Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction, by Simon Egenfeldt Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca, is a text designed to be a gateway to more in-depth video game studies by way of an attempted overview. Nowhere is this idea more evident than in the first two chapters, Studying Video Games and The Game Industry. These two chapters are short, generalized, and fairly common knowledge to both people who play video games and video game scholars. These chapters are not without purpose, however, as they are a good introduction for people unfamiliar with the workings of basic video game theories or the video game industry.
Studying Video Games offers an equal amount of established basic video game theories and the authors’ contentions for how to approach the subject academically. The authors assert that video game studies are becoming increasingly important due to the ever-expanding financial, aesthetic, and cultural influence of the medium. As the book was published in 2008, the authors could not have commented on the fact that the video game industry has eclipsed the film industry, but evidence of their assertion is clear in things like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3’s astounding reception within the first twenty four hours of the game’s release (6.5 million copies totaling $775 million in revenue (“Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 vs. Battlefield 3: the Aftermath,” Game Informer Vol. 225 (Dec. 2011)) and the acknowledgement from Disney, both in a revival of their Tron license and their upcoming animated film, Wreck-It Ralph. Because of this constantly increasing relevance, the authors call for a multi-disciplinary approach to video game studies, with the additional, unique, step of including the game developers themselves in the conversation.
With this background work established, the authors present four approaches to examining video games:
- Examining the game itself, on its own merits (textual analysis, similar to what one might perform with film or literature
- An analysis of social conventions within games (player interactions with one another, and the use of media)
- An analysis of both the culture which has arisen around video games and its impact on wider cultural patterns (and vice versa)
- Ontological analysis (the philosophical foundations of not just video games, but all games, and the concept of play)
The authors then conclude that while all of these approaches are certainly valid, they may be seen as a continuum, and that using one of these approaches does not preclude the use of the others at the same time to form a comprehensive understanding of the game or phenomenon in question.
The Game Industry, the second chapter of the book, is essentially a primer for the way the video game industry functions as a production model. For the most part, it is only useful for people who are completely unfamiliar with the workings of the medium, much like the way in which introductory film studies text books will detail the workings of the Hollywood production system. There are a couple of important points raised, however, in regards to how market forces shape the medium as an art form.
The authors state that aesthetic form and consumption of games are influenced by mass-production industrial processes. While this statement has been true for much of video gaming’s history, the landscape has vastly changed with the emergence of digital distribution and the online marketplace as viable methods of disseminating new and unique game ideas. This shift has given rise to the indie game development trend. Furthermore, this trend was already on the rise at the point of the book’s publication, with the popularity of the X-Box Live Arcade marketplace, the PlayStation Network Store, and the PC compatible Steam network.
The other major point made by the authors is that the market leader in any generation of gaming consoles (e.g. PlayStation; X-Box; Wii) is able to influence publishers, distributors, and retailers. Again, while this statement may have been correct in the past, the proliferation of multiplatform releases, along with the negligible differences between them, have forced a shift in market dynamics, with the console makers courting the game designers for benefits such as exclusive content (see Soul Calibur 2 and 4), staggered release dates between console versions of a particular title (see BioShock), etc. While exclusive titles do still make the choice of console purchased a relevant and important one, this shift in dynamic makes the console manufacturers less powerful than they have been in the past. Once again, this is a phenomenon which was already well under way by the point of the publication of the book, and had been evident since the PlayStation 2/X-Box/Nintendo Gamecube generation of consoles (2000-2006).
These chapters are still useful for offering basic information, as well as a historical perspective of the gaming industry, but as the times change, the relevance of a lot of this information starts to wane.
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