Navigating discourses in place in the world of Webkinz (original) (raw)
According to the perennial, popular collegiate yardstick/burden that is U.S. News & World Report, computer game design is one of the fastest growing curricula that college and universities are adding to satisfy the estimated $82.4 billion game industry by 2015 (Gearon, 2012). Obviously, there is a market and need for a book such as Game Invaders, but thankfully, its ambitions extend past vocational competencies. Beyond just showing expected undergraduate readers how to play with expensive modeling software, the University of Teesside authors challenge them to understand games as the intersection between creativity and technology. Game Invaders' intention is to provide a pack of theories and models from which the reader can draw to better understand (and potentially create) computer games. Mercifully, these authors spare their readers from unnecessary academic jargon as they convey the importance of utilizing models and theories when thinking about computer games as a medium. Somewhat surprisingly, Salen and Zimmerman's Rules of Play (2004) is absent from the book's bibliography, since, 10 years later, this current work could be viewed as the intentional theoretical descendant of that now canonical tome— albeit in a much condensed form and focused solely on computer games. In particular, Mateas and Stern's (2004) views on interaction and narrative would have been interesting to reference in the Game Invaders chapter on pleasure and narrative, while Caillois' (2004) thoughts on the classification of games could have provided an alternative context for genre construction. The niche that this book attempts to fit into is defined by the authors' own statement from Chapter 5: " [T]he graphics have become a lot more sophisticated but in many ways the gameplay has not developed nearly as much " (p. 61). Teaching students to understand gameplay and how to analyze it are the backbone for this effort. For communication scholars, the book's focus on defining games as implementations of the code of interaction is especially valuable. The theoretical pack is comprised of: genre, activity profiles (what one actually does within a particular game), sources of aesthetic pleasures (contrasted to other communication media), emotional models of play, player types, perceptual opportunities, semiotics, and the code of interaction. The thread running throughout this theoretical tapestry, however, is the discussion of agency and how computer games rely on our " belief in the myth of interaction " to satisfy the players' desire/acquiescence for a limited form of involvement. This focus on agency within the interaction and the way meanings are constructed within the player-game dynamic is particularly useful for communication scholars.