A brief literary review

Okay basically what I have done with my piece is break it down into chunks and then dissected what I believe to be the most pertinent points, and laid them out in sequential order below with my comments about them.

1. The piece begins with a brief bit about the first ever computer game made, Spacewar. Apparantly, it was the most “natural” thing to create when its makers first had access to technology. Given that there had never been anything else like this made ever, what inspired them to create it, what about the aspect of playing a game seemed so natural to a group of guys who couldn’t ever have seen something like that before.

2. One quote that I particularly like is this: “She views the computer as a medium for designing action where users play equivalent roles to both the drama performer and audience member.” It is true that when you are playing a game you are both actor and spectator. Taken from Brenda Laurel (1993)

3. Janet Murray (1997) distinguishes three main qualities in the medium of computer games. They are:

Immersion, this means the ability to construct belief rather then merely suspend belief. What I suspect this means is that with a film, you suspend your belief for a while, you know what you are seeing isn’t real but you don’t let it bother you. In a game environment, you populate the world and interact and create your own story.

Agency, which is the capacity of the medium (computer games) to allow users to perform actions which have consequences on the representation (I take this to mean game)

Transformation, which is the ability to morph into multi-perspective, simulated worlds that can enhance the two previously described characteristics. I’m honestly not sure what that one means though.

I like the idea of having another author come up with those three points as it gives us an idea of someone elses attempts to categorize things. One thing it is worth Bearing in mind is the age of these papers which the article quotes, the newest is 97 and the oldest is 93. Therefore it is worth considering the modern day validity of what they have to say.

4. Espen Aarseth (1997) analyses textual representations exclusively and so while most of his stuff is not so helpful to us, he does analyze text based games and argues that to claim there is no difference between games and narratives is to ignore essential qualities of both categories.


Link to my article: http://www.ludology.org/articles/thesis/representation.html

I also thought it would be worthwhile taking a closer look at the writers from my piece, namely Brenda Laurel, Janet Murray and Espen Aarseth:

Laurel: http://www.tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/BrendaBio.html

Murray:http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~murray/

Aarseth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espen_J._Aarseth