Nate Garrelts, "Introduction: Negotiating the Digital Game/Gamer Intersection"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Earlier games are more deterministic, creating a fairly homogeneous experience for all (most?) players
- Simplicity (not primitivity) and novelty as key features of early games
- Newer games are more complex and expansive, creating heterogeneous experiences
- Problems with studying such complex objects (no "authentic" version)
- Making meaning through play
- Problems with removing the player from game studies (this volume to serve as a corrective)
- Industry has made "innovation" normative to great economic success (not simply a case of fast technological advancement)
- Diversity of platforms as part of the industry's economic success and ubiquity
- "Copy-cat and keep away" in the markets
- New hardware drives software sales until they slow and new hardware is developed
- Trouble with naming the object of study in digital game studies
- Garrelts locates the object of study in the relationship between games and gamers
- Move past media-affect theory (dominant understanding of this relationship)
- "Interdeterminacy" of gameplay