Gaming Matters: Art, Science, Magic, and the Computer Game Medium
Judd Ethan Ruggill and Ken S. McAllister
University of Alabama Press, 2011
In Gaming Matters, Judd Ethan Ruggill (Arizona State University) and Ken S. McAllister (University of Arizona) offer a playful and provocative look at the computer game medium, arguing that games are:
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• Idiosyncratic, and thus difficult to apprehend using the traditional tools of media study;
• Irreconcilable, or complex to such a degree that developers, players, and scholars have contradictory ways of describing them;
• Boring, and therefore obligated to constantly make demands on players’ attention;
• Anachronistic, or built on age-old tropes and forms of play while ironically bound to the most advanced technologies;
• Duplicitous, or dependent on truth-telling rhetoric even when they are about fictions, fantasies, or lies;
• Work, or are often better understood as labor rather than play;
• Alchemical, despite seeming all-too mechanical or predictable
In its assessments, Gaming Matters neither flatters game enthusiasts nor emboldens the medium’s detractors. Instead, it provides a new set of lenses through which games can be examined, and in the process makes a significant contribution to the foundation of both computer game and new media studies.
Judd Ethan Ruggill (Arizona State University) and Ken S. McAllister (University of Arizona) co-direct the Learning Games Initiative (LGI), a transdisciplinary, inter-institutional research group that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games. They also curate one of the world’s largest research-oriented computer game archives, and have written and lectured extensively on the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration, the politics of digital media, and the importance of play in scholarship.