Arguments about the potential socio-political functions of play and the ‘gamification’ of real life are made by Pat Kane, The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living (Pan Macmillan, 2004); Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2006); MacKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Harvard University Press, 2007); Christopher Monks, The Ultimate Game Guide to Your Life: Or, the Video Game as Existential Metaphor (TOW Books, 2008); Mary Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design (MIT Press, 2009); Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern, Pervasive Games, Theory and Design: Experiences on the Boundary Between Life and Play (Morgan Kaufmann, 2009); Gabe Zichermann and Joselin Linder, Game-based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests (John Wiley and Sons, 2010); and Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin, 2011). For a wider perspective on play, classic texts available in various editions are Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1938), Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (1958), Eric Berne, Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships (1964), and Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (1997).
There’s now a wide selection of introductory textbooks on Game Studies. Among the most readable are Steven Poole, Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames (Fourth Estate, 2000 and other editions) and James Newman, Videogames (Routledge, 2004). More recent textbooks include Jason Rutter and Jo Bryce (eds.), Understanding Digital Games (Sage, 2006), Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca, Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction (Routledge, 2008), and Frans Mäyrä, An Introduction to Game Studies: Games and Culture (Sage, 2008).
Adding up to over a thousand pages, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s two volumes, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (MIT Press, 2004) and The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (MIT Press, 2006), offer a comprehensive and influential guide for both Game Design and Game Studies.
For debates about the educational value of games, your first port of call might be James Paul Gee’s books, such as What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
For more strictly philosophical approaches to videogames, see Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox, Philosophy through Video Games (Routledge, 2008) and Miguel Sicart, The Ethics of Computer Games (MIT Press, 2009). Open Court publishes some game-related titles, such as Luke Cuddy and John Nordlinger (eds.), World of Warcraft and Philosophy: Wrath of the Philosopher King (2009), in its Popular Culture and Philosophy series.
The Game Studies e-journal contains numerous academic papers covering a wide range of topics. Espen Aarseth’s opening salvo for the first issue, ‘Computer Game Studies Year One,’ remains a key manifesto for the validity of this new discipline: http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html. Or try Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, http://www.eludamos.org/ or DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) Digital Library, http://www.digra.org/dl.
Online the range of writing about gaming is vast. Here’s a brief, eclectic list of further recommendations relating, sometimes closely and sometimes loosely, to the individual missions. As with other online sources, some of the following may become unavailable over time. Googling the author and title of an item may help locate an alternative if the original has been deleted or moved (or provide faster access than typing in a long address).
p3. Gameful, http://www.gameful.org/.
p20. Jasper Juul, ‘Games have rules,’ The Ludologist, 1 December 2006, http://www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist/games-have-rules.
p24. Brice Morrison, ‘The game design canvas: punishment and reward systems,’ The Game Prodigy, February 2011, http://thegameprodigy.com/the-game-design-canvas-punishment-and-reward-s....
p28. John Harris, ‘An intro to cellular automation,’ Gamasutra, 4 May 2011,http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6367/an_intro_to_cellular_automation.php.
p35. Ian Bogost and Cindy Poremba, ‘Can games get real? a closer look at “documentary” digital games,’ (2008), Ian Bogost – Videogame Theory, Criticism, Design, http://bogo.st/97.
p39. Michael Leader, ‘Top five craziest uses of historical figures in video games,’ Den of Geek, 17 July 2009, http://www.denofgeek.com/games/288359/top_five_craziest_uses_of_historic....
p42. Andy Baio, ‘Metagames: games about games,’ Waxy.org, 1 February 2011, http://waxy.org/2011/02/metagames_games_about_games/.
p45. Elmer Tucker, ‘The Orientalist perspective: cultural imperialism in gaming,’ Gameology, 17 July 2006, http://www.gameology.org/alien_other/orientalist_perspective.
p48. ‘Exquisite corpses!’ Jane McGonigal: Avant Game, 2004, http://www.avantgame.com/exquisitecorpse.htm.
p51. http://audiogames.net/; Niklas Röber and Maic Masuch, ‘Playing audio-only games: a compendium of interacting with virtual, auditory worlds,’ Proceedings of the Second DiGRA Games Conference, 2005, http://www.x3t.net/documents/Roeber_2005_PAG.pdf.
p55. Henry Jenkins, ‘Game design as narrative architecture,’ Henry Jenkins blog, 2002, http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/games&narrative.html.
p65. Henry Jenkins, ‘A few thoughts on media violence…’ Confessions of an Aca/Fan archives, 25 April 2007, http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/04/a_few_thoughts_on_media_violen.html; Craig A. Anderson, ‘FAQs on violent video games and other media violence,’ Craig A. Anderson website, Centre for the Study of Violence, Department of Psychology, Iowa State University, 2009, http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/caa/Video_Game_FAQs.html.
p70. Reverend Dagger, ‘The top 10 most blood-soaked video game weapons,’ SPIKE TV Official Website, 17 November 2008, http://www.spike.com/articles/u3e7js/the-top-10-most-blood-soaked-video-... Edgar Wright, ‘Gun fetish (1993),’ Edgar Wright Here, 4 April 2011, http://www.edgarwrighthere.com/2011/04/04/gun-fetish-1993/.
p73. Stephen Totilo, ‘The Daddening of Video Games,’ Kotaku, 9 February 2010, http://kotaku.com/5467695/the-daddening-of-video-games.
p79. Roger Travis, ‘Living epic – the main quest,’ Living Epic: Video Games in the Ancient World, 9 June 2008, http://livingepic.blogspot.com/2008/06/living-epic-main-quest-consolidat... Nick, ‘The hero’s journey and Final Fantasy: chapter 1,’ GameBlurb, 28 March 2011, http://www.gameblurb.net/featured/the-heros-journey-and-final-fantasy-ch....
