Category: Hard Core Columns

Un-Situated Play? Textual Analysis and Digital Games. [1] Diane Carr The shortcomings associated with analysis that focuses ‘on the game itself’[2] are widely and casually acknowledged, yet ‘textual analysis’ as […]

Game Studies: Who Will Continue to Blaze the Trail? Games Studies is a recently established field. Regardless of whether or not we agree that 2001 was the “year one” of […]

It is with a melancholic sigh that one looks back at the Neanderthal days of early Game Studies. The field seemed so wide and fresh, so unexplored. And games researchers […]

“I take the liberty to send you two brace of grouse, curious, because killed by a Scottish metaphysician; in other and better language they are mere ideas, shot by other […]

“There is a powerful impulse many games writers and researchers feel – to struggle against their field, to continually find fault with methods, to participate in epistemological debates with the […]

John Kirriemuir writes about games in education. Groundhog Day for Games in Learning The last seven years have seen an increasing number of reports about the potential and actual use […]

Genre blindness Rune Klevjer Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen There is a curious lack of genre studies in our field, which strikes me as a […]

A short theory of goals: You are playing a card game with some friends. A few rounds into the game the group begins arguing. One player claims that the goal […]

Game Studies 2.0 or Nach dem Spiel ist vor dem Spiel Only five years after the ‘year one’ of game studies, it looks like the colonization of gamespace is over. […]

Games studies and the Hot Coffee moral panic Chris Chesher, August 2005 Computer games are on trial once again, after a sex scandal involving Carl Johnson, the central character in […]

The Art of Making Games cont. Aphra Kerr Recent news has put a rather interesting spin on our discussions on game network about the art of making games and game […]

Some weeks ago, a friend of mine – a faculty member in the Department of Communication and Culture here at Indiana University – invited me to give a guest lecture […]