Book Review

Nordic LARP

Edited by Jaakko Stenros & Markus Montola

Oscar Strik

Live Action Role-Play(ing), or LARP, is a type of playful activity incorporating elements from (tabletop) role-playing games, improvisational theatre, historical re-enactment, and performance art, among other things. In the book Nordic LARP, editors Stenros and Montola present an engaging and valuable overview of LARP in the Nordic countries (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland), a tradition and community that has become famous for its experimental and artistic approaches to LARP. The book is filled with accessible sketches of selected LARP games from the Nordic tradition, illustrating the diversity of the LARPing scene, as well as Nordic LARPing communities’ inclination towards exploring the boundaries of the medium itself. As such, it is a book aimed both towards the critical LARP enthusiast and those involved in the study of games in a broad sense. Continue Reading →

A Game Design Vocabulary

Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design

Sebastian Atay 1 Comment

Anna Anthropy’s 2012 Rise of the Videogame Zinesters made a compelling argument that games shouldn’t be the preserve of a select few: as a mass medium anybody should be able to create a game – and games would be better for it. Her focus was broad – attesting to the variety of games that could be made – and her material tailored to those left cold by academic discourse. Her newer work, A Game Design Vocabulary written in collaboration with Naomi Clark, retains Anthropy’s proclivity for drawing on a diversity of games as examples, but this time around, Anthropy deploys these case studies to help us comprehend the crunchy problems of game design. Here, Anthropy and Clark address players, students, professionals and academics, seeking to start a conversation about the terminology we use in our criticism; they even propose their own analytical framework to get the ball rolling. Continue Reading →

The Mobile Story

Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies

Lauren Burr

Jason Farman’s 2014 edited collection The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies follows closely on the heels of his critically acclaimed Mobile Interface Theory (2011). This new book features twenty articles from a diverse range of voices working in the field of locative media theory and design, each bringing his or her own background to bear on the topic of mobile narratives. Many of the challenges, considerations, and theoretical perspectives addressed in this volume serve to complement what has thus far remained a gap in game studies: the growing popularity of mobile games. While there have been several articles and books on the rise of mobile, social, and other “casual” games, most notably Jesper Juul’s A Casual Revolution (2012), there has been very little written on narrative in mobile games. Farman’s collection doesn’t fall back on the emergence of locative media as a field in the early 2000s, but rather propels both design and scholarship forward by acknowledging what I would call a second generation of mobile narratives and games, linked with the convergence of GPS and high-speed wireless Internet in smartphones since the iPhone 3G. Continue Reading →

In the Shadow of Tomorrow

Huizinga on play before Homo Ludens

Jason Hawreliak

Although many play scholars are familiar with Homo Ludens, it is not the first time Huizinga explicitly takes on the subject of play. As a prolific historian Huizinga wrote a significant number of books before Homo Ludens and play pops up in many of them. But nowhere is play examined more closely in these pre Homo Ludens works than the little read talk-turned-book, In the Shadow of Tomorrow (1936). Although play only really appears in one odd little chapter, “Puerility,” this short chapter provides a revealing glimpse into Huizinga’s pre­-Homo Ludens thinking on play. Continue Reading →

Silent Hill

The Terror Engine

Kaitlin Tremblay 3 Comments

When I was given a list of books to review, the note that went along with this book was this: “May not be a great choice if you’re not an SH fan, though.” And so obviously, I chose this one. Not out of spite, but out of sheer, uncontrollable interest. In the introduction, Bernard Perron makes the obligatory reference to the divide in the horror gaming world: some people are Silent Hill fans, and the others are Resident Evil fans. I fall in the RE camp, and as true to my stubborn roots, haven’t strayed from this conviction. Ever. But it’s not something that I’ve ever really given much thought to, honestly. Continue Reading →

Shared Fantasy

Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds

Galen Fogarty 1 Comment

At the time of Shared Fantasy’s publication, Dungeons and Dragons had not yet been on the market for ten years, and if the anecdotal evidence from Gary Alan Fine’s text is to be believed, the genesis of fantasy role playing itself had occurred only a few years earlier (14). When Fine researched this book, the fantasy role playing was in its very early stages, and it is this proximity to the origins of the genre that makes this an enduring text worth studying. Fine notes the origins of FRPGs in war games, simulation games, and folie-à-deux (shared delusion), and draws on existing scholarship for these precursors; Shared Fantasy is, however, the first academic study of fantasy role players as members of a distinct community. Continue Reading →

The Game Culture Reader

Edited by Jason C. Thompson and Marc Ouellette

Michael Hancock

Jason C. Thompson and Marc A. Ouellette’s edited collection of essays The Game Culture Reader begins with an attack on established game studies—or perhaps not so much an attack as a very pointed prodding to shake off existing lethargy and “game culture by culturing games” (5). To that end, each of the twelve essays making up the collection investigate game studies within broader humanities traditions, from gender studies to Burkean rhetoric to Bourdieu’s cultural capital. Continue Reading →