Gaming the City: The Monetization of Urban Affect and Homemaking in Popular Video Games

Abstract

Digital gaming has become a major global cultural industry, and many popular video games feature cityscapes. While scholars have critiqued the neoliberal and dystopian representations of urban environments, much less attention is given to how video games offer players a sense of belonging: an immersive city where they can feel at home. Game developers create affective urban worlds to attract and maintain a large player base for continuous revenue. We argue that high-budget and popular video games balance a chaotic urban gamescape with opportunities for privatized homemaking that keep players engaged. First, they use emergent gameplay to simulate the urban environment as sensational places where players must prepare for unpredictable, often dangerous, and violent encounters. Second, they provide players with homemaking opportunities and the means to own and curate private spaces. These opportunities, however, reflect and perpetuate a privatized purpose of homemaking that perpetuates gendered and capitalistic assumptions, socializing players into engaging with urban life in a very selective manner. While we analyze several video games, GTA V provides a specific example of how this homemaking is monetized. Our analysis combines scholarly debates on affective geographies and gamescapes.