DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play
The University of Tokyo, September, 2007
Volume: 4
ISBN / ISNN: ISSN 2342-9666
The video game industry is the combination of two worlds: technology (IT) and show-biz/media/cultural industries. This paper explores this tension by exposing the shortcomings of the culture economics perspective and its lack of understanding for the unique characteristics of the video game medium, thus subsequently proposing a deeper analysis of the medium by turning to literary theoretical perspectives on games, such as ludology and narratology. Due the lack of technological dimensions in its theoretical framework, narratology is deemed less fruitful as an analytical tool and ludology is preferred. Ludology, with Espen Aarseth’s cybertext theory elucidates aspects of “interactivity”, author-medium-reader power relations and the mechanical organization of textual machines, which provides perspectives on practice in the video game industry.