Content area
Full Text
An Introduction to Game Studies: Games in Culture by Frans Mäyrä. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008. 208pp.
When Pong was first introduced in 1972, it would be difficult to imagine a scholar building a career examining the cultural implications of a bouncing white ball. Over thirty years later, with the popularity of home console and pc games, some still have difficulty with the idea that game studies constitutes its own academic field. The trouble, however, according to Frans Mäyrä, is that game studies, like most disciplines, is engaged in a debate as to how it should be defined. Describing this conflict as a debate between ludology, the view that games exist for play, versus narratology, the view that games constitute a form of literature, Mäyrä's analysis falls somewhere in between, providing a starting point for teachers who want to introduce the study of games into their classrooms. Mäyrä contextualizes games as cultural artifacts by drawing a parallel between the playing of games and academic...