Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon

Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon

Lowood, Henry
Guins, Raiford

Paperback

Series: Game Histories

Games & Activities GeneralTechnology & Engineering

ISBN10: 0262551101
ISBN13: 9780262551106
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: Feb 6 2024
Pages: 464
Weight: 1.58
Height: 0.94 Width: 7.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Essays discuss the terminology, etymology, and history of key terms, offering a foundation for critical historical studies of games.

Even as the field of game studies has flourished, critical historical studies of games have lagged behind other areas of research. Histories have generally been fact-by-fact chronicles; fundamental terms of game design and development, technology, and play have rarely been examined in the context of their historical, etymological, and conceptual underpinnings. This volume attempts to debug the flawed historiography of video games. It offers original essays on key concepts in game studies, arranged as in a lexicon--from Amusement Arcade to Embodiment and Game Art to Simulation and World Building.

Written by scholars and practitioners from a variety of disciplines, including game development, curatorship, media archaeology, cultural studies, and technology studies, the essays offer a series of distinctive critical takes on historical topics. The majority of essays look at game history from the outside in; some take deep dives into the histories of play and simulation to provide context for the development of electronic and digital games; others take on such technological components of games as code and audio. Not all essays are history or historical etymology--there is an analysis of game design, and a discussion of intellectual property--but they nonetheless raise questions for historians to consider. Taken together, the essays offer a foundation for the emerging study of game history.

Contributors

Also in

Games & Activities General

View All