Recently, I reviewed a pair of books on video game theory and research for Dr. Larry Gross, editor of International Journal of Communication. The two books reviewed were:
Ian Bogost, How To Do Things With Videogames, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, 180 pp., $18.95 (paperback).
Judd Ethan Ruggill and Ken S. McAllister, Gaming Matters: Art, Science, and the Computer Game Medium, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2011, 155 pp., $35.00 (paperback), $28.00 (eBook).
The growth of the video game medium as an economic force (Shaw, 2011) and a source of cultural scrutiny (Anderson & Bushman, 2001; NPR, 2011) has made the study of gaming anything but trite in academic circles. Likewise, the study of video games has proven to be increasingly complicated as the medium finds itself—as Judd Ruggill (Arizona State University) and Ken McAllister (University of Arizona) astutely point out in Gaming Matters: Art, Science and the Computer Game Medium—at ―the nexus of engineering, mathematics, hermeneutics, logic, kinesthesia, narratology, performativity, art, and many others‖ (p. 3). The authors of both volumes attempt to navigate this nexus to explore the many dimensions of video games by offering various perspectives with which to better understand the medium. In How To Do Things With Videogames, Ian Bogost (Georgia Institute of Technology) argues that video games are best understood in terms of their larger role, and they function in the media ecology, perhaps as an microecology or ―a small, specialized environment within a larger [media] ecosystem‖ (p. 6). Ruggill and McAllister take a different perspective in suggesting video games to be best understood as an amalgation of ―wealth and pleasure through wit and work‖ (p. 103), comparing the process of creating a video game to an alchemist’s mixing of base materials to create something greater than the sum of their parts. For Bogost, a focus on the function of video games rather than on their prominence and providence as a special medium is the best path to understanding their uses and effects. For Ruggill and McAllister, understanding the unique qualities of video game production, marketing, and consumption is the key to understanding their role in society. In short, Bogost maintains that we should see gaming as just another unremarkable offering in the panacea of media choices, while Ruggill and McAllister argue for gaming as a magical union of baser parts that cannot be studied as anything less.
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