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Phenomenology of Grand Theft Auto

Head: Matteo Bittanti

Year 2019
Year 2019

Grand Theft Auto is more than a video game: the popular saga of Rockstar Games has conquered the collective imagination thanks to a masterly interactive rewriting of the crime movie and pulp fiction. With five episodes to its credit and over two hundred and fifty million copies sold in the last twenty years, Grand Theft Auto has unequivocally transcended the sphere of entertainment. The various chapters - set in virtual replicas of cities such as Los Angeles, New York and Miami - raise crucial questions about the representation of violence, the simulation of urban spaces and gender politics

Phenomenology of Grand Theft Auto examined the social, cultural and artistic aspects of the series through the contributions of Italian and international scholars. The research culminated in an anthology of essays published by Mimesis Edizioni in the series Eterotopie in June 2019 that brings to the fore the complexity of the video game text and associated consumer practices; a themed conference, entitled Grand Theft Studies organized at the IULM University in May 2019, which was attended by Fabio Vittorini, Andrea Chiurato, Alberto Vanolo and Matteo Bittanti, and a website that pools bibliographic and academic resources on video gaming.

  • Hava Aldouby, Open University, Israel.
  • Alistair Brown, Durham University, United Kingdom.
  • Steffen Kruger, University of Oslo, Norway.
  • David J. Leonard, Washington State University, Washington.
  • Kiri Miller, Brown University, Providence.
  • Soraya Murray, University of California, Santa Cruz.
  • Marc Ouellette, Old Dominion University, Virginia.
  • Matthew Thomas Payne and Michael Fleisch, University of Notre Dame, Indiana.
  • Martin Pichlmair, ITU Copenhagen, Denmark.
  • Adam W. Ruch, University of California, Berkeley.
  • Mark David Teo, University of Western Australia, Australia.
  • Jon Saklofske, Acadia University, Nova Scotia, Canada.
  • Alberto Vanolo, University of Turin, Italy.