Book Chapter

Playing with Negativity: Max Payne, Neoliberal Collapse, and the Noir Video Game

Rejack, Brian

2020

Overview

This chapter analyses the Max Payne series of video games (2001–2012) as an emblematic instance of the noir video game. The analysis focuses on the games’ relations to the anxiety, mourning, and anger associated with the decline of the public sector and the paired rise of globalization and neoliberalism. After the reading of the Max Payne series, the chapter turns to the relationship between gameplay and affect, arguing that various strategies of “counterplay,” as they have been undertaken through the series, offer another way to interrogate the games’ noir affects. The chapter thus introduces an influential example of noir in the context of mainstream video games, reads that series in relation to affects associated with the contemporary geopolitical order, and demonstrates how the gaming medium can afford critical potential through the affective investments we place in the activity of play.

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Subject: affect / counterplay / Literary Theory and Cultural Studies / Max Payne / modding video games / neoliberalism / noir
• ISBN: 0823287807, 9780823287802