The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies

The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies by Steven E. Jones. Routledge 2008. $95.00 hardcover; $29.95 paper. 198 pages

reviewed by NINA B. HUNTEMANN

In the inaugural issue of Game Studies, editor-in-chief Espen Aarseth argued that the scholarly investigation of com- puter games should strive to exist as an "independent academic sector," develop- ing in related fields (he specifically named Media Studies, Sociology, and English), but ultimately free from the reductive ten- dency of sub-field status.1 Eight years later a handful of graduate programs in game studies are attracting students interested in focusing their degrees, and the Digital Games Research Association (DlGRA), a professional organization of academics formed in 2003, has hosted three success- ful international conferences devoted to games. Despite these developments, game studies remains a discipline without a room of its own. The majority of scholars attending DIGRA conferences are from other fields and vary widely in the theory and methodology they bring to the academic study of games. Likewise, these scholars infiltrate the annual conferences of their long-established disciplines to present work that may share theoretical foundations with their colleagues, but they explore an unfamiliar object of study. This interdisciplinary bounty is building a body of work that may or may not succeed in fulfilling Aarseth's dream; in the meantime the cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange is enriching the ground for whatever takes root.

The Meaning of Video Games does not. help mark territory that may be clearly called "game studies"; quite the opposite. Steven Jones, professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, expands the possibility of how games might be understood within and between a network of cultural phenomena that includes television dramas, science fiction, gift books, Shakespeare plays, improvisational theater, and more. At the core of this contextualization is the assumption that, along with these recognizable...