Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community
skip navigationCommentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community.
Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community.
Lisa Nakamura's Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures on the Internet focuses on race and the Internet within a contemporary frame where Internet usage has moved from niche interest to mainstream, everyday use. Digitizing Race uses visual culture studies as a method, explaining visual culture studies and then moving to focused critiques in each of the chapters. Using visual culture studies, Nakamura offers Digitizing Race as a book on "digital race formation, which would parse the ways that digital modes of cultural production and reception are complicit with this ongoing process" (14). As a whole, Digitizing Race is an excellent introduction to media and culture students and a needed work for its focus on race in relation to a post-Internet world. Not only does Nakamura examine the forms and their uses, but also the methods by which visual artifacts and cultures of the Internet are created, used, understood, and communicated across media and culture.
The other day a student asked me to explain what World of Warcraft was. We were talking about how universities are using Second Life for an article the student was writing and I referenced WoW as an easier, more familiar game. This is a minor anecdote like so many others that show that students don't always know as much as we think they know, but it points to a larger issues of a critical gaming literacy.
While "language arts" or "English" is taught in middle and high schools and includes literature, film, plays, and basic rhetoric (normally argument and debate in some form or another), gaming hasn't yet hit the mainstream curriculum, leaving more possibilities for literacy gaps. . . .
This game appears to have been released last month, but I've just recently come across it via Infosthetics. The game, Torrent Raiders is Aaron Meyers' MFA project at USC's Division of Interactive Media, and it's a space-themed shooter based on the real-time content of a torrent. In it, you play as a copyright mercenary, flying among the packets of a torrent and shooting them to gather evidence about the IP addresses it moves through. . . .
The Marriage, a game developed by Rod Humble, has ignited a very welcome discussion on games as art, and their capabilities to convey more complex and delicate matters. In case you are not familiar with the game, you can download it and read about its background, rules and interpretations on Rod's website. . . .
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