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Title details for Mortal Kombat by David Church - Available

Mortal Kombat

Games of Death

by David Church
ebook
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Upon its premiere in 1992, Midway's Mortal Kombat spawned an enormously influential series of fighting games, notorious for their violent "fatality" moves performed by photorealistic characters. Targeted by lawmakers and moral reformers, the series directly inspired the creation of an industrywide rating system for video games and became a referendum on the wide popularity of 16-bit home consoles. Along the way, it became one of the world's most iconic fighting games, and formed a transmedia franchise that continues to this day.

This book traces Mortal Kombat's history as an American product inspired by both Japanese video games and Chinese martial-arts cinema, its successes and struggles in adapting to new market trends, and the ongoing influence of its secret-strewn narrative world. After outlining the specific elements of gameplay that differentiated Mortal Kombat from its competitors in the coin-op market, David Church examines the various martial-arts films that inspired its Orientalist imagery, helping explain its stereotypical uses of race and gender. He also posits the games as a cultural landmark from a moment when public policy attempted to intervene in both the remediation of cinematic aesthetics within interactive digital games and in the transition of public gaming spaces into the domestic sphere. Finally, the book explores how the franchise attempted to conquer other forms of media in the 1990s, lost ground to a new generation of 3D games in the 2000s, and has successfully rebooted itself in the 2010s to reclaim its legacy.

  • Creators

  • Series

    Landmark Video Games

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    February 17, 2022

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780472902620

    • Open EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780472902620
      • File size: 2104 KB

  • Accessibility

    The publisher provides the following statement about the accessibility of the EPUB file supplied to OverDrive. Experiences may vary across reading systems. After borrowing the book, you may download the EPUB files to read in another reading system.

    Summary

    A complex book with images, list items, and complex formatting, which are defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmarks, reading order, Structural Navigation, Index, and semantic structure.

    Ways Of Reading

    • Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and font size, spaces between paragraphs, sentences, words, and letters, as well as color of background and text).

    • All content can be read as read aloud speech or dynamic braille.

    • Has alternative text descriptions for images.

    Conformance

    • The publication contains a conformance statement that it meets the EPUB Accessibility and WCAG 2 Level AA standard.

    • The publication was certified by Benetech.

    • The certifier's credential is https://bornaccessible.org/certification/gca-credential.

    • This publication claims to meet EPUB Accessibility 1.0 WCAG 2.0 Level AA.

    Navigation

    • Table of contents to all chapters of the text via links.

    • Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation.

    Rich Content

    • Information-rich images are described by extended descriptions.

    Additional Information

    • Page breaks included

  • Languages

    • English

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • Open EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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