Book Review: How to Do Things With Videogames

Journal of Magazine Media, 2019

Routledge eBooks, 2014

Games and Culture, 2023

This paper aims to create a shorthand for video game historyfrom video games' infancy to the current subscription model that is dominating gaming. In this essay, I will apply the practices of historical media scholarship that have helped parse out television history (e.g., TV I, TV II, TV III, and TV IV) and film history (e.g., Cinema 1, 2, and 3.0) to define the various shifts in video game history. Gaming I represents the arcade and home system boom up until the 1983 video game Crash, Gaming II describes the post-Crash console period, and finally, Gaming III materializes due to the arrival of modern video game subscriptions. Rather than constructing an exhaustive account of video game history, this essay means to generate more studies on what video game history can mean in the context of the established academic studies on visual media.

MedieKultur: Journal of media and communication research, 2010

James Newman's book Playing with Videogames is accurately as well as playfully entitled. The book documents a wide range of player creativity and productivity that situates somewhat outside but is nevertheless inherently linked to the actual playing of videogames. Instead of the gameplay itself, the book is concerned with activities that go beyond it. The fans or gamers involved in such practices are not, as Newman notes, but a minority of players, whereas the "outputs of their work exist within and even create wider cultures, communities and rich contexts for criticism, review and play" (Newman, 2008, p. 152). Thus, the book builds on the "playing with videogames" as a social and cultural practice consisting of different player hierarchies. It also presents the plasticity of videogames in regard to fan reworkings as well as the ways in which fan texts affect and inform later play experiences. Playing with Videogames is divided into three parts, each approaching player engagement from a different angle. Part 1: Videogames as representational systems considers cases of player productivity that better correspond to those familiar among earlier media and that concentrate on, although are not limited to, the narrative and "textual" level of games instead of simulation and structure, which are examined in Part 2: Videogames as configurative performances. For Newman, "walkthrough writing [as broadly discussed in Part 2] largely eschews discussion of the videogame as a representational system and instead treats it as a simulation model with inputs and outputs as a series of complex mathematical models, logical systems and programming loops" (p. 119). While various aspects of the technology of videogames are discussed throughout the book, Part 3: Videogames as technology con

How did games rise to become the central audiovisual form of expression and storytelling in digital culture? How did the practices of their artistic production come into being? How did the academic analysis of the new medium's social effects and cultural meaning develop? Addressing these fundamental questions and aspects of digital game culture in a holistic way for the first time, Gundolf S. Freyermuth's introduction outlines the media-historical development phases of analog and digital games, the history and artistic practices of game design, as well as the history, academic approaches, and most important research topics of game studies.

Transformative Works and Cultures, 2009

Radical Gaming, 2021

Once considered a niche or adolescent entertainment product, video games are now an integral, if not dominant, part of the world's cultural production that touches all sections of the population and all ways of life. With an estimated global revenue of $180 billion in 2020, the video game industry now has a larger share of the entertainment market than the film and music industries.¹ Video games have changed the entertainment industry and consumer habits, and their influence has also had an impact on other cultural products, both in terms of technological innovations and in terms of collaborations and adaptations between video games and various other entertainment forms such as cinema, literature, and music. Also, on a theoretical and academic level, video games are increasingly the subject of studies by researchers analysing their social dynamics, psychological impacts, or aesthetic forms. Some of the main topics of these studies include the commercial strategies of the video game industry, the Boris Magrini Radical Gaming-The Language of Video Games in Media Art 1 Wallace Witkowski, "Videogames are a bigger industry than movies and North American sports combined, thanks to the pandemic". https:// www.marketwatch.com/ story/videogames-area-bigger-industry-thansports-and-moviescombined-thanks-to-thepandemic-11608654990 (first published 22.12.2021).