Occasionally, I am asked about my work as a critical game scholar, and I have to come up with some kind of short-hand for explaining it. Usually my go-to is comparing game studies to film studies or literature, which usually helps get us to a perspective of analyzing games for social, artistic, or cultural significance rather than technical complexity or some other scientific or “objective” measurement (such as a rating score in game reviews). The next question to answer then is about how one can perform criticism in the spirit of literary or film studies, but of games with mechanics. How do you analyze the gameplay? The mechanics?
In the early days of (computer) game studies, this was the only question that certain game theorists wanted to pursue. The strongly ludological focus of folks like Espen Aarseth and Markku Eskelinen are famous for eschewing any “narrative” content in favor of the mechanical analysis. For me, this was always an artificial, analytical move that may be perfectly valid for certain purposes, but could never tell the full story of any videogame. So, then, the question remains: how do you analyze games while accounting for both the mechanics and representation?
