A beginner's guide to game studies literature

Having just graduated from college, I've got a lot of friends who grew up playing video games and are deeply interested in the medium, but it never quite hit them until recently that "game studies is a thing." For anyone curious about exploring games on the same level we explore literature and film in school, here are a few recommendations of books you should read. Some of these come from college courses I've taken, and others I've simply stumbled upon.

A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster

This is a must-read entry-level book for game analysis, and it's nearing its tenth anniversary. A Theory of Fun is a quick read that introduces audiences to many of the basic concepts of game design. Author Raph Koster is an MMO veteran; he was the lead designer on Ultima Online. Koster's other work includes Star Wars Galaxies and EverQuest II.

Global Gaming Spotlight: Calabouço Tétrico (Brazil)

With each post in this mini-feature, I highlight a game from a different country around the world. Keep in mind these aren't necessarily the best or most popular games from each nation, but simply a fitting representative.

Calabouço Tétrico - Loodo, 2008 (play it here)

After traversing the familiar gaming grounds of the United States, Japan, and Europe, the Global Gaming Spotlight moves south of the Equator. This is really the purpose of my feature--highlighting games made in countries you wouldn't expect so we can expand the horizons of our medium.

Calabouço Tétrico (Portuguese for Tetric Dungeon) is an adaptation of Raph Koster's commentary on the "skin" of games, made by Brazilian designer Raphael Aleixo. Koster wrote about the disconnect between a game's skin and its mechanics, because often hardcore gamers see past the skin. When players see a hooker in Grand Theft Auto, they don't see a blow job; they see a power-up. Mechanics-wise, they're right, but the skin can have a deeper effect.

Aleixo illustrates this with Calabouço Tétrico. When it comes to gameplay, it's simply Tetris with no bells or whistles. But Aleixo changes the skin. Instead of abstract blocks, the player is dropping prisoners into a giant pit. The player-character is the executioner. The prisoners let out a ghastly scream as they're crunched lower into the pit whenever the player clears a line of "blocks." It's jarringly violent.

Is this really so different from Tetris? Aleixo's game tells us that despite the superficiality of a game's skin, it can change the entire tone and meaning. It's also an interesting role reversal where the gameplay stays the same, but the player moves from being the arbitrary protagonist of Tetris to the murderous antagonist of Calabouço Tétrico. When the player loses, the prisoners climb out of the pit and finally attack the executioner. Do we really want to "win" this game?

It's important to highlight video games being made outside the global hubs of North America, East Asia, and Western Europe. South America is only going to get bigger in the gaming landscape over the next decade.

"PICK UP THAT CAN!" Storytelling in Half-Life 2

The divorce between storytelling and gameplay has plagued video games since birth. Gameplay seems to get the games during the week, and maybe storytelling gets to see them on weekends. While never perfect, this upbringing seemed serviceable through games’ Reagan-era infancy. But games are finally reaching a twenty-first-century adolescence, and they’re developing an identity of their own. And now they ask for not just gameplay, or storytelling! They ask for both! They’ll have their cake and eat it too! They want to bring the parents back together into holy matrimony! But like any awkward teenager, this transformation is rife with missteps. There’s a hope, though, that one day games will inherit the best traits of both storytelling and gameplay to become something greater. Something that no other medium for art can create. Something that matters.

Valve’s Half-Life 2 is the final product of this drawn-out metaphor. I know it's been played to death in game academia circles, but there's a reason for that. It exorcises all of gaming’s storytelling vs. gameplay demons, and creates an art experience that could not be accomplished in any other medium—and isn’t that what all games should strive to do? Its storytelling and gameplay are married beautifully, without sacrifice on either end of the spectrum. First-person shooters have been done before, but none of them perfects this balance the way Half-Life 2 does. Valve’s storytelling immerses the player in the gameplay, and the gameplay immerses the player in the story. How does Half-Life 2 do it?

Raph Koster writes in his book A Theory of Fun for Game Design that all games, no matter how little storytelling is involved, require some sort of surrounding fiction. From chess to BioShock, “designers put artwork on [game systems] that is suggestive of some real-world context.” Even in chess, the gameplay is infinitely deep, yet it’s all underneath a fiction of medieval warfare, with queens, pawns, and knights. Early video games featured superficial fictions like this as well, whether it was staving off space invaders or a plumber saving a princess. But at the end of the day, people didn’t play Donkey Kong to get insight into a fat Italian man’s hopes and fears. They played Donkey Kong because the gameplay was fun.