Category Academia

Not a Game

Over the last few months, an increasing number of people have started to ask my opinion (or let me know all about theirs) regarding the boundaries of videogames as a medium.  More often than not, this means affirming someone’s statement…

My Library in Minecraft

Reading Games and Playing Books

Though most of my academic work with videogames centers around rhetoric, discourse and technological development, that wasn’t what initially brought me to graduate school. My scholarly interest with games was first piqued by the way videogames develop narrative structure. As…

Why Spellcheck Hates Me

The field of Videogame Studies is still relatively young, as academic fields go.  So much so, in fact, that we don’t exactly agree on what to call it.  This is due, in part, to the difficulty we have in defining…

Computer Game Studies, Year Ten

The year 2011 marks ten years since the first issue of Game Studies, when Espen Aarseth officially christened the field.  Of course, many scholarly works on videogames had already written, including Janet Murray’s influential book Hamlet on the Holodeck.  Nevertheless,…