The Pleasures of Computer Gaming: Essays on Cultural History, Theory and Aesthetics

The early history of computer games studies has been characterized by a series of pitched battles focusing on the purity of the game experience; the exchange (if any) between other media forms, especially visual; and the need for reduced, or simplified authority to which such studies should adhere. In their collection of essays, The Pleasures of Computer Gaming: Essays on Cultural History, Theory and Aesthetics , Melanie Swalwell and Jason Wilson argue that creative practices, like computer games, will always exceed any attempted definitions of them because no creative practice occurs in a vacuum but is rather sullied by a constant exchange of images, techniques, and concepts between media and human beings that enact them.

More specifically, Swalwell and Wilson argue that "attempting to cut video games off from other media is counterproductive in that it blinds us to rich commonalities and continuities with cinema, television, music, visual arts, and predigital games" (4). There is a need, they say, for scholarship that moves beyond the reduction and oversimplification of earlier debates, and seeks complex answers to a wide range of questions associated with the digital games phenomenon not confined to the games themselves. In short, they seek "a focusing on what computer gaming is and what it produces, rather than what others think it should or should not be or do" (emphasis in original).

Given this context, the eight essays in this collection seek to situate computer games, gameplay, and game practice and pleasure within broader contexts of cultural history and theory in order to indicate new directions for game studies, and more specifically, gaming pleasures.

In their essay, "Little Jesus and *@#?-off Robots: On Cybernetics, Aesthetics, and Not Being Very Good at Lego Star Wars ," Seth Giddings and Helen W. Kennedy study the player's relationship to digital gaming world's of interaction by training their critical gaze on their own efforts at learning a new interface. They comment on the drama of mastery as the game trains the player and conclude the lack of a level playing field. Each experience is individual, defined, shaped, and contextualized by a player's ability to imbricate multiple agencies.

For Joyce Goggin, it is the pleasure principle of repetition that connects computer gaming to the often slavish self-expenditure in gambling. In her essay, "Gaming/Gambling: Addiction and the Videogame Experience," Goggin argues that the constant dialogic oscillation between winning and losing constructs the gaming experience, the gamer, and the text produced by interaction with the game world.

Julian Kücklich's essay, "Forbidden Pleasures: Cheating in Computer Games," asks how cheating can be approached theoretically, especially when online cheat guides, "Easter Eggs" hidden in the game itself, and other codes and strategies that allow players to override the machine enhance the pleasure of computer gaming. With references to literary and media studies, Kücklich offers new insights.

Editor Melanie Swalwell argues a need for a more nuanced understanding of players' aesthetic relations with game worlds and avatars in her essay, "Movement and Kinaesthetic Responsiveness: A Neglected Pleasure." Players' kinaesthetic responsiveness, she argues, indicates their engagement with computer technology.

Co-editor, Jason Wilson, argues in his essay, "'Participation TV': Videogame Archaeology and New Media Art," that the continuities between the earliest iterations of new media art and the earliest video games show a common concern among artists and developers with changing information behaviors possible in relation to television. He concludes with a call for a reintegration of critical studies of new media art and videogames.

Bernadette Flynn, "The Navigator's Experience: An Examination of the Spational in Computer Games," also considers the relationship between video games and prior or parallel forms of visual culture, drawing on visual and spatial theory (architecture and landscape design) to represent movement through space in specific digital games. She asks which models might be best to analyze the pleasures of the user's navigational experience.

Patrick Crogan reconsiders real-time strategy war games in his essay, "Wargaming and Computer Games: Fun with the Future," in order to reexamine the realism versus playability debate and how this debate helps determine the nature and emphasis of gameplay and interactivity.

Finally, Brett Nicholls and Simon Ryan, in their essay, "Gameplay as Thirdspace," drawing from their readings of sociological and philosophical discussions, argue that computer games constitute a space that is both real and imagined, a Thirdspace.

The essays in this collection broaden and overlap our understanding or computer games in relation to cultural theory and the nature of aesthetic experience, the importance of body and sociability, larger and broader cultural histories, and in connection with other kinds of visual and interactive culture. The end result is to show computer gaming in relation to various practices that allow movement beyond the historical narrow definition of computer games and/or gaming.

The Pleasures of Computer Gaming: Essays on Cultural History, Theory and Aesthetics is an interesting and perhaps important book for the continued development of computer games studies as its own field of study. Swalwell, Wilson, and their contributors, by replacing digital games and gameplay into longer arcs of cultural history and theory argue that games are not just games but rather cultural commodities, new media technologies, and items of visual culture embedded in complex social practices. Considering computer games and gameplay in this light facilitates more nuanced accounts of the pleasures of computer gaming.