Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Zach, thanks for what was clearly a thorough read, and for the review. I'll make a few comments here.

(1) I should address the issue of difficulty. It *is* a hard book, and I am aware that some readers may not be prepared for it. But it's a hard topic (a meeting point between computation and humanism to facilitate comparative videogame criticism), and I tried not to candy coat that challenge. I was particularly interested in drawing traditional humanists into the arena of game studies, and to do that I felt obliged to address the culture and history of critical theory, since it's been so influential in that domain. I'm not sure this sort of thing *shouldn't* be hard.

That said, I think Zach would agree that about halfway through the book gets a lot easier. In fact, some readers (perhaps game developers in particular) could skip around if they wished.

(2) That said, I think a lot of readers will get their introduction to Badiou here. Badiou is still somewhat unknown in the States, although he's very well regarded by those who read him. His major work, Being and the Event, was finally released in English after this book went to press. But Badiou has articulated concepts closest to the ones I was after, and his merger of philosophy and mathematics somewhat parallels my attempt at humanism and computation, so it seemed a reasonable fit.

(3) Zach, you may be right that the book doesn't provide the reader with a step-by-step method for performing analysis on their own. I've heard this objection elsewhere too. The concepts are admittedly abstract and difficult, but I didn't want to write a "how to" book for criticism either. I suppose that would be more convenient, but I have a fear that we value convenience too much in game studies. Hopefully the "approach" I provide is still useful in the sense that it raises questions and offers a perspective on potential analysis. Still, I hear your objection and I'll be considering it for follow-up articles.

(4) On that note, my new book, Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric is much, much, much more accessible. It's also much longer, so hopefully it will still be consumable by the general reader. I do keep the notion of unit operations and build on it in the new book, which deals with rhetoric and explicitly addresses politics, advertising, and education in games.

I'll stop there for now, but I'll hope to come back and say more shortly.