Coming Soon: Dragon's Lair and the Fantasy of Interactivity

Coming Soon from Lexington Books:

Dragon's Lair and the Fantasy of Interactivity

M J CLARKE

Lexington Books

Pages: 150 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-7936-3603-4 • Hardback • July 2022 • $95.00 • (£73.00)

978-1-7936-3604-1 • eBook • June 2022 • $45.00 • (£35.00)

Further details and ordering at https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793636034/Dragon's-Lair-and-the-Fantasy-of-Interactivity.

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.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Dragon's Lair: The Hardware

Chapter 2: Dragon's Lair: The Business

Chapter 3: Dragon's Lair: The Disc

Chapter 4: Dragon's Lair: The Fantasy

References

About the Author

Author Information:

MJ Clarke is associate professor in TV, film, and media studies at California State University, Los Angeles.