American Journal of Play最新文献

{"title":"I AM ERROR: The Nintendo Family Computer/ Entertainment System Platform","authors":"Michael Z. Newman","doi":"10.5860/choice.193838","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.193838","url":null,"abstract":"I AM ERROR: The Nintendo Family Computer/ Entertainment System PlatformNathan Altice.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Series forward, appendix, notes, sources, index. 426 pp. S40.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780262028776The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and its Japanese predecessor, the Family Computer or Famicom, hold a unique place in video game history as the bridge between two eras. Before Nintendo's console, which was released in Japan in 1983 and in North America in 1985, the vanguard of electronic play was the arcade cabinet produced to play a single game. Nintendo's Donkey Kong (1981) was one such game, which was adapted for play in the home as a cartridge for a variety of consoles including the Famicom and NES. The Famicom/NES was the platform that established home console play as the vanguard. As processing power increased and PC gaming developed, the arcade faded as a key site of electronic leisure. In the later 1980s and 1990s, playing Nintendo was often synonymous with playing video games, and Nintendo has endured into the present by continually exploiting the intellectual property popularized by the Famicom-NES platform, particularly Mario of Super Mario Bros. (1985), whose origins are in Donkey Kong's Jumpman. Few video game producers or platforms are of greater historical significance than Nintendo and the NES. As an entry in the groundbreaking MIT Press series of Platform Studies, Nathan Altice's I AM ERROR gives Nintendo its due as an object of rigorous critical and historical study, while also providing a welcome intervention within the literature on platforms as cultural artifacts. Our knowledge of video game consoles and of this one in particular are substantially increased by Altice's exhaustive efforts to explore and explicate the Famicom-NES from the inside out, but so are our understandings of digital cultural expression and the poetics of computers as expressive media. This book serves as a case study and exemplar of the history of digital technology as an aesthetic terrain.As a platform study, Altice is engaged most deeply with the task of opening the black box of the Famicom/NES to show how its material form produces particular technological affordances. But he is equally interested in showing how cultural constraints external to the technology itself shaped the platform, and how the platform in turn shaped later instances of cultural expression such as PC game emulations and electronic music such as \"chiptunes\" composed specifically for the Famicom/NES processor.The most resonant themes of this study are easily applicable beyond the particular case of the Nintendo console. One is the way a platform functions as a point of always uneasy and often flawed translation between languages, cultures, technologies, and experiences. The other is the refrain of platform constraints (such as technological limitations) functioning as creative opportunities. Altice is most compelling when sounding these themes.Sometimes, Altice uses trans","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71029592","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds","authors":"Drew Chappell","doi":"10.5860/choice.191282","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.191282","url":null,"abstract":"Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds Joseph P Laycock Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. Notes, bibliography, index. 349 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520284920I am old enough to remember what Joseph P. Laycock describes as the 1980's \"moral panic\" concerning Dungeons & Dragons (DD and, second, a cultural analysis of this moral panic. In the rst section, Laycock presents meticulous research into the events of the early role- playing game era, from the development of D&D and other RPGs, such as Vampire: the Masquerade, to crime stories to media reportage. \"is section gathers disparate strands in a thorough and compelling fashion, painting a picture of American society (particularly middle-class subur- ban U.S. society) struggling to come to grips with new paradigms in play and in youthful identity seeking. Reading these chapters brought back memories of my elementary school classmates debating whether Bloody Mary would appear in the bathroom mirror if we called her. Such was the period I grew up in: the occult was almost a part of daily conversation.In the second section, Laycock weaves his historical research together with socio- logical analysis, pointing to ways in which self-styled religious leaders and talk show hosts in%uenced the thinking of millions of Americans, connecting dots between crime and role-playing games in ways that benetted these media gures. …","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2015-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71028407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Science of Play: How to Build Playgrounds That Enhance Children's Development","authors":"David B. Jones","doi":"10.5860/choice.189912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.189912","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2015-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71027281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Playing to Win: Sports, Video Games, and the Culture of