James Newman: Playing with videogames. New York: Routledge, 2008

According to the perennial, popular collegiate yardstick/burden that is U.S. News & World Report, computer game design is one of the fastest growing curricula that college and universities are adding to satisfy the estimated $82.4 billion game industry by 2015 (Gearon, 2012). Obviously, there is a market and need for a book such as Game Invaders, but thankfully, its ambitions extend past vocational competencies. Beyond just showing expected undergraduate readers how to play with expensive modeling software, the University of Teesside authors challenge them to understand games as the intersection between creativity and technology. Game Invaders' intention is to provide a pack of theories and models from which the reader can draw to better understand (and potentially create) computer games. Mercifully, these authors spare their readers from unnecessary academic jargon as they convey the importance of utilizing models and theories when thinking about computer games as a medium. Somewhat surprisingly, Salen and Zimmerman's Rules of Play (2004) is absent from the book's bibliography, since, 10 years later, this current work could be viewed as the intentional theoretical descendant of that now canonical tome— albeit in a much condensed form and focused solely on computer games. In particular, Mateas and Stern's (2004) views on interaction and narrative would have been interesting to reference in the Game Invaders chapter on pleasure and narrative, while Caillois' (2004) thoughts on the classification of games could have provided an alternative context for genre construction. The niche that this book attempts to fit into is defined by the authors' own statement from Chapter 5: " [T]he graphics have become a lot more sophisticated but in many ways the gameplay has not developed nearly as much " (p. 61). Teaching students to understand gameplay and how to analyze it are the backbone for this effort. For communication scholars, the book's focus on defining games as implementations of the code of interaction is especially valuable. The theoretical pack is comprised of: genre, activity profiles (what one actually does within a particular game), sources of aesthetic pleasures (contrasted to other communication media), emotional models of play, player types, perceptual opportunities, semiotics, and the code of interaction. The thread running throughout this theoretical tapestry, however, is the discussion of agency and how computer games rely on our " belief in the myth of interaction " to satisfy the players' desire/acquiescence for a limited form of involvement. This focus on agency within the interaction and the way meanings are constructed within the player-game dynamic is particularly useful for communication scholars.

"In highlighting the apparatus as the keystone for the magic circle of video gaming, we displace players—the subject of ludology—and “text”—the subject of narratology. This is not to deny the importance of players’ agency or the meanings of texts in video gaming; rather it is to reconsider these with regard to the screening of player from played inherent in the gaming apparatus. To better understand the situation of homo ludens in these more mediated play spaces, we turn to Jacques Lacan’s account of “split” subjectivity and retread it by explaining how it may well explain the operation of a magic circle spanning three dimensions of screen-play: rules (Symbolic dimension), representations (Imaginary dimension), and wares (Real dimension). In the end, we come around to the other space of Huizinga’s theory—the connections with the non-game world—to show that the value of video game play is also found beyond the apparatus, that the experience and enjoyment of video games are affected in part by social reality and, in turn, social reality is being affected by the experience and enjoyment of video games. Arriving at this point by first theorizing the video game apparatus, however, highlights matters of video game design more so than issues of audience or textual analysis. To illustrate this perspective, we conclude by defining three ways to analyze video games in terms of “realism,” proposing three types of video game realism: representational, simulative, and inverse. "

Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi, 2023

This course will introduce students to video games as an art form, as a business, and as a part of global popular culture. The course will begin with a broad establishment of game studies and investigation of the uniqueness of video games as a medium. Subsequent weeks will introduce different approaches to studying video games, including historical, industrial, technological, cultural, theoretical, and aesthetic. Students will read material from video game history, scholarly theory of games, and the trade and popular press. To contextualize these readings, weekly lab sections will provide the opportunity for screenings and video game play. In lab sections and outside of class, students will interact with games representing different eras of video game history and different aspects of the industry. Several guest speakers—including journalists, developers, and podcasters—will share their insights about the industry and culture of video games.

This paper intends to offer some preliminary insights into the milieu that produce the world of videogame play. Beginning with an historical overview of the industry from it's inception as a major entertainment medium, I will examine the means by which production of videogames has been set-up and sustained and it's subsequent successes and failures. From here, I will map these instances onto culturally relevant theoretical models. By using empirical data from interviews with developers, programmers, artists and producers throughout the West, I will investigate the current state of the art in the industry and analyse the relationships, differences and similarities that contemporary videogame production has with its antecedents. Finally, I will offer some thoughts on the future of videogame production and the increasing opportunities of expansion it offers to sociological exploration of situated -and displaced -play.

Videogames are beginning to share the forms and concerns of art. During the current era, calling videogames an artistic medium is controversial. However, defining videogames as an artistic medium is important as the medium offers infinite possibilities for artistic expression. This essay attempts to establish the possibilities of videogames as an artistic medium, explore their place in the contemporary art world that simultaneously rejects and embraces the new cultural form, critically analyse certain examples of popular videogames that share the forms and concerns of art and discuss artists that have embraced videogames as an artistic medium. Undoubtedly, there is a genuine artistic richness in this new cultural form, even if it is in its infancy.