Every Game is an Island: Endings and Extremities in Video Games

Description

Despite the pervasive rhetorics of immersion and embodiment found in industrial and social discourses, playing a video game is an exercise in non-linearity. The pervasiveness of trial and error mechanics, unforgiving game over screens, loading times, minute tweakings of options and settings, should lead us to consider video games as a medium that cannot eschew fragmentation. Every Game is an Island is an analysis and a critique of grey areas, dead ends and extremities found in digital games, an exploration of border zones where play and non-play coexist or compete. Riccardo Fassone describes the complexity of the experience of video game play and brings integral but often overlooked components of the gameplay experience to the fore, in an attempt to problematize a reading of video games as grandiosely immersive, all-encompassing narrative experiences. Through the analysis of closures and endings, limits and borders, and liminal states, this field-advancing study looks at the heart of a medium starting from its periphery. Cover page Halftitle page Title page Copyright page Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction A book about extremities Structure of the book 1 Two Non-definitive Definitions What is a video game? The exceptionality of video games Computer-mediated games Designed procedural experiences Notes 2 Game ↔ Game Closure Caesura Endlessness Openness Notes 3 Game ↔ Metagame Fragmentation Metagaming Immersion Holism Notes 4 Game ↔ Games Uniqueness Ephemerality Modularity Serialization Notes Conclusions From the outside in Bibliography Ludography Filmography Index