Kotaku
As I promised yesterday, during my run as Bizarro Brian I want to share some recent activity in the field of game studies.
Videogame, Player, Text is a new anthology with articles focused on player experiences in games. Barry Atkins and Tanya Krzywinska are the editors, and contributors include Marie-Laure Ryan, Matteo Bittanti, Henry Lowood, Jesper Juul, and others. These are some of the names you might want to Google around for if you're interested in the academic study of games.
Table of contents after the jump.
Contents
Introduction: Videogame, player, text - Barry Atkins and Tanya Krzywinska
1. Beyond Ludus: narrative, videogames and the split condition of digital textuality - Marie-Laure Ryan
2. All too urban: to live and die in SimCity - Matteo Bittanti
3. Play, modality and claims of realism in Full Spectrum Warrior - Geoff King
4. Why am I in Vietnam? - The history of a video game - Jon Dovey
5. 'It's Not Easy Being Green': real-time game performance in Warcraft - Henry Lowood
6. Being a determined agent in (the) World of Warcraft: text/play/identity - Tanya Krzywinska
7. Female Quake players and the politics of identity - Helen W. Kennedy
8. Of eye candy and id: the terrors and pleasures of Doom 3 - Bob Rehak
9. Second Life: the game of virtual life - Alison McMahan
10. Playing to solve Savoir-Faire - Nick Montfort
11. Without a goal - on open and expressive games - Jesper Juul
12. Pleasure, spectacle and reward in Capcom's Street Fighter series - David Surman
13. The trouble with Civilization - Diane Carr
14. Killing time: time past, time present and time future in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time - Barry Atkins
Videogame, Player, Text [Manchester University Press]
Comments
I'm kind of sad that there's not a chapter on Tetris.
i'm fascinated by the titles i've heard of/played.. but i wonder if i'd even skim the remaining chapters. seems kind of narrow-minded of me, but there are so many subtle nuances from game to game..
Doom 3 was a good pick. That game scared the sh*t out of me. The ending was very disappointing. Half Life, Halo and Shogo are missing from the list but no book could capture all the great games.
needs more half life, but halo could stay out, unless they included a chapter on how to make an average game popular.
This actually looks like a very interesting read.
I'm hoping my college library will be getting a copy of this soon. These are exactly the kinds of works that the medium needs right now.
Although I'm just waiting for someone to jump out and be like "Gamecube controller? wtf lol"
I love books like this or Pikachu's Global Adventure. I doubt I'll pick this one up though - no offense to the editors, but I prefer a narrower focus in collections like this
This isn't exactly the kind of text your typical lay person would pick up, but the "narrow" aspect of the papers is VERY encouraging when you're looking at academic studies ... especially in a field as new as this one. Basically, game studies has to build an entire base of knowledge from which future studies can spring from. It's nice to see academics adding to the literature.
So are 3rd party Gamecube controllers the pinnacle of gaming?
@ Clarke
Yes.
Definitely looking forward to picking this up at some point.
Wow, nice to see more academic studies into more focused aspects of videogames rather than the broader debates that have been raging on for years. I will definitely be picking this up to read through, especially as it seems to be drawing on wider media theory ('Of eye candy and id') and past videogame theory ('Beyond Ludus') I just wish there was more of a forum to get involved in this.
@clarke: That actually looks like the Mega Man X GameCube controller by Nubytech. It was an official Nintendo product.
Love the title of chapter 2.
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