The Video Game Theory Reader 2
Language: English
Pages: 456
ISBN: 0415962838
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Video Game Theory Reader 2 picks up where the first Video Game Theory Reader (Routledge, 2003) left off, with a group of leading scholars turning their attention to next-generation platforms-the Nintendo Wii, the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360-and to new issues in the rapidly expanding field of video games studies. The contributors are some of the most renowned scholars working on video games today including Henry Jenkins, Jesper Juul, Eric Zimmerman, and Mia Consalvo. While the first volume had a strong focus on early video games, this volume also addresses more contemporary issues such as convergence and MMORPGs. The volume concludes with an appendix of nearly 40 ideas and concepts from a variety of theories and disciplines that have been usefully and insightfully applied to the study of video games.
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relationship of game design and game playing is probably not as antagonistic as this seems. A more productive view is that games derive their interest from the interaction between these different considerations, and that the apparent contradiction comes from the fact that games can be viewed from two distinct frames of reference (see Figure 12.10). Playing a game entails (a) a goal-orientation as part of the activity, but a player also has (b) an outside view of the game that entails an aesthetic
to address them in a proper manner. This is also an issue of public perception; during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s when digital games spread out from the mainframe computers and research laboratories, first into gaming arcades and then into people’s homes as television games, console video games, and home computer games, critical awareness of games as an art form remained rather limited. Games like PONG (Atari, 1972) or Pac-Man (Namco, 1980) may have appeared too trivial and considered “low”
(Rockstar North, 2001)—which is itself one in a series of several sequels— has become a more or less a subgenre into itself, spawning a number of imitators that follow its very successful genre conventions: True Crime: Streets of LA (Luxoflux, 2003), Saints Row (Volition, 2006), and The Getaway (Team SOHO, 2003). The following of generic conventions has become a standard practice in the video game industry, however, the audience will also often criticize games that are perceived as relying on
PlayStation and Beyond (2007), and J. R. R. Tolkien: Of Words and Worlds (forthcoming, 2009). The Video Game Theory Reader 2 Edited by Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf First published 2009 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection
York: Basic Books, 2002); hereafter cited as Norman, Design. 11. James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). 12. Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 13. As implied in Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); hereafter cited as Davidson. 14. Following Davidson; Georg Henrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding
