An Introduction to Game Studies : Games in Culture

List of Tables and Figures viii List of Boxes x Acknowledgements xi Introduction: what is game studies? 1(12) Making sense of games 1(4) A (very) short history of game studies 5(6) Summary and conclusions 11(1) Suggested further reading 11(1) Orientation assignment: Personal game history 11(1) Notes 12(1) Game culture: meaning in games 13(17) Games as cultural systems 13(8) Game cultures as subcultures 21(6) Summary and conclusions 27(1) Suggested further reading 28(1) Assignment: Game culture survey 28(2) Play and games in history 30(22) Writing for game history 30(2) Defining games 32(5) Prehistory of games 37(6) Study of play in culture 43(7) Summary and conclusions 50(1) Suggested further reading 50(1) Assignment: Remediation of a non-digital game 50(2) Dual structure and the action games of the 1970s 52(16) Digital games as multi-layered meaning-making systems 52(3) How to define a `classic'? 55(1) Three decades of digital games: The rise of modern information society 56(2) Games in the 1970s: Learning the lexicon 58(3) Pong (1972): Introducing enjoyable core gameplay 58(3) Significance in gaming devices 61(4) Space invaders (1978) and the playability of a shooter 62(3) Summary and conclusions 65(1) Suggested further reading 66(1) Assignments on early digital games 66(2) Adventures and other fiction in the 1980s' games 68(22) Games and culture in the 1980s 68(10) Pac-Man (1980) and digital game as pop culture 68(5) Donkey Kong (1981), the rise of interactive story-worlds 73(5) Text adventures and the evolution of computer role-playing games 78(8) Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985) and games' thematic depth 81(5) Summary and conclusions 86(1) Suggested further reading 87(1) Assignments on diversifying game cultures 87(2) Notes 89(1) Three-dimensionality and the early 1990s 90(28) Debating games in the 1990s 90(1) Meaningful audiovisual technology? 91(24) Civilization (1991): Ideological simulation or just strategic play? 95(6) Doom (1993): Controversy, immersion and player-created mod culture 101(14) Summary and conclusions 115(1) Suggested further reading 116(1) Assignments on 3D and turn-taking 116(2) The real and the game: game culture entering the new millennium 118(34) Games as worlds, the world as a game 118(1) The growth of online games 119(22) EverQuest (1999) World of Warcraft (2004) and other virtual worlds 127(14) Multimodal and pervasive games 141(9) Summary and conclusions 150(1) Suggested further reading 151(1) Assignments on mixed reality and multiplayer games 151(1) Preparing for a game studies project 152(19) Learning to ask 152(3) Selecting and building the toolbox of methods 155(12) Humanities methods 157(1) Social sciences methods 158(4) Design research methods 162(3) Game playing as a method 165(2) Writing for an audience 167(4) References 171(13) Index 184