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Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age, 1971-1984. Van Burnham. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
Although computer and video game designers have long been at the forefront of computer interactivity and visual design, only recently have scholars turned their attention to computer games as a serious field of academic study. Some noteworthy early scholarly studies have been done (Buckles, 1985; Laurel, 1991; Sloane, 1991), but the establishment of this field occurred in 1997 with the publication of Aarseth's (1997) seminal work Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Although it is not immediately apparent from his title, Aarseth was studying computer games, particularly narrative adventure games, which originated in text-based games such as Crowther and Wood's (1976) Adventure (also known as Colossal Cave) and Blank and Lebling's (1986) Zork trilogy. Although text adventures are still written, these eventually evolved into graphic-intensive, multimedia games such as Myst, which was the first "multimedia novel" to sell more than 1 million copies (Miles, 1996). With his primary emphasis on narrative, Aarseth connected the work of adventure game designers to the pioneering work in hypertext theory (Bolter, 1991) and hypertext fiction (Joyce, 1990). The work of Aarseth and others has led to a flurry of scholarly activity-conferences, workshops, edited collections, theses, books, and articles-in a field that some participants refer to as ludology, the study of interactive game theory (see Ludology.org, 2003). This field (not yet a discipline) has brought together historians, critics, and theorists with game designers and users in a fruitful collaboration between the scholarly world and the high-tech world of the computer industry and computer counterculture (see, e.g., Cassell & Jenkins, 1998; Kent, 2001; King, 2002; Montfort, 2003; Poole, 2000; Sellers, 2001; Sloane, 2000; Wolf, 2001).
With the recent turn to the image in communication studies, scholars are increasingly turning their attention to the design features of computer games. Much of the current interest in visual communication derives from studies of the imago in various fields: art (Borger, 1973; Mitchell, 1980), film (Arnheim, 1957, 1969; Worth, 1981), photography (Barthes, 1982), and visual rhetoric (Tufte, 1990). In Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age, 1971-1984, Van Burnham provides scholars with an opportunity to examine the image in what many consider the Golden Age of arcade games,...