Monday, September 15, 2008

Jane: Video Game Scholarship




Did you know that there is a scholarly field of Video Game Theory?

I'm at work looking through "Choice cards," the little summaries of books the library sends out to faculty, who then request the ones they want for our library.

These are a few titles:

Persuasive Games: the Expressive Power of Videogames ("because games are process-based representations of specific political, social, and cultural systems, their persuasive potential extends beyond traditional verbal and visual rhetoric")

Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames ("looks at aspects of digital play athat resonate with broader concerns in cultural and legal studies . . . and the paratext and the obvious relvance that . . . in cyberspace 'code is law'")
!!!!

Well, I might order this one:

Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality ("Synthetic [online] worlds already draw millions of people into realms where online personae usually bear little to no resemblance to the players' actual lives . . . New social structures have already formed in online language, and it follows that we will adapt to new social structures as a result of widespread synthetic worlds")

The reviewer says "this book is highly readable, profound, and prophetic." Now that sounds fun.

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