Play","authors":"Christopher A. Paul","doi":"10.5860/choice.190618","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.190618","url":null,"abstract":"of why we should take sports video games seriously and oers critical insights into how we can think about them meaningfully. €e major drawback of the book is one of timing, because much of the work seems to be written well before the book was published. Divided into two sections, “Gender Play” and “€e Uses of Simulation,” Brookey and Oates set up the volume with an introduction that lays out the importance of sports video games by invoking games from Pong (1972) to Madden NFL (1988, 1990–present) to demonstrate that sports games are a key part of both a video game history and the contemporary video game market. Chapters range in focus, but most address representations of sports in video games like Madden, FIFA, and Pro Evolution Soccer. However, some contributions reach beyond the text of video games and consider elements like fantasy sports, e-sports, and the advertising surrounding games. €e strength of the collection is its breadth. In taking on a number of dierent kinds of topics, Brookey and Oates have assembled a collection that encourages the reader to think beyond any singular way of examining sports games. For example, I !nd the inclusion of an analysis of fantasy sports players in chapter 4 particularly commendable. Beyond the speci!c topics discussed, the group of authors also demonstrates a commitment to multiple methodologies because it includes scholars from a number of fields—most notably some who primarily analyze video games and some who primarily analyze sport. €e mix of the two groups may sometimes leave one or the other wanting more, but overall the place within it, and online fantasy-based creative-writing spaces. Even a mention of sociological and cultural relevance of D&D in its most recent incarnation (D&D Fi\"h Edition) would have been welcomed. I hope that other scholars pick up Laycock’s threads and explore today’s player transformation, world building, and cultural contexts. In the final analysis, this book deserves a place in the library of any scholar of games as cultural texts—and especially those interested in religion and games. I will refer to the text o\"en as both an eective analysis of the impact RPGs have on culture and as a masterful example of historical research into play and its place in society.","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2015-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71027607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life","authors":"R. Guyker","doi":"10.5860/choice.185938","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.185938","url":null,"abstract":"Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second LifeRobert M. Geraci New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014. Appendix, notes, references, index, and images. 348 pp. $35.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780199344697Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraftand Second Life is in many ways a natural follow-up to Robert W. Geraci's 2011 book Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality. His latest work is erudite, lucid, and a poignant and significant contribution to the flourishing multidisciplinary study of games and virtual worlds. It also adds to the recent body of scholarship examining the nexus of virtual worlds, sacred traditions, meaning making, and myth, including sociologist William Sims Bainbridge's eGods: Faith Versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming and psychologist Nick Yee's Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us-and How They Don't. Virtually Sacred stands firmly alongside such works, offering a theoretical premise derived from the social sciences in general and the sociology of religion in particular.Beyond Geraci's ambitious theoretical premises, he also spent extensive time in and out of virtual game worlds conducting ethnographic research replete with interviews and surveys within guilds of World of Warcraft(2004) and communities of Second Life (2003). Geraci balances quantitative and qualitative findings and observations with insightful anecdotes highlighting everyday occurrences of virtual-world residents. At times he openly acknowledges when the two approaches conflict or need not express religious impulses exclusively. All this teeming with an approachable style of writing and prose makes Geraci's case equitable. He has also supplied ample endnotes and an invaluable appendix on his own methodologies and sources. Any scholar pursuing similar work will want to consult this generous supplementary material.Chapters 1 through 3 lay out Geraci's experiences in World of Warcraftand his own efforts to acknowledge its strength as a prefabricated mythos and lore-driven domain. As such, the first few chapters reveal Geraci's suggestive insights into the discourse of myth and meaning as a cohesive story and game world. He further develops a brief account of key progenitors of World of Warcraftand games with similar thematic and aesthetic tendencies toward myth making. Naturally, the mythopoeia of Tolkien and the genre of high fantasy stand out as canonical, along with science fiction in general as a model for \"modern mythology\" (pp. 28-31). These, alongside the highly influential table-top role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, readily demonstrate content culturally transmitted with an appeal for myth and magic. However, the operative and more deeply entrenched mythos, as Geraci suggests, may very well be the players' intervention with a cosmic struggle between good and evil, enabling room for ethical concerns and reflections, while yielding transcendent-l","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71025079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Avant-Garde Videogames: Playing with Technoculture","authors":"Patrick Jagoda","doi":"10.5860/choice.187492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.187492","url":null,"abstract":"Avant-Garde Videogames: Playing with TechnocultureBrian Schrank Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Notes, references, index, images. 