Print Screen: Narrative Ludology in Three Somewhat Easy Steps
4/9/2009 7:00 PM | 0 Comments | Page 3 of 3
Notable (gaming) essays:
Kenneth Hite, "Multicampaign Setting Design for Role-Playing Games"
Monte Cook, "The Game Master and the Role-Playing Game Campaign"
Chaim Gingold, "A Brief History of
Spore"
Matthew Kirschenbaum, "War Stories: Board Wargames and (Vast) Procedural Narratives"
Tanya Krzywinska, "Arachne Challenges Minerva: The Spinning Out of Long Narrative in
World of Warcraft and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer"
As a set, the Harrigan/Wardrip-Fruin collection is essential for getting a wide-angle look at the state of academic game criticism and game studies as a scholarly discipline. The books waste no time making the case for studying games. It is simply assumed that, as cultural products, videogames are fit subjects for literary analysis. There are the usual barely beneath-the-surface debates about if, how and when games are best understood as narrative. And it is clear that ludology has not quite reached the point where it has its own analytic language. Maybe it shouldn't. But these three volumes are an excellent starter set for people curious about this topic.
