Nick Dyer-Witheford


Nick Dyer-Witheford is an American author and associate professor at the University of Western Ontario in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies. His area of study primarily focuses on the rise of technology and the internet, as well as their continuous impact on modern society. He has written six books, along with seventeen other publications.

Work

Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games is Dyer-Witheford's third book, published in 2009 and cowritten with Greg de Peuter. In it they talk about how the history of video games has shown how capitalism has shaped the means of how the video game industry works. It serves as an analytical approach to areas such as control, industry and expenditure over the short life of video games. Dyer-Witheford and Peuter use a marxian lens to examine the concept of games as a contributor to a substantial part of financial systems.

Critical reception

The book received mixed reviews from its readers. Dr.Joseph Rebello, assistant professor of economics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said "Reactions, both positive and negative, to this work have been strong. This is not the place to rehash existing debates, but a reader uncomfortable with the very concepts of empire and multitude will probably not be entirely convinced by the book's arguments concerning imperial and multitudinous games. That being said, the book offers plenty of insight to anyone interested in the political economy of video games. Media lawyer Alex Wade, deemed it "Readable and accessible" and said "its critical approach was a vital counterpoint to the sclerotic ludology/narratology debate that dominated games studies discourse in the early years of the 21st century.

Accolades

Nick Dyer-Witheford won the Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize in 2016 by the Canadian Communication Association. He was given the award for his book, Cyber Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex. The prize is named after Professor Gertrude J. Robinson for all she had done for the field of communications across the globe.

Books

Journals

  • "Games of Multitude"
  • "A Playful Multitude? Mobilising and Counter-Mobilising Immaterial Game Labour"
  • "Prolegomenon to a theory of slump media"
  • "Net, square, everywhere?"
  • "Nintendo Capitalism: Enclosures and Insurgencies, Virtual and Terrestrial"
  • "Commons and Cooperatives"
  • "Reprogramming Japan: The High Tech Crisis Under Communitarian Capitalism"
  • ""EA Spouse" and the Crisis of Video Game Labour: Enjoyment, Exclusion, Exploitation, and Exodus"
  • "The Political Economy of Canada's Video and Computer Game Industry"
  • "The New Combinations: Revolt of the Global Value-Subjects"
  • "Empire, Immaterial Labor, the New Combinations, and the Global Worker"
  • "The Work in Digital Play"
  • "Cognitive Capitalism and the Contested Campus"

Chapters

  • "Hegemony or Multitude? Two Versions of Radical Democracy for the Net"
  • "Stagnation, Circulation, and the Automated Abyss"

Articles

  • 'Karl Marx @ Internet Studies"
  • "Videogame Culture Playing on the Digital Commons: Collectivities, Capital and Contestation in Video Game Culture"

Papers

  • "Species-beings: For Biocommunism"