As the videogame industry has grown into its increasingly dominant role within popular entertainment, more AAA releases have experienced an “introspective turn^*.” Games have openly become more concerned with what they ask of players, and show this concern through the composition of their gameplay elements. Recent works of popular criticism, such as Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives and Brendan Keogh’s Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line, have examined these developments, questioning how these games reflect upon such subjects as player subjectivity and the human capacity for violence.

The academic discipline of “game studies” has been exploring the processes of videogames for many years prior to this recent critical interest from videogame journalism. What is now considered game studies began as a reaction in the humanities and social sciences to videogames’ growing popularity and importance in the early 1980s. As such, game studies is built off of a long line of theoretical and philosophical writing concerned with aesthetics, subjectivity, and the mechanics of play in their most general of forms, such as board games and sports; one example is Bernard de Koven’s The Well-Played Game, a theoretical exploration of game mechanics that is currently being republished 35 years after its original release in 1978.

Game studies has recently experienced a revival of sorts. While universities such as Georgia Tech and MIT have hosted graduate-level programs - studies-related fields for many years, an increasing number of institutions have incorporated digital media classes into their undergraduate humanities curriculums. Theorists such as Ian Bogost and Jesper Juul have also assumed a very public role in a videogame community hungering to talk about those “big questions” about videogames. If you are interested in learning more about game studies, I would suggest reading Extra Lives by Tom Bissell and An Introduction to Game Studies by Frans Mayra.

^* From Killing is Harmless, page 3.

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