Alex Wade

Review: Jim Rossignol, This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities. Ann Arbor, MI: Digital Culture Books, 2008. £17.50. 224 pp

with deeper character exploration in Tony Soprano, through the vehicle of therapy that is afforded by both. In this way, the programme appeals across gender and transgresses the narrative spaces and themes of both genres. In Part 3, ‘Defining Quality: Aesthetics, Form, Content’, Jane Feuer’s analysis of Six Feet Under (HBO 2001–5) demonstrates its ancestry within art cinema and to ‘quality television’ itself. By counterposing it to the contemporaneous long-running series The West Wing (NBC 1999–2006), she demonstrates the different genesis of the products. The West Wing adheres closely to mainstream quality drama of the 1980s and 1990s and marks itself out as ‘different’ from everyday television. Six Feet Under’s ancestry in television drama is, according to Feuer, clearly signalled in the injection of a musical number into a realist scene in the family kitchen – a direct reference to Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven. Avant-garde music and other tropes of modernist cinema are also employed alongside the use of the paradigmatic narrative of the soap opera. In a very close analysis of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS 2000–), Jonathan Bignall points to the industrial and institutional changes that have made it possible for the insertion of the ‘self-consciously wrought mise-en-scène’ (p. 159) into the police investigation genre. This aesthetic quality is attributed to the use of film, the emphasis on depth of colour, lighting and elaborate camera movement that is indicative of a longer history of the relationship between Hollywood – resources and personnel – and network television. Three chapters in this part engage with the role of ‘producer/auteurs’ in Maire Messenger Davies’s discussion, through her research on the production of Star Trek, of the nature of creativity in television in Mark Lawson’s extended interview with David Chase, creator of The Sopranos and in Peter Kaye’s interview with the leading composer for quality television scores, W.G. ‘Snuffy’ Walden. These chapters reveal the complex operations and working practice of these shows in their different contexts and once again raise questions about authorship in relation to the valued cultural product. This is a useful and timely collection that offers a range of perspectives and positions on the ever elusive notion of ‘quality’ television.

Space pilot: an introduction to amateur flight simulation

Life in twenty-first-century societies is complex, interdependent and changeable. Taking this consideration as its starting point, this article examines how spatial analysis comprehends this fluidity. With the theoretical emphasis on Henri Lefebvre, I look to examine how the classic triadic model of lived, conceived and perceived space can be updated to include those areas of space whereby society is in a state of flux, manifested by the apparently indiscernible switches between a variety of spaces. The constant movement and habitation of a multitude of spaces, I call “trans-space”. Expanding upon this, the article argues that a revision of Lefebvres typology should include “digital” and “enchanted” space to allow for a more nuanced comprehension of how space interrelates. This model is then applied to the ethnographic study of an amateur flight simulator, showing how individuals transfer between spaces, how spaces act when they are brought together and how they simultaneously complement and resist one another.

Review: Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy, Game Cultures. Maidenhead and New York: Open University Press, 2006. £19.99. 171 pp. Barry Atkins and Tanya Krzywinska (eds), Videogame, Player, Text. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007. £15.99. 256pp

voyeurism and exhibitionism, and the mediatization of identity. Here again, those hyperlinks keep popping up, from paparazzi to counterterrorism and beyond. It’s a book that’s absolutely jam packed, yet still leaves room for the reader to add in more. This shouldn’t be taken as a criticism, of course. It’s more a case of the way this book keeps the reader interested, the way its style encourages the making of connections. Trying to figure out how to summarize this effect, I can only describe it as Benjaminian, and indeed Walt is a constant presence (along with other urbanists’ favourites such as Simmel and Kracauer, and reflexive modernists like Lash). Writing with effusiveness uncharacteristic of back-cover blurbs on academic tomes, James Donald says ‘I love this book’. But I will end by echoing his praise, and make a promise to readers: you will love The Media City, too.

The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact – By Jean Baudrillard

There is an air of weary finality surrounding The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, that is not fully explained by the retrospective knowledge that this was Baudrillard’s final monograph before his death in March 2007. As Chris Turner writes in the introduction, ‘Baudrillard sees the present work . . . as the closing text in a cycle of “theory fictions” ’ (10), suggesting that Baudrillard himself would not continue writing in this idiosyncratic style and format which, in a typical inversion, alienates the academy as much as it enfranchises a wider readership. Yet, beneath the panache and the occasional bursts of optimism (91–113), the overriding theme is that the book represents an endgame of a fatal strategy: that its incorporation of the Baudrillard corpus from the past 35 years, with references to 1973’s The Mirror of Production (41, 47), 1981’s Simulacra and Simulation (68) and 1986’s America (79), eventually resulting in the sum of all fears, that the world prefigured in his canon and précised here, a world of excess where ‘[t]oo much is too much’ (193), came to pass on September 11 2001, with any work following this merely fallout from ground zero. In fact, the original actualisation of Baudrillard’s world-view finds its genesis in his 1990 work, The Transparency of Evil, to which this is a spiritual successor. Then Baudrillard attempted to comprehend a world where Soviet Communism had been dismissed from the political landscape and the west, in all its technocratic glory had no other to compete with, economically, militarily or ideologically.A lack of stability at the fin de siecle manifested itself in an inward turn, towards global recession and an eventual political ‘involution’ (21) to the now-acceptable soft left as the spectre of Marxism was dispelled–perfectly embodied in the transformation of the Labour Party in the UK. Effectively global society becomes a solitary capitalist enterprise with ‘integrated and hyperintegrated systems – the technological system, the social system, [which] tend towards the extreme’ (Baudrillard, 1990: 62), with the symbolic a mere addenda to semiotic hegemony. In The Intelligence of Evil, this is evinced as an ‘ “Integral Reality”, a reality without limits in which everything is realized and technically materialized’ (18), suggesting that we have reached the apogee of a one-world system, where the only form of resistance can come from within the system itself. As opposition to the dominant model has declined, Baudrillard argues, so innate defensive mechanisms are lost resulting in fourth order (viral) simulacra, which, being beyond both copy and simulation, is a mutagen of the system itself, ‘[i]t is the global violence immanent in the world-system itself which from within, sets the purest symbolic form of the challenge against it’ (22).This was finally achieved in Autumn 2001, when the signs of economic and military dominion were involuted via Book reviews