Week 1 - Digital Games Studies

The articles to read during the first week discussed the concept and importance of game studies and the comparison between digital games and literature.

Personally, I found them a bit hard to read because I am not very well acquainted with that kind of vocabulary in English and because the topic is treated very vaguely and abstractly. However, some of the statements they do are completely true: digital games have become during the last decades an important issue in society and therefore there should be an academic field specifically in game studies (maybe called ludology) rather than having a mixture of psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists dealing with it.

On the other hand, I totally disagree with the comparison the authors make between play and science. They  basically affirm that, applying a slightly abstract definition, science is a form of play. The definition could then also be applied to almost everything, and so I don't consider it valid.

Apart from that, I also have to agree with the authors as far as the comparison between narrative and games is concerned. The understanding of literary does serve for analyzing games, and these can in fact be compared to other forms of fiction. Both games and literature immerse user in a completely different world, but in order to understand digital games, we have to determine how they differ from other forms of entertainment; and there is where game studies apply.

In conclusion, there is an obvious need of science like ludology or game studies to treat this topic, but it still need to be set into specific boundaries.