Play Redux: The Form of Computer Games - Digital Culture Books | Exploring Video Game History & Design for Gamers & Scholars
Delivery & Return:Free shipping on all orders over $50
Estimated Delivery:7-15 days international
People:8 people viewing this product right now!
Easy Returns:Enjoy hassle-free returns within 30 days!
Payment:Secure checkout
SKU:87145240
Product Description
"Play Redux excels in tying together intellectual traditions that are rooted in literary studies, cognitive science, play studies and several other fields, thereby creating a logical whole. Through this, the book makes service to several academic communities by pointing out their points of contact. This is clearly an important contribution to a growing academic field, and will no doubt become important in many future discussions about digital games and play." ---Frans Mäyrä, University of Tampere, Finland"David Myers has researched video games longer than anyone else. Play Redux shows him continually relevant, never afraid of courting controversy."---Jesper Juul, IT University of Copenhagen, DenmarkPlay Redux is an ambitious description and critical analysis of the aesthetic pleasures of video game play, drawing on early twentieth-century formalist theory and models of literature. Employing a concept of biological naturalism grounded in cognitive theory, Myers argues for a clear delineation between the aesthetics of play and the aesthetics of texts. In the course of this study, Myers asks a number of interesting questions: What are the mechanics of human play as exhibited in computer games? Can these mechanisms be modeled? What is the evolutionary function of cognitive play, and is it, on the whole, a good thing? Intended as a provocative corrective to the currently ascendant, if not dominant, cultural and ethnographic approach to game studies and play, Play Redux will generate interest among scholars of communications, new media, and film.David Myers is Reverend Aloysius B. Goodspeed Distinguished Professor at the School of Mass Communication, Loyola University New Orleans.
Customer Reviews
Myers's book makes a much-needed case for and contribution to video game studies addressing games as games (closed, fixed systems of rules that we interact with) rather than analyzing them primarily as narrative texts as we would with, say, literature or film. Myers provides a great foundation for and example of the direction that scholarly discourse on video games can and should go, a direction that involves increased theoretical rigor that will only make for a richer and more useful critical conversation.A note: The chapter in question in the 1-star review here argues that players overlay their own sets of socially-created "rules" onto what is actually possible within the mechanics of the game and react with anger when those social rules are transgressed, even though transgressing them occurs within the fixed system of possibilities that make up the game. So, Myers writes about his experience performing actions within a game that are necessarily allowed by the game (otherwise, they could not be performed) and that any player could perform. The strong negative reaction of the review, if anything, would seem to support Myers's argument in that chapter.I would recommend this book to anyone writing academically on video games.
