Matthew Wells

Game scholarship tends to require researchers to assume a detached perspective on their materials of choice. While our first Nintendo console may have wowed us as children, and while modern games like Fallout 4 may continue to draw us into hours-long play sessions, we have to set aside our emotional relationships with such titles when it is time to get to work. No academic journal is going to publish an article on how sad The Last of Us made us, or how excited we were to finally vanquish those pesky Aztecs in Civilization. We might record such responses from others if, for example, we take an ethnographic approach in our research. But it is our own feelings, and our own affective responses to the games we play, that are often silenced. But what are we losing by adopting such a perspective? Continue Reading →