Do you have any examples or recommendations?
Here’s an example (and the channel’s most-viewed video) - How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves
That stuff is very in-the-weeds on the mechanics of platformers. If you like that video, Itay Keren's article on the history of how cameras work in 2d sidescroller games is one of my favorite pieces on 2d game construction: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ItayKeren/20150511/243083/Sc...
[0] https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/author/SimonCarless/185740/
- Errant Signal
- Game Maker's Toolkit
- hbomberguy
- Matthewmatosis
- New Frame Plus
- Noclip
- Super Bunnyhop
- Super Eyepatch Wolf
- ThorHighHeels
open to recommendations as well
> regretfully academics try to optimize different metrics
um I'm not sure what you're getting at here, that's not really my experience with games academia at all.
> insightful enough but not academic
based on what you asked for, Payne and Huntemann's [How to Play Video Games](https://nyupress.org/9781479802142/how-to-play-video-games/) might be up your alley. It's written specifically to bring the ideas of games academia to a non-academic audience.
edit: oh and to be clear, since you said "I have not read you": ummm if my first post made it seem like I'm Ian Bogost I should probably just clarify that I am not, in fact, Ian Bogost.
I read Bogost article (the Goose one) and I really liked it, that was the style I was looking for.I see he has published some books and many articles, so I will try to read more . Researching a little bit more about him, he has some weird positions, but classic for an academic (i.e "videogames cannot create good narrative") and so on.
> um I'm not sure what you're getting at here, that's not really my experience with games academia at all.
My problem is not with academics per se, just with academic writings. When you write an academic article you are constrained to a set of implicit rules, things like clearly show your "contribution" to the field with the paper, quote lots of relevant literature, not ruffle the feathers of other academics, especially those with perceived power over you, try to sell up the cultural significance of your article and so on and so forth.
An example is better I suppose:
> Liminality and the Smearing of War and Play in Battlefield 1 by Debra Ramsay Abstract This article interrogates how war and play are smeared together in Battlefield 1, the first AAA game set in World War I. It advances liminality as a conceptual framework that goes beyond the notion of hybridity (Giddings 2005, Keogh 2014) in addressing how videogames destabilise spatial and temporal relationships and facilitate play with the memory, history and cultural meanings associated with World War I. In contrast to the tendency in games studies to focus either on single-player or multiplayer, this article analyses form, content and player responses in both to answer the following questions: What happens when the spaces and temporalities of two liminal phenomena merge in Battlefield 1? What affective intensities are generated in the play with cultural notions about WWI, and what emerges in the tensions between game form and historical content?
That abstract makes perfect sense in a very specific context, which is: it's using the language and tools established by prior fields of study as lenses through which the medium of video games can be analyzed. It's not written with the expectation that a reader understands the piece in isolation (or even that the reader understand the piece by reading it linearly), but is intended to be in dialog with other existing pieces of academic writing. That the opening seems to obtusely reference liminality without defining it seems like shoddy writing, but keep reading and liminality is defined ... four paragraphs later, for some reason. In a sense, you're supposed to just read it expecting to be confused and then bounce around. It's not literature. An analog in computing might be reading man pages or RFC's or whitepapers: stylistically obtuse at first, but each format starts to make sense once you've read a handful of them and have learned the language patterns and the most widely cited cross-references. Also a lot of it is just self-aggrandizing bullshit. (I enjoy this piece btw, and had not read it before.)
That's kinda why I like stuff like the Atlantic pieces; those pieces are written to stand up independently, and don't need the support of many prior writings to make sense.
In my last comment I was going to say something about foundational academic texts, namely Huizinga's "Homo Ludens", which the piece you just cited mentions almost right out the gate:
> There is a long history of association between war and play, as mapped out initially by Johan Huizinga, who argued that both share an essential identity in their earliest history: “Play is battle and battle is play” (89).
Homo Ludens is, to me, more accessible than a lot of other games writing because it's foundational, so it doesn't require a lot of prior knowledge to comprehend. The thing that's weird about games writing is that the prior knowledge cited by a lot of games writing is ... not about games; it's often writing from anthropology, or sociology, or critical film theory, etc.
My all-time favorite publication for intelligent games writing for a general audience was Kill Screen, but that project collapsed and is no longer in print. They have ebooks on Amazon still. I think my favorite single piece from them was an interview in issue 5 with Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the designer of Rez and The Tetris Effect: https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Screen-5-Sound-Issue-ebook/dp/B0...
that interview used to be available online as a pdf, but I can't find it any more.
he talks about celebrities as symbols and the evolution of celebrity as a concept and how it intersects with games. For me that was an incredibly mind-blowing piece. Nothing has ever come close to the quality of that publication. It struck the perfect level of sophistication and accessibility that has been completely unmatched since.