Tom Apperley: Gaming Rhythms: Play and Counterplay from the Situated to the Global (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · australia, computer games, everyday, game studies, gaming, life, venezuela
Global gaming networks are heterogenous collectives of localized practices, not unified commercial products. Shifting the analysis of digital games to local specificities that build and perform the global and general, Gaming Rhythms employs ethnographic work conducted in Venezuela and Australia to account for the material experiences of actual game players. This book explores the materiality of digital play across diverse locations and argues that the dynamic relation between the everyday life of the player and the experience of digital game play can only be understood by examining play-practices in their specific situations.
Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2010
Theory on Demand series, No 6
ISBN: 978-90-816021-1-2
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Netherlands License
McKenzie Wark: Gam3r 7h3ory, v. 1.1 (2006)
Filed under wiki book | Tags: · computer games, game studies, game theory
“Together with the Institute for the Future of the Book, I created this website as a way to think to about games. Games, as in computer games, are the subject of my next book, GAM3R 7H30RY. I am interested in two questions.
1. can we explore games as allegories for the world we live in?
2. can there be a critical theory of games?
I thought it would be interesting to share the book in its draft state to see if these questions are something other people might have ideas on or might want to pursue.” (author)
A project of the Institute for the Future of the Book.
Published under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.5
Miguel Sicart: The Ethics of Computer Games (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · computer games, ethics, game studies, gaming
Despite the emergence of computer games as a dominant cultural industry (and the accompanying emergence of computer games as the subject of scholarly research), we know little or nothing about the ethics of computer games. Considerations of the morality of computer games seldom go beyond intermittent portrayals of them in the mass media as training devices for teenage serial killers. In this first scholarly exploration of the subject, Miguel Sicart addresses broader issues about the ethics of games, the ethics of playing the games, and the ethical responsibilities of game designers. He argues that computer games are ethical objects, that computer game players are ethical agents, and that the ethics of computer games should be seen as a complex network of responsibilities and moral duties. Players should not be considered passive amoral creatures; they reflect, relate, and create with ethical minds. The games they play are ethical systems, with rules that create gameworlds with values at play.
Drawing on concepts from philosophy and game studies, Sicart proposes a framework for analyzing the ethics of computer games as both designed objects and player experiences. After presenting his core theoretical arguments and offering a general theory for understanding computer game ethics, Sicart offers case studies examining single-player games (using Bioshock as an example), multiplayer games (illustrated by Defcon), and online gameworlds (illustrated by World of Warcraft) from an ethical perspective. He explores issues raised by unethical content in computer games and its possible effect on players and offers a synthesis of design theory and ethics that could be used as both analytical tool and inspiration in the creation of ethical gameplay.
Publisher MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 0262012650, 9780262012652
Length 280 pages