Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Hi folks,

I've been thinking about this point myself. I initially resolved it by following the IGJA's term 'videogame'. No problems...

However, in my contact with North American scholars at the APCA conference in San Diego March 2005, I noticed a quite significant trend for North American scholars to refer to them as 'digital games', Nathaniel Garrelts was the chair of the videogames panels, and he obviously took this on board (hence the titles of his books). I felt at the time that this term was rather useless, because it would involve translation for everyone who was not a videogame scholar (I was about to do an ethnography, and I imagined asking people about which digital games that they played). Anyway I was reading a lot of anthropological material at the time and from that discipline there is a real demand that the researcher use the terms that are deployed by the people themselves (understandable I think).

However, since I read Aphra Kerr's new book I think that 'Digital games' is more appropriate as an umbrella term to describe the field in general. This then allows us to move between different levels of focus to examine the technological forms of gaming. Its okay for a handle, a generalisation of the field, that allows scholars to talk about the field. But when discussing individual games a more specific approach should be taken. Different issues circulate around different material form and those can be located by reference to the site of consumption (its to mobile, domestic [console; PC], public [arcade; LAN]), and the connections it engenders (multiplayer, two-player, mmo, etc.).

Whats more important for understanding whats going on (the embodied experience of playing) in a digital game?
1) Knowing that Second Life (for example) is a digital game, not a video game. [e.g. the sentence: The digital game Second Life has been a constant source of ....]
2) Knowing that Second Life is an MMORPG that can be played on a PC (or Mac) and is thus consumed in both Domestic spaces (peoples homes) and public spaces (cyber cafes)

Its important to have a term that scholars can use to talk about this kind of games generally, whichout it being confused with a specific kind of game. Its also important that the term is able to encapsulate transitional catergories like ARGs

Good luck with sorting it out Zach! I will be interested to see how Half Real and Unit Operations inter-relate