p83. always_black (Ian Shanahan), ‘Bow nigger,’ always_black.com, 22 September 2004, http://www.alwaysblack.com/blackbox/bownigger.html; Kieron Gillen, ‘The New Games Journalism,’ Kieron Gillen’s Workblog, 2004, http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/?page_id=3.
p85. John Walker, ‘A death is for life, not just for quickload,’ Rock, Paper, Shotgun, 12 May 2011, http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/05/12/a-death-is-for-life-not-just-....
p88. Joseph DeLappe, ‘dead-in-iraq,’ Joseph DeLappe website, 2009, http://www.unr.edu/art/delappe/gaming/dead_in_iraq/dead_in_iraq%20jpegs.....
p91. Susan J. Robertson, Jane Leonard, and Alex J. Chamberlain, ‘PlayStation purpura,’ Australasian Journal of Dermatology 51: 3 (2010), http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1440-0960.2010.00652.x/pdf.
p97. Edmond Chang, ‘Close playing: a meditation on teaching (with) video games,’ EDagogy, 11 November 2010, http://staff.washington.edu/changed/2010/11/close-playing-a-meditation/.
p102. Richard Bartle, ‘Bartle Test of Player Psychology,’ gamerDNA.com, http://www.gamerdna.com/quizzes/bartle-test-of-gamer-psychology; G. Christopher Klug and Jesse Schell, ‘Why People Play Games: An Industry Perspective,’ summary available at http://playertypes.org/research/?q=node/82.
p105. GameLog, http://www.gamelog.cl/.
p109. Anthony Burch, ‘The end, my friend: the difficulty in creating an awesome game ending,’ Destructoid, 11 June 2007, http://www.destructoid.com/the-end-my-friend-the-difficulty-in-creating-....
p117. RoboCup objective, 2010, http://www.robocup.org/about-robocup/objective/.
p120. Ian Bogost, ‘Persuasive games: video game Zen,’ Gamasutra, 29 November 2007, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2585/persuasive_games_video_game_z....
p123. Robbie Cooper, Immersion video, Robbie Cooper website, 2008, http://www.robbiecooper.org/ then click Simulations, Immersion, Photos, Play video.
p126. Cathal Horan, ‘Bored with time?’ Philosophy Now 65, January/February 2008, http://www.philosophynow.org/issue65/Bored_With_Time.
p129. Gary Wolf, ‘Know thyself: tracking every facet of life, from sleep to mood to pain, 24/7/365,’ Wired, 22 June 2009, http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/17-07/lbnp_knowthyself.
p132. Drew Davidson, ‘Snackable Games,’ Tap Repeatedly, 10 January 2011, http://tap-repeatedly.com/2011/01/10/celebrity-guest-editorial-drew-davi... Lajos (Lajos Ishibashi Brons), ‘A FAQ for the slow games movement,’ BoardGameGeek, 7 August 2007, http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/23629/a-faq-for-the-slow-games-mov....
p139. David Thomas, José P. Zagal, Margaret Robertson, Ian Bogost, and William Huber, ‘You played that? Game studies meets game criticism,’ Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) Digital Library, 2009, http://www.digra.org/dl/db/09287.17255.pdf.
p144. David Griner, ‘To hell and back: EA’s guerilla marketing campaign for “Dante’s Inferno,”’ AdFreak.com, 24 February 2010, http://adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/electronic-arts-marketing-of-dantes-infe... Tim Buckley, ‘Marketing hell,’ Ctrl+Alt+Del webcomic, 11 September 2009, http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20090911.
p148. Tom Boellstorff, ‘A ludicrous discipline? Ethnography and game studies,’ Games and Culture 1: 1 (2006), http://www.anthro.uci.edu/faculty_bios/boellstorff/Boellstorff-Games.pdf.
p150. Robert Coles, ‘Doing documentary work,’ The Washington Post, 1997, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/doingdoc....
p154. Stick Page, http://www.stickpage.com/; Eric Lewallen, ‘A history of the stick figure,’ video talk, words are pictures too, February 2008, http://wordsarepicturestoo.wordpress.com/2008/02/07/a-history-of-the-sti....
p157. Tim Hunkin, ‘Mobility masterclass,’ Tim Hunkin home page, 2005, http://www.timhunkin.com/a113_Mobility_Masterclass.htm; Iain Sharp, ‘Lunar lander,’ www.lushprojects.com, 2009, http://www.lushprojects.com/lunarlander/.
p163. Ryan Scott, ‘My dad, the gamer,’ GameSpy, 6 May 2011, http://www.gamespy.com/articles/116/1166461p1.html.
p173. Gamers’ Voice, http://gamersvoice.org.uk/.
p175. James Paul Gee, ‘Good video games and good learning,’ Phi Kappa Phi Forum Summer 2005, http://jamespaulgee.com/sites/default/files/pub/GoodVideoGamesLearning.pdf; New Learning Institute, ‘Katie Salen,’ Vimeo, 11 October 2010, http://vimeo.com/15732859.
p178. Jennifer Gabrys, ‘five: media in the dump,’ chapter 5 of Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics, Digital Culture Books, University of Michigan Press, 2011, http://www.digitalculture.org/books/digital-rubbish, chapter available at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.9380304.0001.001.
About the author
Andrew Cutting is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at London Metropolitan University, where he teaches Game Studies, English Literature, and Professional Writing. He is also the author of Death in Henry James.