The Study of Video Games

The New York Times has a technology article about what happens when academics discover video games.

Ludology, the theory of video games, is the name of a new academic field that seeks to explore concepts behind video games. I glanced at Ludology.org and Ludonauts, and noticed some emerging terminology in the field such as agonistic integrity and epistemic conditions. Hmm... why do I have the feeling that the people who study video games are not the people who play them.

Comments

[Walter]

Hi there. Just wanted to say that all of us at Ludonauts are definitely people who play videogames. I've been playing them for longer than I can even remember, and spend way too much of my disposable income on them.

In all honesty, if you read the article you'll discover that I very much have to be a player of games, and a relatively hardcore one at that, to raise the problem that I did and come up with the terminology. If you ever get into literary or film theory or whatnot, you'll discover that all those peeps have developed their own language, just as arcane or worse, but it's definitely no sign that they're not book readers or movie watchers. There was definitely a time when most game studies folk did NOT play games, at least not for their own enjoyment (if even for study! some would simply watch their kids play), but that time has definitely come and gone.

But regardless of how off-putting the terminology may be at first, if you seriously want to understand games it's extremely helpful to be able to convey a concept without always having to describe it in a full sentence first.