A Day of Reading

Very soon I will begin a very busy couple of weeks teaching Art History. But today I had an opportunity to spend some time reading Matthew Gladden's Phenomenology of the Gameworld and it is a very rewarding read. I'm not going to review it here, I will need to work may way through it and use what I find i writing instead. But I was struck by one early thought. A lot of writing on games describes them as stories or journeys, and a journey in a game is usually a story along a distance of gameworld paths. Gladden makes this a lot more complicated an interesting by talking about this from the standpoint of both game developer and game player. And he writes that the understanding of a complex combination of a lot of different parts of a game's construction and the perception of it distills down to one smooth easily graspable picture (p. 34).

And that's where I begin, and where my thinking about gameworlds differ from almost all the writers I've read this far. I see a picture that is a world, made by a team of game developers and experienced by a gamer. That gameworld is double coded (as per Stuart Hall) and it is taking place (as per Norman Bryson). Art History has an angle on images and worldbuilding that I can contribute with in a growing discussion about games. Art History and Visual studies frames the understanding of gaming for me and I can see some good paths for my writing. And that is a good thing since I've booked two seminars next semester and need to hit certain writing goals for them! Sorry for not expanding on those ideas here and now, I need to read and think more.

A campfire in Hyrule



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