Overview

This collection expands the analytical framework of digital games by exploring them through the lens of genre analysis—the evaluation of the structural designs that provide the framework for the player’s experience. Each chapter in this volume attends to a unique game genre that is newly emerged or revisited, and often new under-addressed in critical scholarship to theorize where games are situated currently and establish new ground in Game Studies for the future. As video games continue to dominate the media landscape, understanding the structure and form of games is increasingly important. Despite the fluid nature of genre, there remains an intellectual and ideological power for understanding the connective tissue of game genres as creative artifacts through their relational iterations. This volume extends these ideas by considering the current framework for game genres, highlighting the additions and evolutions of the last decade. Each section in this collection revisits the idea of genre as a flexible dynamic to capture the iterative quality of the work by signaling things that exist currently, tracing their emergence and evolution, and theorizing what such affordances might mean for the future. The first section considers emerging genres as a function of the material conditions of play, and the game experience. The second section examines many of the formal/mechanical elements used to identify genres, highlighting the emergence or evolution of forms that are unique to the current landscape of games. The final section explores the function and construction of genre as affective, highlighting the expressive and persuasive potential of games to shape the audience.

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Reviews

The study of genres seems to mirror the arrival of a new medium that makes audiences, academics, and producers rethink the idea and reconfigure their understanding of the way that genres speak through the text. Given that video games are the medium of our era, this text comprehensively catalogues emerging genres in a host of games and game genres. The essays in this collection will help fans and scholars alike tease apart our understanding of popular genres like horror games and new ones like cozy games. Conversely, the chapters explore the ways that genre conditions our understanding of the production of identities in and through the genre of a game. Importantly, the essays collected here will also provide scholars in other fields with new ways of understanding established genres through this important look at emerging ones. * Marc A. Ouellette, Associate Professor of Cultural & Gender Studies, Old Dominion University, USA *

Author Information

Josh Call is Professor of English at Grand View University, USA. Betsy Brey is Instructor in Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Gerald Voorhees is an Associate Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Matthew Wysocki is Associate Professor at Flagler College, USA, where he is the Coordinator of Media Studies.

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