‘In the wake of ‘big rhetoric’, the tools of rhetorical analysis offer a perspective for scholars interested in studying how knowledge and situated truths are established in and surrounding games. Rhetoric can address the entire discursive environment of gaming as virtually everything can be described as rhetorical’ (Christopher A. Paul p. 6). Continue Reading
Anna Anthropy may seem disillusioned with the state of gaming, but it should be obvious to any reader of this book that she has a great love of the medium and is optimistic for its future. Anthropy is a long-time gamer and game creator, so the criticism she levels at the industry is grounded in her experience on both ends of a videogame. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters is part-history, part-how-to that gives an overview of games and their histories in the first half, and shows the readers how to start making their own games in the second. Throughout the text, Anthropy calls for games that are more personal, more accessible, and more diverse. While she understands (and explains) why the industry focuses primarily on games where the player spends most of her time killing other characters, Anthropy wants to play a different kind of game, made by a different kind of person. Anthropy wants everyone – regardless of their access to technical knowledge or money – to make games, because she wholeheartedly believes in power of videogames to tell meaningful, personal stories. I found Rise of the Videogame Zinesters to be an engaging book, and would recommend it to anyone interested in small, personal games, as an overview of the genre. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters is provocative and inspiring, an almost-manifesto. It is not heavily engaged in games scholarship (though Anthropy is clearly aware of the work of people like Ian Bogost, for example), so those coming to Rise of the Videogame Zinesters with that expectation may be disappointed… Continue Reading
Reality is Broken has become a bit of a big deal in gaming, both in the academic and popular presses. Ian Bogost wrote that it “is destined to be one of the most influential works about videogames ever published,” and it has become a New York Times Bestseller. McGonigal is writing to a very broad audience – designers, theorists, academics, the public – and so it is a very readable, lucid text. It is divided into fourteen chapters under three main sections – “Why Games Make Us Happy,” Reinventing Reality,” and “How Very Big Games Can Change the World,” which I’ll summarize below. Each chapter is essentially centered around a ludic “fix” for reality, such as the one for Chapter 2: “Emotional Activation: Compared with games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at and enjoy” (p. 38)… Continue Reading
Discourse analysis is a fairly new field of study, but one with a very distinguished pedigree, delving deeply into rhetoric and linguistics. Game studies, in comparison, is a relatively new field, but one that has had to fight (or perhaps just “has fought”) fiercely to declare its independence and relevance. In The Language of Gaming, Astrid Ensslin combines the two, detailing over the course of ten chapters how various subsections of discourse analysis can be applied to games and gaming—to the semiotic, textual content of games, and to the discourse and power structures constructed through the discussions of those who play them. As you can imagine with that remit, it’s a rather diverse book, covering everything from how instruction manuals phrase rules to players chatting over a game of Worms 2. By the end, though, Ensslin had me convinced of the value of discourse analysis to game studies… Continue Reading
In his 2007 book Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost expounds at length his problem with the term “serious games.” The term was coined in order to define games whose topics were serious things such as economics, or ecology, whose purpose was first and foremost to emphasize their educational and institutional orientation. The problem with “serious games” is that the title implies that whoever used it was defining themselves in opposition to games that lacked the adjective, a distinction that made “regular” games appear light and frivolous, whereas serious games came off as ponderous and pretentious. If the term must be used, he decided, let it be used for games that draw attention to underlying structures, or call for a greater attention to detail. But he’d prefer to use different terms entirely. Continue Reading