I am elbows deep in readings for my comprehensive exam with Mia Consalvo. The topic is Player and Audience Studies.

So far, I have gone through about a third the works on the docket. I wanted to give mini-reviews of each for my own purposes, as an exercise in brevity, but also as a mini-annotated bibliography, should someone ever attempt to study players and audiences.

–          Aarseth, Espen. “I fought the law: Transgressive play and the implied player.” Situated Play. Proc. DiGRA (2007): 24-28.

This is a remarkably short, but helpful paper in framing ideas surrounding an implied reader for videogames, the titular “implied player.” While it does some work to problematize the concept, there is clearly more to be explored.

–          Bobo, Jacqueline. Black women as cultural readers. Columbia University Press, 1995.

Bobo is writing about important films featuring black actors and directors and the ways in which middle-class black women talk about them. Bobo does a lot of close analysis of the films in question and juxtaposes the interpretations of professional film critics against her interpreting subjects.

–          Caillois, Roger. Les jeux et les homes: le masque et le vertige. Paris, France: Editions Gallimard, 1967.

I have read this text by Caillois before, but never in its entirety. Game studies has been largely interested in the first half of his text and seems to have ignored the more philosophical extensions of his categories in the latter half of the book. Caillois attempts to raise the stakes of his work by arguing that culture emerges from play. In a very unfortunate way, Caillois attempts to chart the progress and stagnation of cultures to the types of games they enjoy.

–          Cassell, Justine, and Henry Jenkins. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998.

Despite have a sequel, which will be covered in a following weeknote, this text has aged very well. Of course, it is no longer about the state of the art, but rather captures a moment in history when games for girls were being examined as a potentiality. The work showcases some remarkably accurate predictions, particularly in relation to what successful girl games might look like. Games such as FarmVille and Kim Kardashian’s Hollywood, fit the bullet point findings of what a game marketed toward women would look like 10-15 years before the fact. With regards to its politics, they are as relevant as ever.

–          Consalvo, Mia. Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007.

Consalvo describes the ways in which cheating is ideologically positioned. Her work uses Dick Hebdige’s concept of subcultures and Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital to focus on gamer capital of players, albeit tacitly at most times.