The medium where the audience acts.
11 topics · 14 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Art of Computer Game Design
Chris Crawford · 1984
Argues computer games are a new expressive medium in their own right, and proposes a taxonomy of game types plus a repeatable design process rather…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs
Richard Bartle · 1996
Proposes that multiplayer game players sort into four types — achievers, explorers, socialisers and killers — defined by whether they act on the…
+10 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Gaming Situation
Markku Eskelinen · 2001
Attacks the application of literary and narratological methods to games as a category error, arguing games should be analysed as configurative…
+1 more at this level
12 of 14 works
Chris Crawford
Argues computer games are a new expressive medium in their own right, and proposes a taxonomy of game types plus a repeatable design process rather than treating game-making as unteachable craft.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Richard Bartle
Proposes that multiplayer game players sort into four types — achievers, explorers, socialisers and killers — defined by whether they act on the world or on other players.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Espen Aarseth
Argues video games need their own theoretical discipline independent of literary and film studies, because their defining feature — the player's own actions — cannot be explained by narrative theory alone.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jesper Juul
Argues games and narrative are fundamentally at odds because narrative requires a fixed past while games unfold in a player-controlled present, so most games only frame a story rather than tell one.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Edward Castronova
Uses real economic data from an online game to argue virtual worlds have genuine markets and measurable output, making them legitimate objects of economic study rather than mere entertainment.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc & Robert Zubek
Proposes splitting games into Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics as distinct layers, arguing designers and players experience a game in opposite directions through this same structure.
link checked 17 Sept 2026T. L. Taylor
Argues competitive gaming's push toward professionalisation — leagues, sponsorship, spectatorship — creates real tension with the participatory, amateur culture that made these games communities in the first place.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Laine Nooney
Argues videogame history has been told as a patrilineal narrative that treats women as rare exceptions, and proposes reading domestic space and material culture instead to show how gender itself shaped who got to make games at all.
link checked 17 Sept 2026GDC Festival of Gaming
Argues that a level must teach its own rules through play rather than instruction, and that most design failures are the player being asked to do something the level never demonstrated.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Fabien Sanglard
Reconstructs id Software's DOOM engine release by release, arguing its speed came from exploiting the specific limits of 1993 PC hardware — binary space partitioning, fixed-point math — rather than from any general theory of engine design.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Seth Lipkin
Argues the flooding of digital storefronts with cheap engines and low barriers to entry has driven indie developers' returns toward zero, undermining the myth of indie development as a viable alternative to studio labour.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Brendan Keogh
Argues, from interviews with over 400 developers, that the videogame industry is not the handful of large commercial studios it is popularly imagined to be but a much larger, codependent field of hobbyists, students, contractors and small collectives.
link checked 17 Sept 2026