Play Redux: The Form of Computer Games

ISBN-13: 9780472050925 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 192 str.

David Myers

Opis

This title presents a new look at digital gaming and the aesthetics of play. Play Redux is an ambitious description and critical analysis of the aesthetic pleasures of video game play, drawing on early 20th-century formalist theory and models of literature. Employing a concept of biological naturalism grounded in cognitive theory, Myers argues for a clear delineation between the aesthetics of play and the aesthetics of texts. In the course of this study, Myers asks a number of interesting questions such as what the mechanics of human play as exhibited in computer games are, whether these mechanisms can be modeled and, what the evolutionary function of cognitive play is, and whether or not it is, on the whole, a good thing. Intended as a provocative corrective to the currently ascendant, if not dominant, cultural and ethnographic approach to game studies and play, Play Redux will generate interest among scholars of communications, new media, and film.