Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

In the Technology section of NewScientist.com, David Robson reports on a study by researchers at the University of Southern California, the Palo Alto Research Center and the University of Deleware that dispel some common assumptions about gamers. Here's a link to the article.

The article is short and the study focused on one MMO, Everquest II; however, it does offer some positive stats:

• "Adult gamers have an average body mass index of 25.2, compared to the overall American average of 28"

read more

Vagrant Story, I was reminded forcibly, is probably the best game of all time. Now, I know terms like ‘best’ are of course relative and subjective, but just forget that for a moment and let me tell you about this game.

I suppose it all goes back to the concept of ‘arthouse’. This is definitely an arthouse game, one of the first. You don’t necessarily enjoy a Pasolini or Warhol experimental film, but they’re definitely a harder kind of best than some blockbuster. They explore things and open new avenues. Similarly, not everyone will appreciate Vagrant Story, but that doesn’t mean that you should be so presumptuous as to ignore the cultural cringe - director Yasumi Matsuno is liek Pasolini, and who are you or I to question Pasolini? The game itself is admittedly stupendously complex, but think of the learning curve as being like salmon fighting their way upstream to spawn more salmon. Lots of effort, but good stuff waiting at the end. And death, but hey, every simile breaks down after sufficient abuse, much like a rubber band used to hold shut an exploding bank vault.

read more

Does anyone know of any good articles on videogame design principles? I'm teaching a multimedia authoring course this semester, and the final project asks students to design a prototype of a videogame. Since the whole course isn't about game design, I don't want to bombard my students with a ton of reading on the subject; instead, I'd like to give them one or two articles that'll provide a basic working vocabulary. If anyone has such an article in mind, I'd love to hear about it.

In checking recent posts, I ended up on my account page on Gameology and found "Member for 2 years 50 weeks" and Zach's shows "2 years 51 weeks". That means we're coming up on a three year anniversary for Gameology! Since Gameology took over the earlier and smaller Academic-Gamers blog it's actually been even longer than three years. Three years for Gameology alone is an impressive tenure especially given videogame studies' general youth as a whole. It's still a bit early, but it's nice to see this anniversary right before the new academic year starts and brings another year of activity for Gameology.

read more

From Henry JenkinLowood's blog, the How They Got Game project will be starting up a new journal, Historical Studies of Digital Entertainment Media edited by Matteo Bittanti and Henry Lowood. Historical Studies of Digital Entertainment Media's theme for the first issue will be "Digital Games: Historical and Preservation Studies," and the journal will be openly online, published using the Open Journal System of the Public Knowledge Project. It's always great to see new journals in the field, especially new open access online journals because accessible research can have the most immediate, widest, and greatest impact and use.

read more

The organizers of the 2008 Meaningful Play Conference want to remind you that the deadline for submissions is soon:

So if you like waiting until the last minute to submit things, this is it!

The Refractory journal's Issue 13: Games and Metamateriality, is online. It includes an article by Gameology's own Zach Whalen.

I remember making a short film with some friends after one of them had bought an early digital video camera, and being somewhat surprised that the whole process didn't consist of lining up actors in front of the lens, having them say their lines in order and then calling it a day. There was makeup, props, continuity, sound and lighting to worry about, and scenes were shot in haphazard order. Then it was all editing, editing, editing.

read more

Two postdoctoral positions in the digital humanities and two fellowship positions in digital art are now available at HUMlab, Umeå University, Sweden from August 1, 2008 (the actual start date may be later).

The postdoctoral fellowships are one-year positions, with a possible extension of one year. The digital art fellowships are one-year positions. For the postdoc positions, applicants will be expected to have a Ph.D. in a humanities discipline (from a non-Swedish university) and a specialty in any of the following five research areas: participatory media, digital cultural heritage, digital art/architecture, electronic literature, and critical perspectives. For the digital art fellowships, applicants will be expected to have an M.F.A or the equivalent (from a non-Swedish institute/school). In exceptional cases, other areas and backgrounds can be of interest as well.

read more