Judd Ethan Ruggill – författare

Atari’s 1981 arcade hit Tempest was a “tube shooter” built around glowing, vector-based geometric shapes. Among its many important contributions to both game and cultural history, Tempest was one of the first commercial titles to allow players to choose the game’s initial play difficulty (a system Atari dubbed “SkillStep”), a feature that has since became standard for games of all types. Tempest was also one of the most aesthetically impactful games of the twentieth century, lending its crisp, vector aesthetic to many subsequent movies, television shows, and video games. In this book, Ruggill and McAllister enumerate and analyze Tempest’s landmark qualities, exploring the game’s aesthetics, development context, and connections to and impact on video game history and culture. By describing the game in technical, historical, and ludic detail, they unpack the game’s latent and manifest audio-visual iconography and the ideological meanings this iconography evokes.

Atari’s 1981 arcade hit Tempest was a “tube shooter” built around glowing, vector-based geometric shapes. Among its many important contributions to both game and cultural history, Tempest was one of the first commercial titles to allow players to choose the game’s initial play difficulty (a system Atari dubbed “SkillStep”), a feature that has since became standard for games of all types. Tempest was also one of the most aesthetically impactful games of the twentieth century, lending its crisp, vector aesthetic to many subsequent movies, television shows, and video games. In this book, Ruggill and McAllister enumerate and analyze Tempest’s landmark qualities, exploring the game’s aesthetics, development context, and connections to and impact on video game history and culture. By describing the game in technical, historical, and ludic detail, they unpack the game’s latent and manifest audio-visual iconography and the ideological meanings this iconography evokes.

Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4 In his 2004 book Game Work, Ken S. McAllister proposed a rigorous critical methodology for the discussion of the “video game complex”—the games themselves, their players, the industry that produces them, and those who review and market them. Games, McAllister demonstrated, are viewed and discussed very differently by different factions: as an economic force, as narrative texts, as a facet of popular culture, as a psychological playground, as an ethical and moral force, even as a tool for military training.   In Gaming Matters, McAllister and coauthor Judd Ruggill turn from the broader discussion of video game rhetoric to study the video game itself as a medium and the specific features that give rise to games as similar and yet diverse as Pong, Tomb Raider, and Halo. In short, what defines the computer game itself as a medium distinct from all others? Each chapter takes up a different fundamental characteristic of the medium. Games are: • Idiosyncratic, and thus difficult to apprehend using the traditional tools of media study • Irreconcilable, or complex to such a degree that developers, players, and scholars have contradictory ways of describing them • Boring, and therefore obligated to constantly make demands on players’ attention • Anachronistic, or built on age-old tropes and forms of play while ironically bound to the most advanced technologies • Duplicitous, or dependent on truth-telling rhetoric even when they are about fictions, fantasies, or lies • Work, or are often better understood as labor rather than play • Alchemical, despite seeming all-too mechanical or predictable Video games are now inarguably a major site of worldwide cultural production.   Gaming Matters will neither flatter game enthusiasts nor embolden game detractors in their assessments. But it will provide a vocabulary through which games can be discussed in academic settings and will create an important foundation for future academic discourse.

​The recent and dramatic development of China’s economy and international political muscle is especially pronounced in the country’s video game industry. Now the largest of its kind in the world by gross revenue, the Chinese video game industry impacts every player in the global game market and has begun to directly influence the nature of the video game medium itself. From its conceptualization of the player as a category and commodity, to its approach to the design, development, and marketing of products and services, the Chinese game industry is engaging in a complex, innovative, and fascinating reimagining of the video game as a cultural and industrial force.The purpose of The Chinese Video Game Industry is to help introduce and investigate this industrial and cultural powerhouse. The book’s contributors array the industry across its history, economics, organization, politics, and cultures, documenting its rise, exploring its operational, cultural, and aesthetic characteristics, and capturing its context vis-à-vis the global media landscape. In so doing, the contributors provide a robust resource for anyone interested in studying, building, or even simply appreciating games.