ETC Press is excited to announce the release of the first issue of the fourth volume of
Well Played: a journal on video games, value and meaning, co-edited by Sean Duncan and Caro Williams.
PART ONE: DiGRA
Sean Duncan, Guest Editor
Where’s BattleTech in MechWarrior Online? A Case Study in Game Adaptation
Hans-Joachim Backe
One Click at a Time: Playing Porpentine’s howling dogs
Hanli Geyser
Cause No Trouble: The Experience of “Serious Fun” in Papers, Please
Oscar Moralde
Playing for the plot: Blindness, agency, and the appeal of narrative organization in Heavy Rain
Fanny A. Ramirez
Spore’s Playable Procedural Content Generation
Gillian Smith
PART TWO: Games Learning Society
Elder Scrolls Online: How ESO encourages group formation and cooperative play
Michelle Aubrecht, Jeff Kuhn, Justin Eames
Acting in the Light and on Fayth: Ritualized Play in Journey and Final Fantasy X
Kyrie Eleison H. Caldwell
Well Played & Well Watched: Dota 2, Spectatorship, and eSports
Chris Georgen
Magic the Gathering: A Learning Game Designer’s Perspective
Dan Norton
For the Records – Understanding Mental Illness Through Metaphorical Games
Doris C. Rusch
Gaming a Non-Game? A Long Term (Self)-Experiment about FarmVille
Heinrich Söbke
The Stanley Parable
Phil J. Dougherty III
*These essays were part of the Well Played Sessions at GLS 10, the 2014 Games+Learning+Society Conference in Madison, WI, as well as the Well Played Sessions at the 2014 DiGRA conference in Salt Lake City, UT.
The Well Played Journal is a forum for in-depth close readings of video games that parse out the various meanings to be found in the experience of playing a game. It is a reviewed journal open to submissions that will be released on a regular basis with high-quality essays.
Contributors are encouraged to analyze sequences in a game in detail in order to illustrate and interpret how the various components of a game can come together to create a fulfilling playing experience unique to this medium. Through contributors, the journal will provide a variety of perspectives on the value of games.
The goal of the journal is to continue developing and defining a literacy of games as well as a sense of their value as an experience. Video games are a complex medium that merits careful interpretation and insightful analysis. By inviting contributors to look closely at video games and the experience of playing them, we hope to expand the discussion, and show how games are well played in a variety of ways.
The Well Played Journal has been receiving enough quality submissions to be published quarterly. We have organized our editorial board so that there are Associate Editors (Jane Pinckard and John Sharp) and Assistant Editors (Ira Fay and Clara Fernandez) to help set up a blind peer review process. Our goal is to publish great essays. There won’t be a subscription, although as with all ETC Press publications, all issues will be available for download for free, and we’ll offer print versions for sale through Lulu.com.
For more information, and to purchase or download a copy, visit:
The ETC Press is an academic and open-source publishing imprint that distributes its work in print, electronic and digital form. Inviting readers to contribute to and create versions of each publication, ETC Press fosters a community of collaborative authorship and dialogue across media. ETC Press represents an experiment and an evolution in publishing, bridging virtual and physical media to redefine the future of publication.
All submissions and questions should be sent to:
drew ( at ) andrew ( dot ) cmu ( dot ) edu
For formatting guidelines, see:
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/etcwellplayed
ISSN 2164-344X (Print)
ISSN 2164-3458 (Online)
ISSN 2164-3458 (Online)
