Article Title
Adorno in the Digital Age: Consumerism, Ideology, and Participation in The Beatles: Rock Band
Abstract
This essay presents an analysis of the ideologies in the online trailer to the virtual musical performance video game The Beatles: Rock Band. This analysis presents a contribution to the scholarly conversation by using Theodor W. Adorno’s theories, a novel and underutilized heuristic for analyzing video games. The trailer to The Beatles: Rock Band (Harmonix, 2009) promotes the ideology of consumerism through its mythologized depiction of the Beatles. The interactivity of video games may combat Adorno’s condemnation of the culture industry, allowing resistance to its hegemony via the performed de(con)struction of the text.
This paper has been withdrawn.