232 pp. $32.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780262027144In his 1991 book The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, Paul Mann declares, \"The avant-garde, we know, is dead; nothing could appear more exhausted than its theory, its history, its works.\" This provocative claim warrants reevaluation in the early twenty-first century, which has brought with it numerous experimental art movements, many enabled by the increased centrality of digital media. Brian Schrank's Avant-Garde Videogames, declares that the avant-garde is alive and well, especially in what are often called art, serious, and \"DIY\" games. An avant-garde game, for Schrank, is one that \"opens up the experience of playing a game or expands the ways in which games shape culture\" (p. 3). He argues that unlike mainstream games that strive for universal literacy, avant-garde games seek to foreground their medium, defamiliarize conventional mechanics, and disrupt play flow. They also interrogate the ideologies, technologies, and systems that are central to contemporary culture.Schrank's core taxonomic argument is that we can only think of experimental video games as belonging to multiple avant-gardes. He organizes these games into two broad categories: the formal (as understood by art critics such as Clement Greenberg) and the political (as elaborated by literary critic Peter Burger). The formal avant-garde focuses on medium specificity, while the political avant-garde privileges collective play and social change.Schrank's art historical method departs notably from more common starting points of game studies that include narrative (Marie-Laure Ryan), rhetoric (Ian Bogost), and design (Mary Flanagan). To link historical avant-garde movements in painting, performance, film, and mixed media, the book reviews the work of figures such as Edouard Manet, Filippo Marinetti, Bertolt Brecht, and Augusto Boal. The video game avant-garde, then, appears in the context of a broader history that includes movements such as Dada, futurism, Fluxus, the Situationist International, performance art, video art, and net art.Rather than offering an absolute definition of avant-garde games, the book presents a menu of artworks that explore the formal and political possibilities of play. One of the book's greatest virtues is as an introduction to a broad range of experimental games. Schrank begins with works that have been more frequently discussed in art historical contexts since the late 1990s- such as Jodi's Untitled Game (1996 - 2001) and Brody Condon's Adam Killer (1999). Schrank then explores games that he places in the categories of radical formal (Arcadia, 2003), radical political (Toywar,1999), complicit formal (Cockfight Arena, 2001), complicit political (World without Oil, 2007), narrative formal (Game, Game, Game, and again Game (2007), and narrative political (Darfur is Dying, 2006). This catalog o","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71026043","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Playfulness in Adults Revisited: The Signal Theory in German Speakers.","authors":"R. Proyer, Lisa Wagner","doi":"10.5167/UZH-110043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5167/UZH-110043","url":null,"abstract":"The authors elaborate on the role of playfulness as a preferred characteristic in potential long-term partners recently espoused by Garry Chick and others. They aim to replicate the findings of such research by studying a different culture (that of German-speaking countries) and to develop them further by taking into account the participants' relationship status and individual differences in their playfulness. A sample of 327 students completed a rating scale for desired characteristics in potential partners and a questionnaire for playfulness as a personality trait. Their findings do indeed lend support to the notion that being playful is a desirable trait of potential long-term mates. Keywords: Adult play; play and romantic relationships; play and sexual selection; playfulness; Preferences Concerning Potential Mates rating scale; Sexual Strategies TheoryPlayfulness-despite the lack of a general consensus on its conceptualization, definition, and measurement-as a personality trait in adults has been associated with a broad range of positive outcomes, such as academic success (Proyer 2011), coping with stress (e.g., Barnett 2011; Staempfli 2007), innovative work performance (e.g., Glynn and Webster 1992), and subjective well-being (e.g., Barnett 2012; Proyer 2012c, 2013, 2014b) to name but a few. Although playfulness is a comparatively understudied topic, researchers have used diverse techniques for a better understanding of its content and structure. Some investigators (e.g., Guitard, Ferland, and Dutil 2005) use qualitative techniques, others (e.g., Lieberman 1977) observe behavior, still others (e.g., Barnett 2007; Yarnal and Qian 2011) employ focus groups, and some (Proyer 2012b, 2014a) take psycho-linguistic approaches. Overall, their