Game Studies
Table of Contents
Vocabulary
- critical path / ideal experience
- emergence vs. progression gameplay
- spaces
- rules, mechanics
- presentation (Nitsche): mood, atmosphere, vibes, juicibess (Juul), expressive content (in visual analysis)
- #todo
Methodologies
HGP (Horror Game Politics)
- Pfister, E. (n.d.). How to analyse a Video game from a historical, source-critical perspective: The HGP-Method [Billet]. Horror - Game - Politics. Retrieved 17 September 2022, from https://hgp.hypotheses.org/1754
- Reading notes under How to analyse a Video game from a historical, source-critical perspective - The HGP-Method
The HGP-approach takes Roland Barthes concept of myth as a centerpiece and has a focus on historical source criticism, which is the critical viewing of the historical sources that inform research. The approach then goes through four main phases to analyse a game.
- production analysis
- product analysis
- reception analysis
- developing a catalogue of myth
Introduction to Game Analysis
- Fernández-Vara, C. (2014). Introduction to Game Analysis. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203794777
- Reading notes under @fernandez-varaIntroductionGameAnalysis2014
Clara Fernández-Vara’s approach proposes to read games like texts, akin to the approach developed by Roland Barthes. The book then contains various aspects of what can be “read”, well organized into three major categories: context, game overview, formal aspects.
- Context: Circumstances of play and production, Paratexts
- Game Overview: Content, Audience, Meaning, Affordances
- Formal Aspects: Construction, Rules and controls, Design, visual styles, etc, Formalism/Structuralism
The book delivers a lot in where to gather data for your research and how to deal with it, but little in how to analyse the data. The book is mainly geared towards writing a text as output.