Die Tryin' traces the cultural connections between videogames masculinity and digital
culture. It fuses feminist psychoanalytic Marxist and poststructuralist theory to analyze
the social imaginary that is produced by - and produces - a particular form of masculinity:
boyhood. The author asserts that digital culture is a culturally and historically situated
series of practices products and performances all coalescing to produce a real and imagined
masculinity that exists in perpetual adolescence and is reflective of larger masculine
edifices at work in politics and culture. Thus videogames form the central object of study as
consumer technologies of control and anxiety as well as possibility and subversion. Moving away
from current games research the book favors a game-specific approach that unites visual
culture cultural studies and performance studies instead of a sociological structural
inspection of the form.