findings encourage a stronger consideration of playfulness in research and practice because it seems to be a trait of great potential in numerous areas.We often hear as a general criticism about the research on playfulness that it rarely replicates its findings and frequently fails to provide information on the stability of its findings and their general applicability. In an effort to overcome these shortcomings, we aimed both to replicate and to expand a recently published study (Chick, Yarnal, and Purrington 2012) on the signal function of adult playfulness, a study which has greatly contributed to an increased appreciation of the important role of playfulness in mate selection in adults. We hoped to replicate the study using German-speaking participants and thus contribute to a cross-cultural evaluation of its findings. We extended the study by considering moderating variables such as individual differences in playfulness and a participant's relationship status.Testing the Signal Theory of Adult PlayfulnessChick suggested that play in adults might be a consequence of sexual selection and thus serve a signal function in mate selection. This theory and its background received a full review in Chick (2001, 2013","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70634077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife","authors":"Thomas H. Rousse","doi":"10.5860/choice.52-0099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.52-0099","url":null,"abstract":"Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game AfterlifeRaiford Guins Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Appendix, notes, bibliography, index. 376 pp. $35.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780262019989A new generation of video game historians must preserve the medium's heritage before it disappears. In Raiford Guins's compelling journey as an adventuring media archaeologist, arcade machines from the heyday of arcade video games are an endangered species: they rot away in dumps, corrode on beachfront boardwalks, and succumb to the indignities of a ceaseless tide of button mashing without the care to keep them running. While threatened in the wild, some fortunate games have been removed from their natural habitats and placed into preserves ranging from museums, private collections, and historically minded arcades. By exploring and documenting the many ways in which people and institutions preserve digital games, Guins challenges the status quo of game history, surveys, and underused artifacts and archives in the United States, and invites others to follow in his footsteps to write a richer history of video gaming. Crucially, Guins's project is not to engage with games-as-artifacts merely to recapture the authenticity of the play experience at the moment of its release as a consumer product. Instead, he seeks to trace the path of games as they travel through time and space and in so doing take on different meanings, cultural environs, values, and epistemologies.Following Erkki Huhtamo, Guins chides video game historians for not moving beyond the \"chronicle era,\" (p. 22) characterized by collecting information from written sources often provided by manufacturers or regurgitated by the enthusiast press with little analysis or theoretical motivation. In opposition to the written accounts of early game history, Guins provides an overview of the collection and presentation of games in museums in chapter 1, using the remains of the Atari Pong prototype from 1972 (the harbinger of the coin-operated video game industry) as an exemplary iconic object and Ralph Baer's fragile \"Brown Box\" prototype (the origin of the home console) as a treasured object held but not displayed. In chapter 2, he challenges scholars to engage with archival resources in research libraries and material history- especially extant games and their contemporaneous ephemera and documentation- by providing an overview of major game archives and interviews with the librarians and curators who tend them. For scholars interested in working in video game history, this section provides an invaluable road map to moving beyond industry chronicles and towards in-depth study of gaming's material culture.The remainder of the book focuses not on resources suited to the learned scholar but of the role video games play out in the world after their release, a vital part of the \"afterlife\" of a product of consumer society. Despite their purported technological obsolescence, games from decades past have been taken up by enthusi","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71146712","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Architecture on the Carpet: The Curious Tale of Construction Toys and the Genesis of Modern Buildings","authors":"Frederika A. Eilers","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-2483","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-2483","url":null,"abstract":"Architecture on the Carpet: The Curious Tale of Construction Toys and the Genesis of Modern BuildingsBrenda Vale and Robert ValeLondon: Thames & Hudson, 2013. Notes, images, acknowledgements, index. 208 pp. $27.