A personal perspective on the evolution of gaming

Entertainment Computing, 2003

The potentials of using games and gaming for other purposes than just entertainment are very promising. While today initiatives mainly are focusing on the learning capabilities of games and gaming there are many other potential uses. This new use focuses on combining the advantages of gaming (motivation, stimulation and engagement) while in the same time solving different "serious" and time critical tasks. But along with promises comes economic and cultural differences between the game industry (the developers) and the traditional industries (the users). Even though many of these problems can be avoided by setting up projects differently the biggest challenge is to perhaps to fight the prejudices and preconceptions surrounding both camps.

2011

Review of Educational Research, 2012

Routledge eBooks, 2014

Games: Research and Practice

In games and playable media, almost nothing is as it was at the turn of the millennium. Digital and analog games have exploded in reach, diversity, and relevance. Digital platforms and globalisation have shifted and fragmented their centres of gravity and how they are made and played. Games are converging with other media, technologies, and arts into a wide field of playable media. Games research has similarly exploded in volume and fragmented into disciplinary specialisms. All this can be deeply disorienting. The journal Games: Research and Practice wants to offer a lighthouse that helps readers orient themselves in this new, ever-shifting reality of games industry and games research.

Journal of Magazine Media, 2019

Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi, 2023

This course will introduce students to video games as an art form, as a business, and as a part of global popular culture. The course will begin with a broad establishment of game studies and investigation of the uniqueness of video games as a medium. Subsequent weeks will introduce different approaches to studying video games, including historical, industrial, technological, cultural, theoretical, and aesthetic. Students will read material from video game history, scholarly theory of games, and the trade and popular press. To contextualize these readings, weekly lab sections will provide the opportunity for screenings and video game play. In lab sections and outside of class, students will interact with games representing different eras of video game history and different aspects of the industry. Several guest speakers—including journalists, developers, and podcasters—will share their insights about the industry and culture of video games.

How did games rise to become the central audiovisual form of expression and storytelling in digital culture? How did the practices of their artistic production come into being? How did the academic analysis of the new medium's social effects and cultural meaning develop? Addressing these fundamental questions and aspects of digital game culture in a holistic way for the first time, Gundolf S. Freyermuth's introduction outlines the media-historical development phases of analog and digital games, the history and artistic practices of game design, as well as the history, academic approaches, and most important research topics of game studies.