Game Studies

Information

Description

“Step into my magic circle!” Said the designer to the player! “There will be flow states! And narrative! And no ludology! Or no narrative and a lot of ludology! Whatever you prefer! It will be ergodic if not erotic! And it will be so immersive you just might drown in it!”

History

Game Studies is the first collaboration between Jonathan Lessard and Pippin Barr, made as a way to “teach” the academic study of games to a broad audience of game players and others. While the academics sit in their ivory towers thinking about postmodernism, Game Studies will be out there in the trenches, educating the public on the theory of games through the most painfully obvious physical metaphors for game studies concepts we could come up with.

More seriously, a central motivation behind Game Studies was to explore the popular concept that games can be used as educational tools, turning difficult abstract ideas into interactive, aesthetically-appealing presentations that are fun to play with. And what better area of abstraction to explain with a videogame than the academic study of videogames themselves?

Thus, Game Studies takes on a Big Five of game studies concepts (and authors): the Magic Circle (Johann Huizinga), Flow Theory (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), the infamous Ludology vs. Narratology debate (Markku Eskelinen), Ergodic Literature (Espen Aarseth), and Immersion (Janet Murray). The game is a lighthearted presentation of those theories in “game form”. You might even learn something. But probably not?

Features

Images

Trailer

View the trailer on YouTube

Credits