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780500342855Professors of architecture and experts in sustainable design, Brenda Vale and Robert Vale place new foundations in the field of twentieth-century toys with their most recent book Architecture on the Carpet: The Curious Tale of Construction Toys and the Genesis of Modern Buildings. The authors take a nuanced approach that leads to few outright conclusions about the subject but rather to more questions about whether architecture inspires the toy or vice versa, about how toys inform child development, and about the extent to which consumer society influences toy design.Ranging from Richter's stone blocks (actually, a composite of chalk, sand, and linseed oil) to plastic LEGOs (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene), the authors capture a broad spectrum of the types of construction and materials common to these toys. Through this survey, they make some innovative observations: Lincoln Logs \"mimicked how such buildings are fundamentally constructed\" (p. 80); \"the Dutch [Mobaco] is an elegant system that makes models only superficially similar to buildings children would see, whereas the English [Bayko] is a complex and rather pragmatic system that makes quite accurate replicas of very familiar buildings\" (p. 92); and Castos were a \"model of the process of making concrete\" (p. 144). Thus, toy design has to balance accuracy with assembly.Throughout the book, the authors supply facts gleaned from playing with the objects. For example, it is impossible to build higher than ten units in Playplex, and it is difficult not to bend the rods in constructing with Bayko. Because they draw primarily from their personal collection, it is easy to spot the toys that inspired them. Despite relying heavily on their own collection, they do mention the National Building Museum's collection, but they overlook collections at other cultural institutions, such as that at The Strong museum; they prefer citing collectors rather than curators, insisting that bayko.org.uk or brickfetish.com are veritable encyclopedias.The book skillfully weaves materials and visual items, such as the boxes and instruction manuals of the toys, together with physical architecture and information from trade journals. Fourteen roughly chronological chapters follow a formula that makes the book accessible to readers interested in a single construction toy or a quick read. Each short chapter begins with a toy, gives a physical description and its design history, then reveals the toy's role in an issue important to the current architectural profession, such as industrialization, everyday architecture, Cold War architecture, suburbia, and sustainability. For instance, the authors use Wenebrik to explore the rarity of metal buildings and, according to them, how it quickly ag","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2014-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71143579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game","authors":"T. Mortensen","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-4843","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-4843","url":null,"abstract":"Aesthetic Theory and the Video GameGraeme KirkpatrickNew York: Manchester University Press, 2011. Images, bibliography, index. 247 pp. $25.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780719077180 Graeme Kirkpatrick's study of aesthetic theory and video games seeks to apply aesthetic theory to what some view as a garish, popularized, and mass-produced cultural form. What do video games have to do with aesthetics after all? Kirkpatrick takes this question head on and argues that video games are a\"historically specific instance of an aesthetic form,\" and as such they should be viewed through the lens aesthetics to be understood (p. 1). Over the course of six chapters, Kirkpatrick discusses the newness of what games bring to aesthetics. For the author, the newness of games is a specific way of approaching the text through the body, as a participant rather than as an audience.Drawing on the work of Markku Eskelinen (a founder of gamestudies.org), Kirkpatrick demonstrates the difference between games and stories. As Eskelinen notes, when we are thrown a ball, we do not expect it to tell us stories. This example becomes Kirkpatrick's starting point for an exploration of games as texts that expect us to play along, take part in, and initiate the progress of the experience. He pushes Eskelinen's comments further by asserting that the act of playing can be meaningful without being subjected to interpretation. The act is its own meaning and its own goal.Despite Kirkpatrick's initial claim that play does not have to be interpreted, he does commit interesting and thoughtprovoking acts of interpretation. For instance, in chapter 5, \"Meaning in Virtual Worlds,\" he interprets the structure of video games as a constant revisiting of loss, and he points to how it is described as a joyless pleasure (p. 187). In this discussion, he demonstrates through strong and engaging analysis the connections between game criticism and the cultural criticism of Walter Benjamin and Frederic Jameson.In Kirkpatrick's chapter called \"Ludology, Space, and Time,\" he positions the ludology (the study of games) of Espen Aarseth and Jesper Juul in the context of traditional aesthetic theory. He weaves the loose ends of structuralist game studies into the aesthetic traditions and understandings that the ludologists originally rejected, claiming that game scholarship was independent of them. These original ludologists did this to avoid having games reduced and understood only in the image of the previous, more static texts dominating the field of literature and aesthetics. Yet while this chapter performs the necessary task of positioning ludology in relation to aesthetic theory, it also leaves a lot to future discussion. …","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2014-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71137238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}