As previous generations of players have aged and new generations with new tastes and expectations have emerged, the game industry has increasingly turned to high-profile remasters and remakes to re-valorize old software for new market conditions. To date, scholars and journalists have viewed this development almost entirely through an authenticity-focused lens inherited from preservation discourses, which has led many to dismiss rerelease efforts as simultaneously derivative and ahistorical. But this focus on authenticity has obscured the complex cultural and economic processes which give rise to rereleased games and the heterogeneity of the adaptive strategies that the industry has produced to appeal to varied consumer groups. This paper argues that we should instead view remastering and remaking as sub-practices of what I call temporalization, which, like the more familiar practice of localization, should be viewed as a creatively challenging and politically underdetermined cultural force which demands analysis on its own terms.
Critical examinations of the Saw films have generally focused on their post-9/11 production context and the link between the War on Terror and images of spectacular violence. This article argues that Saw and its sequels can instead fruitfully be understood as products
of new neo-liberal regimes of subjecthood. As neo-liberal ideology and policy push market logics further into everyday lives, new forms of immaterial labour force the worker to act both as disciplining manager and as disciplined worker. By tracing neo-liberal subjectivity’s emphasis
on individualized agency and responsibility through Jigsaw’s ideology, this piece shows that Saw dramatizes the parody of freedom offered by late capitalism. Jigsaw, like neo-liberalism itself, operates through a complex assemblage of technology, ethics and guilt, which forces
the neo-liberal subject to enact its own punishment. Saw’s trademark traps are explored through the series’ use of video game logic and language in order to position Jigsaw’s victims within the more subtle mechanisms of control necessitated by contemporary capitalism.
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