next »

[threesided]

Ok, so I'm in a little pickle, and maybe someone here can help.

I have to do a critical analysis of literary journals and stuff, and as my topic I chose to do Video Games as a Valid Art Medium. Now, the problem with this is that it's not a hot topic in the academic realm, and as a result i'm running into a bit of a brick wall with this one.


So here's what I'm asking of you. If you know of anyone who has worked with this topic before, know of ANYWHERE where i can get scholarly articles on the topic, it would be immensely helpful for me.

[Seth]

did a quick search and someone wrote to Roger Ebert with this list:

There are already countless serious studies on game theory and criticism available, including Mark S. Meadows' Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative, Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan's First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, and Mark J.P. Wolf's The Medium of the Video Game, to name a few.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=ANSWERMAN&date=20051127

[threesided]

did a quick search and someone wrote to Roger Ebert with this list:

There are already countless serious studies on game theory and criticism available, including Mark S. Meadows' Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative, Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan's First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, and Mark J.P. Wolf's The Medium of the Video Game, to name a few.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=ANSWERMAN&date=20051127

WOW, this is exactly what I have been looking for! Thank you! This totally opens things up for me a little bit.

The only thing I can't really get out of this are scholarly journal articles, since all the things being listed here are books, which I unfortunately can't use. But now I can maybe find articles citing those books.

You sir have saved me <3<3<3


Have my man-child.

[ChrisFranklin]

Other academics include Jesper Juul, Gonzalo Frasca, Ian Bogost, Henry Jenkins, Katie Salen, and more.

[fish]

im going for lunch with bogost in 2 weeks!
he's gonna be at gamma, taking pics!

sorry, that dosent answer anything.

[Michaël Samyn]

Matteo Bittanti is one of those misguided souls who thinks video games are (already) art.
http://mbf.blogs.com
http://www.mattscape.com
He has (co-)published several books, each deeply analyzing a single video game or author: http://www.ludologica.com/english.html .
And he's a very nice person.

[fish]

im more interested in the question of games as design, than games as art.

i mean, good design.

[Michaël Samyn]

I was trained as a graphic designer. The course I attended was called "functional graphics" to set it apart from "free graphics", which was art. During my 4 years in college, we completely tranformed the course by asking the simple question "what function?"

Design of games is interesting. But whether it is good or not can only be judged in as far as everyone agrees on what a game's function is. Art questions the conventions required for this. I personally find that interesting because I personally find these conventions premature.

Whether a design is good, depends on its purpose. That purpose might be artistic, even in a game.

In the end, in school, we discovered, that "graphics" can have many "functions", even simultaneously. And so can games. Design does not exclude art, or vice versa. On the contrary.

Though I admit that it is much easier to discuss design value, than it is to discuss artistic value.

[threesided]

Well, thanks for all the help guys. In my search I found some interesting sites that as gamers you may be interested in. Unfortunately what you guys are offering up wasn't really usable based on the project's guidelines. BUT, I did find some stuff that I thought I should bring to everyone's attention, since it's very relevant to what everyone here is trying to do.

http://gamestudies.org/0601
This site is a new scholarly journal developed specifically to archive research in Game Studies. It's fairly new, and as of right now, seems to be fully open to any submissions from the general public. This is basically the literature goldmine for my project. I'm in luv.

http://www.digra.org/
This is a database type site dedicated to the same kind of thing, gathering resources on digital gaming research. It is however not free, you have to pay to read some of the articles they contain. But it seems to have some links to various sites relevant to gaming, including some indie gaming stuff (from what I saw from my brief lookover)

Anyways, that's what I found. Seems the tables have turned and I'm now providing you guys with the resources. SO GO, young TIGers and soak up the knowledge of the interwebs!

[ithamore]

So we can better help you, what are the guidelines, and when is your deadline? Also, I'd like to know what online resources does your university's library have or at least how familiar are you with them? I used to be a university librarian, and I always found it a bit odd that so many students used the library and all of it's online and off-line resources as a last resort. And then there were those who where afraid to use our online databases of academic journals simply because their backwards professor said no online resources: they're just search-able, digital copies.

You might have to broaden the scope of your research queries to games in general to find information you can correlate to video games. Or you might have to check art journals to find qualifications for art that can be applied to video games. Any time you are researching a topic that is groundbreaking enough, you're going to have to search outside of your topic or field to find anything applicable. Besides, many professors and academics smile upon cross-disciplinary approaches.

[threesided]

So we can better help you, what are the guidelines, and when is your deadline? Also, I'd like to know what online resources does your university's library have or at least how familiar are you with them? I used to be a university librarian, and I always found it a bit odd that so many students used the library and all of it's online and off-line resources as a last resort. And then there were those who where afraid to use our online databases of academic journals simply because their backwards professor said no online resources: they're just search-able, digital copies.

You might have to broaden the scope of your research queries to games in general to find information you can correlate to video games. Or you might have to check art journals to find qualifications for art that can be applied to video games. Any time you are researching a topic that is groundbreaking enough, you're going to have to search outside of your topic or field to find anything applicable. Besides, many professors and academics smile upon cross-disciplinary approaches.

Well the course I have to do this for is "Introduction to Information Retrieval" so we're dealing specifically with online databases and scholarly journal articles. Considering your background as a librarian, I will assume you will know what I'm talking about when I say we're supposed to use sites such as scholar's portal, web of science, EBSCO, Proquest, etc. Basically, the options are endless, my university subscribes to hundreds if not thousands of journals. I am fairly familiar with them since I've been using them throughout the semester to do work and they've been teaching us all about index searching and all sorts of information processing techniques.

The guidelines are basically that they have to be scholarly (therefore have references, be in a scholarly journal, be full text, and preferrably peer reviewed)

That help?