This dissertation offers a non materialist Marxist reading of how play is constructed in many contemporary computer games and in much of the critical and the popular discourse surrounding these games. Focused primarily on two computer games, The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour, its goal is to come to terms with the political, cultural and economic structures that underpin the complex textual and visual rhetoric of computer games. To this end, the primary purpose of this dissertation is to understand how computer games encode the reading and writing process. Specifically concerned with the emphasis that games like The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour place on following rules, it demonstrates that many computer games are constructed around a ludic, goal-orientated model of play that is designed to teach players that the type of open-ended, creative and critical play that Jacques Derrida understands as freeplay is undesirable and unreachable. In doing so, its larger purpose is to show that the danger of computer games like The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour is not that they are too real. Although many computer games promise players a virtual experience that is more real than real, they invariably fail to deliver on these promises. Whether these failures are consciously or unconsciously coded into the games, the result is that the so-called "real world"---the constructed social reality of third-stage capitalism---appears to be real and beyond question in much the same way that Jean Baudrillard argues that Disneyland serves to make Los Angeles appear more real. In this sense, the danger of computer games is not that players become so addicted to their virtual largess that they remove themselves from the concerns of so-called real world. Instead, the danger is that players will become unable to see that the real world is in many ways as fantastic, as constructed and as flawed as the virtual worlds that computer games offer and thus fail to understand the always powerful role that they play in the mechanism of simulation: the always violent, always economic ways in which the real is produced and sustained by readers.
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