Simon Egenfeldt Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca, "Introduction: Games as a Field"

(In Understanding Video Games)

- Many are no longer satisfied with "passive" entertainment (weird place to start...)
- Distinction between pre-digital/digital games
- Survey most influential/important developments and perspectives in game studies
- Interdisciplinary variety
- Game studies still young, messy
- Unanswered questions: What is a game? Why are there games? Why do some people prefer certain games? How to games affect the player?
- "There is much to be done."

Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, "Build It to Understand It: Ludology Meets Narratology in Game Design Space"

(In Worlds in Play)

- If game scholars are contribute to game design/the advancement of the form (why would they want to?), they must understand design, rather than only analyzing existing games -> explore the new territory they imagine in their theory (but why should they be imagining new territory?)
- Player agency as the heart of the tension between ludology and narratology
- Mateas and Stern created Façade to explore this tension
- Complexity of game design problems requires the construction of experimental games to map/discover new areas of game design space
- Existing games only represent a small fraction of the possibility of games, so game scholars need to speculate on and explore those spaces to truly understand games
- So, according to Mateas and Stern game studies should be guided by a hypothetical, imaginary gamespace that will somehow reveal to us what games truly are/will be as we explore it? That's dumb. Games are whatever they are at any given moment, and are changing constantly... why would we assume that the true nature of games are in it's hypothetical future development, and not in their actual cultural-historical contexts? And for that matter, why would we assume that games have a true nature that can be revealed by making new games? Absurd.

William Huber: "Fictive Affinities in Final Fantasy XI: Complicit and Critical Play in Fantastic Nations"

(In Worlds in Play)

- How does FFXI generate space/tasks of play and situate the player?
- Altman's genre theory: semantically fantasy, syntactically an MMO (why does everyone ignore pragmatics?!)
- Fantasy as a fictional geography for working out questions of race, nation, ethnos, etc.
- Playable as procedure in games (actualization)
- Fantasy as an episteme created by always-ideological processes of replacement, subtraction and augmentation
- In-game races reference real-world ethnicities, relationships (and hybridize)
- Mechanisms of complicity: relation between nation-state and aboriginal/subaltern enemies; conquest, dominance of regions in the game; necessity of coordinated efforts (ie: partying up) that overshadows individual choice/agency
- This inescapable complicity is revealed through backstories, etc., but there is still no "real" historical agency
- So where, then, is the critical play promised by the title? (Expansive gameplay could be an example of this.)

Clara Fernández-Vara, José Pablo Zagal, Michael Mateas, "Evolution of Spatial Configuration in Videogames"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Spatial configurations from early games to today, how they position the player, how they affect gameplay
- "Cardinality of gameplay," how the player can have in the game (1D, 2D, 3D), distinct from spatial representation (2D, 3D)
- Discrete vs continuous spaces, segmentation (contiguous would be a better word here!)
- Unlikely for more spatial configurations to emerge, but possibly new, impossible cardinalities (Portal, etc?)
- 2D single screen (discrete); 2D space/1D gameplay (discrete or continuous); 2D space/2D gameplay (discrete or continuous); 3D space/1D gameplay (continuous); 3D space/2D gameplay (discrete or continuous); 3D/3D (discrete or continuous);

Stephen N. Griffin, "Push Play: An Examination of the Gameplay Button"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Crawford: simple input devices (button) -> cognition-centred approach to games
- By contrast, long history of games that involve the abilities/idiosyncrasies of the body, no reason why symbolic input is the only way
- Importance/prevalence of the button as the primary means of taking action in digital games
- Buttons on the border of the magic circle (accept limits by participating)
- Transparancy (presumed) of simple input devices
- Reduces gesture and performance to symbolic action, automation, functional value, productivity, efficiency, not expression
- Lack of embodied interaction impedes the medium?
- Importance of physicality of input (example of musicians and instruments)
- It would seem that the Wii (and Kinect, and Move) actualizes this argument, but does it also reduce gesture to merely symbolic action? (Diagonal slash is more or less the same thing as the Y button... or is this just a function of technology not being advanced enough?) Maybe Guitar Hero is a better example - performance, expression

John A. L. Banks, "Opening the Production Pipeline: Unruly Creators"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Ethnography of game developer/fan relationships (Banks worked for the developer in question)
- Changing relationships between users and producers in the games industry
- Fan communities, end-user creativity
- Voluntary fan labour, distributed co-production
- What are the implications of opening the commercial development to voluntary fan content creators? (Not an opposition)
- Lower cost of production by using fan labour (otherwise game could not be released)
- Problems with delays, consistency, support, etc. (logistics)
- Not unwitting exploitation, fan-creators are aware participants in a mode of practice
- What if the development process was actually organized around fan content creation?
- Banks' perspective is very much from the commercial side of things ("how can/are the industry" questions, not "how can/are the fans")

Kenji Ito: "Possibilites of Non-Commercial Games: The Case of Amateur Role-Playing Games Designers in Japan"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Role of users in technology
- Blurs boundary between user/manufacturer -> creative amateurs
- Amateur RPG designers in Japan (RPG Tkool 2000)
- Community network of circulation, interaction outside commercial realm
- Emphasis on story in these games
- Synthesis between socioeconomic and content studies (text and context)
- Textual difference between games made in different socioeconomic conditions
- Amateur RPGs: "old-fashioned" graphics (otaku nostalgia?)
- Versatility (simple to extremely complicated games)
- Low technical threshold
- Accessibility of games (no powerful PC required)
- Free distribution (standalone)
- Active community of users
- Not necessarily computer experts
- Mostly young males
- Pleasurable, not utilitarian activity (fantasy, world-making, imagination)
- Telling stories, sharing
- Fan games/tributes/inspired-by games
- Downloadable resources
- Collaboration is common (if only for beta testing)
- Reviews, evaluation, competitions (distinction)
- After-release support
- Darker or taboo thematic elements, social critique, unconventional narratives, self-reflection, personal expression are possible outside the mainstream (the same old "indie" or "alternative" argument)
- Greater technological sophistication = more homogeneity in the mainstream games industry? (Ito doesn't really offer any evidence of this)
- Amateur designers accomodate this lack and the diversity of personal taste, potential for artistic expression in this context, not just entertainment
- Ito's view of amateur game design is much too rosy-eyed and uncritical