Gaming Matters: Art, Science, Magic, and the Computer Game Medium

In Gaming Matters, Judd Ethan Ruggill and Ken S. McAllister offer a playful and provocative look at the computer game medium, arguing that games are:

 

* Idiosyncratic, and thus difficult to apprehend using the traditional tools of media study

* Irreconcilable, or complex to such a degree that developers, players, and scholars have contradictory ways of describing them

* Boring, and therefore obligated to constantly make demands

on players' attention

* Anachronistic, or built on age-old tropes and forms of play

while ironically bound to the most advanced technologies

* Duplicitous, or dependent on truth-telling rhetoric even when they are about fictions, fantasies, or lies

* Work, or are often better understood as labor rather than play

* Alchemical, despite seeming all-too mechanical or predictable

Video games are now inarguably a major site of worldwide cultural production.

 

In its assessments, Gaming Matters neither flatters game enthusiasts nor emboldens the medium's detractors. Instead, it provides a new set of lenses through which games can be examined, and in the process makes a significant contribution to the foundation of both computer game and new media studies.