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 a methodology remains rarely or broadly defined in Game Studies literature. Sometimes broad definitions are appropriate, but when the topic under discussion is a methodology…

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 this emerging, viable and international field (Aarseth, 2001), the truth is that videogames have not been around much longer. Games, of course, pre-date videogames and…

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 had so much to talk about as they stepped into that undiscovered country. Aristotle and Propp were exciting, hidden universes seemed to open up behind…

“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 ideas, out of a pure intellectual notion called a gun” (Smith, 1808)

“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 idea of resolving them in their own name.”

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 of computer games in education. These are often commissioned and produced by education or research support bodies.

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 bit of a missed opportunity. It means that variation, tension and significant detail too easily fall below the radar of academic game studies. It also…

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 of the game is to gain as many tricks as possible; another claims that the goal is to avoid getting any tricks.

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. First came the narratologists, seeking refuge from a world that had grown increasingly hostile to their humble profession year by year. They were usually well-meaning,…

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 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA:SA). At first, the game’s distributor, Rockstar Games, denied the charge that Carl could have sex with his girlfriend (after…

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 authorship. I was in the US when the ‘Hot Coffee’ story broke surrounding Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA:SA). Along with a number of US…

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 on videogames in her undergraduate course on new media. When I asked about possible topics, she replied that just anything would be fine: projects I’m…