DOOM

SCARYDARKFAST

Introduction: There Are a Lot of People Totally Opposed to Violence. They’re All Dead.

There are a great many videogames that can justify some claim or other for being seminal works that changed the course of the game industry, but id’s 1993 DOOM makes a better case than most. It pioneered the first person shooter genre, it popularized the shareware method of distribution, and, perhaps most significantly, it created a gamer culture, as its multiplayer brought people together in attempts to shoot each other to pieces. It is an appropriate subject, then, for the University of Michigan Press’ Landmark Videogame series, and for Dan Pinchbeck’s book, DOOM:SCARYDARKFAST. And while the book occasionally seems uncertain of its intended audience, in general, it is an excellent study of DOOM and what the game means for the first person shooter genre at large. Continue Reading

The Legend of Zelda

Hyrule Historia

Nintendo’s recent release of Hyrule Historia has the internet abuzz about Zelda timelines and character sketches. This piece of ephemera is obviously worth picking up for a die hard Zelda fan, but its use value for a game scholar is more questionable. The text does contain pertinent “facts” about the Legend of Zelda universe but I am still unsure how much this information will change perceptions of the series, or the scholarship around it. This review will examine the many different sections of Hyrule Historia in order to discern what such an official piece of metatextual “history” can offer. Continue Reading

Dungeons, Dragons, & Digital Denizens

If you’re immersed in game studies long enough—or just interested in videogames in general—you’re bound to pick up certain acronyms. FPS. RTS. MMO (or, if you’ve really been around long enough, MOO or MUD). And RPG, the abbreviation for role-playing game. In consideration of the quotation above, just what does the RPG have to offer us in terms of thinking about contemporary living? The answer may be a negative one; on the one side, the RPG has its roots in Dungeons & Dragons and fantasy stories, and those roots in turn lead to J. R. R. Tolkien, who famously declared that the use of fantasy was escapism. And on the other side of the Dungeons and Dragons relation, you have statistics and numbers, which lead to horror stories of obsessive grinding and wasteful time commitments. In their anthology on RPGs, Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens: The Digital Role-Playing Game, editors Gerald A. Voorhees, Joshua Call, and Katie Whitlock provide no definitive answers, and, indeed, any definitive answers for such a complex question should be suspect. What the book offers instead is three sections, sixteen chapters, some four hundred pages on how games commonly labeled as RPG are “designed, played, and made relevant to contemporary society and culture” (18). And while the book tends to dwell on particular areas of the RPG catalog more than others, the quality of the essays make it worth reading for anyone working on a game that fits under the RPG umbrella—and their variety offer several very interesting yet very different potential answers to our question. Continue Reading

Video Games for Health

Principles & Strategies for Design and Evaluation by Ivan Leslie Beale

While commentators in the health and technology sectors frequently tout the potential of video games to enhance patient involvement in their own healthcare and to provide avenues for interactive health education, this enthusiasm seems yet to be fully supported by developments in the health or gaming industries. Video games for health are a relatively new genre of ‘serious game’ and, thus, the body of literature dedicated to defining, analyzing, and theorizing them is currently quite limited in both depth and breadth. In Video Games for Health, Ivan Leslie Beale is particularly concerned with this deficit, and he wants to ensure that future approaches to creating media for health management follow rigorous standards that support a commitment to scientific validity. Centrally, Beale asks: how can we employ findings from the more established realm of educational video games in the development of the emergent sphere of video games for health? Because of Beale’s interest in developing this sphere, the text also takes up the broader task of defining the health genre of video game, and, in that respect, it breaks relatively new ground. Continue Reading

Mimesis as Make-believe

On the Foundations of the Representational Arts

Like all truly interesting epic endeavors, game studies has its own origin myth. It’s a story about battling against stories, with narratology and the study of videogames as essentially narrative on one side, and ludology and the study of videogames as essentially games or play on the other. Its battle sites were websites, and traces of its force can still be seen in gamestudies.org, grandtextauto.org, and others. And like any myth, it’s not exactly true, either because, as some ludologists claim, the narrative defenders “never showed up” or because, as others postulate, it was never a disagreement to begin with (see: Bogost http://www.bogost.com/writing/videogames_are_a_mess.shtml). But whether the conflict ever actually happened, there is a case to be made that it ideologically happened, as the myth is constantly returned to and debunked in an almost ritualistic fashion (as, for example, what I’m doing now). What is at stake here is a single question: How do we study videogames? Kendall Walton has no direct answer to this question. Though Mimesis as Make-believe was published in 1990, the closest it comes to any sort of digital medium is a few examples that touch on film. But I still think that its premise—that all forms of representation should be regarded as potential props for games of make-believe—provides a useful contribution to the ongoing myth of game studies. Continue Reading

Utopic Dreams

Critical Approaches to Researching Video Game Play

Michael Hancock is the Book Reviews editor on First Person Scholar.  He is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo.  Currently, his grey matter is engaged in writing a dissertation on… Continue Reading