Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz, Matthias Böttger (eds.): Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level (2007)

“Computer and video games are leaving the PC and conquering the arena of everyday life in the form of mobile applications (such as GPS cell phones, etc.) – the result is new types of cities and architecture. How do these games alter our perception of real and virtual space? What can the designers of physical and digital worlds learn from one another? Space Time Play presents the following themes: the superimposition of computer games on real spaces and convergences of real and imaginary playspaces; computer and video games as practical planning instruments.”

With articles by Espen Aarseth, Ernest Adams, Richard A. Bartle, Ian Bogost, Gerhard M. Buurman, Edward Castranova, Kees Christiaanse, Drew Davidson, James Der Derian, Noah Falstein, Stephen Graham, Ludger Hovestadt, Henry Jenkins, Heather Kelley, James Korris, Julian Kücklich, Frank Lantz, Lev Manovich, Jane McGonigal, William J. Mitchell, Kas Oosterhuis, Katie Salen, Mark Wigley, and others.

Publisher Springer, 2007
ISBN 376438414X, 9783764384142
495 pages

Keywords and phrases
SimCity, Pac-Man, computer games, video games, gamespace, id Software, Perplex City, locative media, game designers, first-person shooter, virtual worlds, Augmented Reality, Linden Lab, ubiquitous computing, LARP, Counter-Strike, MMORPGs, Super Mario Bros, Spacewar, Blizzard Entertainment

Publisher

PDF (11 MB, updated on 2015-7-2)

Alexander R. Galloway: Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (2006)

“Video games have been a central feature of the cultural landscape for over twenty years and now rival older media like movies, television, and music in popularity and cultural influence. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to understand the video game as an independent medium. Most such efforts focus on the earliest generation of text-based adventures (Zork, for example) and have little to say about such visually and conceptually sophisticated games as Final Fantasy X, Shenmue, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and The Sims, in which players inhabit elaborately detailed worlds and manipulate digital avatars with a vast—and in some cases, almost unlimited—array of actions and choices.

In Gaming, Alexander Galloway instead considers the video game as a distinct cultural form that demands a new and unique interpretive framework. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, particularly critical theory and media studies, he analyzes video games as something to be played rather than as texts to be read, and traces in five concise chapters how the “algorithmic culture” created by video games intersects with theories of visuality, realism, allegory, and the avant-garde. If photographs are images and films are moving images, then, Galloway asserts, video games are best defined as actions.

Using examples from more than fifty video games, Galloway constructs a classification system of action in video games, incorporating standard elements of gameplay as well as software crashes, network lags, and the use of cheats and game hacks. In subsequent chapters, he explores the overlap between the conventions of film and video games, the political and cultural implications of gaming practices, the visual environment of video games, and the status of games as an emerging cultural form.

Together, these essays offer a new conception of gaming and, more broadly, of electronic culture as a whole, one that celebrates and does not lament the qualities of the digital age.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2006
ISBN 0816648514, 9780816648511
143 pages

Review (Kelly Boudreau), Review (Steven Conway), Review (Ted Kafala), Review (Randy Nichols), Review (Timothy Welsh)

PDF (updated on 2012-7-8)

Sherry Turkle: The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, 20th ed. (1984/2005)

“In The Second Self, Sherry Turkle looks at the computer not as a “tool,” but as part of our social and psychological lives; she looks beyond how we use computer games and spreadsheets to explore how the computer affects our awareness of ourselves, of one another, and of our relationship with the world. “Technology,” she writes, “catalyzes changes not only in what we do but in how we think.” First published in 1984, The Second Self is still essential reading as a primer in the psychology of computation. This twentieth anniversary edition allows us to reconsider two decades of computer culture—to (re)experience what was and is most novel in our new media culture and to view our own contemporary relationship with technology with fresh eyes. Turkle frames this classic work with a new introduction, a new epilogue, and extensive notes added to the original text.

Turkle talks to children, college students, engineers, AI scientists, hackers, and personal computer owners—people confronting machines that seem to think and at the same time suggest a new way for us to think—about human thought, emotion, memory, and understanding. Her interviews reveal that we experience computers as being on the border between inanimate and animate, as both an extension of the self and part of the external world. Their special place betwixt and between traditional categories is part of what makes them compelling and evocative. (In the introduction to this edition, Turkle quotes a PDA user as saying, “When my Palm crashed, it was like a death. I thought I had lost my mind.”) Why we think of the workings of a machine in psychological terms—how this happens, and what it means for all of us—is the ever more timely subject of The Second Self.”

Keywords: personal computer, Speak and Spell, video games, hacker culture, artificial intelligence, Software Wars, Pac-Man, Marvin Minsky, Merlin, Seymour Papert, tic-tac-toe, Dungeons and Dragons, sprite, Tinkertoys, Sherry Turkle, Joseph Weizenbaum, home computer, computer program, pinball, Space Invaders

Publisher MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0262701111, 9780262701112
372 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2014-9-15)