find comfort, transcendence, and accomplishment in the routine and familiar ways we play.
The Counterfeit Coin is ideal for scholars of film interested in learning more about video games and for video game scholars interested in psychoanalysis and comparative media studies. It also intervenes into the ongoing debates within game studies about how games generate meaning, be that by virtue of mechanics, code, and procedural elements, or narrative elements found in other media forms, like story and plot.
CHRISTOPHER GOETZ is an assistant professor in the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. He is one of the founding organizers of the annual Queerness and Games Conference.
Introduction: Feeling Powerful and Getting Your Way
1 The Fantasy of Bodily Transcendence
2 The Fantasy of Bodily Transcendence in Narrative Media
3 The Tether Fantasy
4 The Fantasy of Accretions
Conclusion: Surface Narratives and the Contrivance of Fantasy
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index
