Game Studies All Over the Place: Videogames and Gamer Identities.

Games and Culture, 2006

Video games are a new art form, and this, the author argues, is one good reason why now is the right time for game studies. As a new art form, one largely immune to traditional tools developed for the analysis of literature and film, video games will challenge researchers to develop new analytical tools and will become a new type of "equipment for living," to use Kenneth Burke's phrase for the role of literature. This article discusses several of the features that make video games a unique art form, features that will, the author believes, come to play a role in analyses of games in the emerging field of game studies.

The Game Culture Reader, 2013

In their Introduction the authors eschew the three dominate video game topics of violence, sexism, and addiction and maintain that these overemphasize an agentive media consumption practice while obscuring other topics, namely video game production and distribution practices. Thompson and Ouellette call for preserving the complexity of the medium and its study, claiming that Game Studies must "reject the dominant, apolitical discourse that would consign digital games to irrelevant spheres of harmless child play or invidious mass entertainment."

2017

This book argues that videogames offer a means of coming to terms with a world that is being transformed by digital technologies. As blends of software and fiction, games are uniquely capable of representing and exploring the effects of digitization on day-to-day life. By modeling and incorporating new technologies (from artificial intelligence routines and data mining techniques to augmented reality interfaces), and by dramatizing the implications of these technologies for understandings of identity, nationality, sexuality, health and work, games encourage us to playfully engage with these issues in ways that traditional media cannot. Chapters 1. Digital Subjects: Videogames, Technology and Identity 2. Datafied Subjects: Profiling and Personal Data 3. Private Subjects: Secrecy, Scandal and Surveillance 4. Beastly Subjects: Bodies and Interfaces 5. Synthetic Subjects: Horror and Artificial Intelligence 6. Mobile Subjects: Framing Selves and Spaces 7. Productive Subjects: Time, Value and Gendered Feelings

Université de Montréal, 2012

Département d'histoire de l'art et d'études cinématographiques Faculté des arts et des sciences Thèse présentée à la Faculté des arts et des sciences en vue de l'obtention du grade de Philosophiae Doctor (Ph. D.) en d'études cinématographiques avril, 2012

Simulation and Gaming, 2006

This article examines the notion of genre in video games. The main argument is that the market-based cate- gories of genre that have been developed in the context of video games obscure the new medium’s crucial defining feature, by dividing them into categories (loosely) organized by their similarities to prior forms of mediation. The article explores the inherent tension between the conception of video games as a unified new media form, and the current fragmented genre-based approach that explicitly or implicitly concatenates video games with prior media forms. This tension reflects the current debate, within the fledgling discipline of Game Studies, between those who advocate narrative as the primary tool for understanding video games, “narratologists,” and those that oppose this notion, “ludologists.” In reference to this tension, the article argues that video game genres be examined in order to assess what kind of assumptions stem from the uncrit- ical acceptance of genre as a descriptive category. Through a critical examination of the key game genres, this article will demonstrate how the clearly defined genre boundaries collapse to reveal structural similari- ties between the genres that exist within the current genre system, defined within the context of visual aesthetic or narrative structure. The inability of the current genre descriptions to locate and highlight these particular features suggests that to privilege the categories of the visual and narrative is a failure to under- stand the medium. The article concludes by suggesting that the tension between “ludology” and “narratology” can be more constructively engaged by conceptualizing video games as operating in the interplay between these two taxonomies of genre.

2016

The term ‘gamer identity’ is hotly contested, and certainly not understood as a broadly accepted term. From the outdated stereotype of white, heterosexual, teenage boys playing Nintendo in their parents’ basement to the equally contested proclamation that “‘gamers’ are over”, the current game culture climate is such that movements as divisive and controversial as #gamergate can flourish.For this latest special issue of Press Start, we invited submissions regarding the recent controversies surrounding the notion of player identities, with the aim of receiving papers from different viewpoints on gamer identity and culture.

This thesis is a critical examination of videogame theory and of videogames. The analysis of various approaches to videogames, from ludology to unit operations and simulation, places each approach alongside each other to compare and contrast what is gained and lost by adhering to each perspective. Following from this, I develop a framework which considers the role of the player as part of the game system, whose attitude will influence their relationship with the videogame. Critics must acknowledge and respect the varied play practices of various kinds of players in exploring what any given videogame means. Finally, I explore three broad videogame-play experiences: ludic play, narrative or dramatic pleasure, and paidic curiosity and exploration. Each of these offer fundamentally different ways of addressing videogames as objects and the play of games as a practice, which creates a more nuanced language with which to discuss various kinds of videogames and experiences of play. Through close studies of a range of contemporary, mainstream videogames, I conclude that not only are there fundamentally different kinds of videogames which cannot all be adequately served by a single approach, but that players utilise different approaches themselves when playing. Therefore, videogame theory should become at least as varied and agile as videogame players themselves. The goal of this thesis is to explore what certain games mean, to certain players, rather than appeal to a higher, objective sense of true, universal meaning.