Download e-book for kindle: The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies by Steven E. Jones

By Steven E. Jones

ISBN-10: 0203929926

ISBN-13: 9780203929926

ISBN-10: 041596055X

ISBN-13: 9780415960557

The that means of games takes a textual stories method of an more and more very important type of expression in today’s tradition. It starts by means of assuming that games are meaningful–not simply as sociological or financial or cultural facts, yet of their personal correct, as cultural expressions helpful of scholarly recognition. during this means, this booklet makes a contribution to the learn of games, however it additionally goals to counterpoint textual stories. Early online game stories students have been fast to indicate online game shouldn't ever be decreased to basically its "story" or narrative content material and so they rightly insist at the significance of learning video games as video games. yet right here Steven E. Jones demonstrates that textual studies–which grows traditionally out of historic questions of textual recension, a number of models, creation, replica, and reception–can fruitfully be utilized to the learn of games. mentioning particular examples comparable to Myst and misplaced, Katamari Damacy, Halo, Façade, Nintendo’s Wii, and may Wright’s Spore, the booklet explores the ways that textual stories concepts–authorial goal, textual variability and function, the paratext, publishing heritage and the social text–can make clear games as greater than formal structures. It treats games as cultural kinds of expression which are bought as they're performed, out on the planet, the place their meanings get made.

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Manipulating the Hanso websites using clues from the ads, for example, yielded “Easter eggs”—extra clues, sometimes concealed in images or employee profiles on the company site. All of this was discussed by fans at length on both official and unofficial blogs and threaded discussions, and in real-sounding entries in Wikipedia, for example. The official sites were sometimes sponsored by the show and on these, the show’s writers and producers sometimes took part online. The duo most associated with the show, executive producers and writers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, provided content for a regular podcast posted during the TV season.

This remark probably alludes to an infamous TV finale, for St. Elsewhere, in which, absurdly, the hospital where the series had taken place is revealed to have been inside a child’s snow globe all along. At any rate, the final scene served as notice to the viewers that Lost would not be resolved (or completed or won) that easily (“it was only a dream” or, I would add, “only a [literal] video game”), that its “play” would not be so narratively self-contained. It seems a tacit acknowledgment of the multi-platform, transmedia field of play that is the Lost phenomenon, a self-conscious reference to the arbitrariness of the island as a fictional limit or bounding horizon for the show, which as a cultural product is anything but an isolated object, cut off from the world.

8 This scene bears an obvious resemblance to the abrupt opening The game of Lost 25 scene of the pilot episode of Lost, in which Dr. Jack Shephard wakes in much the same state in a similar setting. In general, the writers have used glimpses of or allusions to books in order to send (real or bogus) encoded messages to the always-vigilant fans, creating a kind of shifting asteroid belt of texts always circling around the TV narrative, for those in the know. In this way, watching the show often feels like following hypertext links on the web.

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The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies by Steven E. Jones


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