About the Author

Judd Ethan Ruggill (Arizona State University) and Ken S. McAllister (University of Arizona) co-direct the Learning Games Initiative (LGI), a transdisciplinary, inter-institutional research group that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games. They also curate one of the world's largest research-oriented computer game archives, and have written and lectured extensively on the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration, the politics of digital media, and the importance of play in scholarship.

Reviews

"This small volume is big on ideas. Ruggill and McAllister move beyond the latter's Game Work to offer seven 'prompts' for examining computer games. These prompts are in fact provocations--at times contrarian, never polemic--that engender new ways to think about the objects of study. Three chapters emphasize the difficulties that confront scholars, developers, and players who attempt to discuss computer games, a topical domain that is protean, expansive, and at best challenging to delineate. Spurning received wisdom, a chapter on 'aimlessness' argues that computer games are 'fundamentally boring'; a chapter on 'work' illustrates how computer games can be best understood as labor and not play. A chapter on 'anachronism' locates computer games in terms of time (e.g., compressed product-release cycles, play objectives that hearken back to ludic pastimes hundreds of years old), and a chapter on 'duplicity' examines how games, the game industry, and gamers are complicit in willing suspensions of disbelief. Unsurprisingly, the authors supply a myriad of references to both game studies scholarship and computer games. The result will please a broad audience. Summing Up: Recommended."--CHOICE

"A stimulating, provocative, and informative discussion of games that both contributes to some ongoing discussions and debates, and moves beyond others that have stalled. . . . With each chapter structured as something of a provocation, the book strikes me as ideal for undergraduates new to the study of games, while also being excellent for grizzled veterans of game studies who'd like a fresh approach to old issues."--Jonathan Gray, author of Television Entertainment