Seeing Henry Jenkins’s digital-age concept of transmedia convergence as the late-capitalist assembly of 1960s psychedelic intermedia practices, this article adds to a discussion of pre-digital convergence through an examination of the Beatles’ countercultural media production and distribution practices. This research examines how these practices are indicative of their cultural ideologies, and how and why these seemingly countercultural beliefs were vulnerable to (and actively complicit in) the formation of neoliberal movements of the digital age. This work finds the psychedelic values held by members of the Beatles to have shaped their song lyrics, distribution, business model and branding in ways that function effectively similar to Jenkins’s notion of ‘transmedia storytelling’. The result primes audiences for the consumer practices and subjectivity of the postmodern condition. This is accomplished by dispersing narratives and iconography across Beatles’ content such that all texts contribute to an oceanic network while lacking any ‘core’ texts

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This research seeks to add to recent critical reevaluations of Alexander Galloway’s seminal “Social Realism in Gaming” through a closer analysis of the texts by Andre Bazin and Gilles Deleuze which inform Galloway’s initial conceptions of social realism. The present work emphasizes social criticism in this esthetic movement and finds the medium specificity of games limits applicability of cinematic terms like neorealism. Procedural rhetoric and effective Brechtian alienation tactics emphasizing player-character subjectivity, can be used to effectively convey the philosophical and ideological tenants of neorealism and broader social realism. This is expanded upon using the World War Two (WWII) game Red Orchestra 2 as a case study. Ultimately this work argues against Galloway’s “congruence requirement” between players real-world contexts and game interactions, rather finding social realism in games as dependent on convergence between a game’s functional and visual rhetoric.