The Game of Critique
The Game of Critique
The Game of Critique
Andrew Fleshman
April 04, 2021
Summary
Playing games is something we do when the serious business of living relaxes its grip on us, making space for us to indulge - however fleetingly - in the idle pleasures of distraction.
The question of what games are and can do is an especially pressing one for understanding the digital milieu within which we all live and move.
According to some estimates, 2.7 billion people played video games in 2020.
In 2019, consumer expenditures on digital games alone exceeded $120 billion worldwide, nearly three times the $42 billion that the film industry took at the box office.
As with the rise and evolution of older media forms, video games are shaping our cognitive and social lives in unprecedented and unpredictable ways.
He ambitiously pursues two modes of analysis that are too often separated in the field of game studies: on the one hand, he provides a detailed genealogy of the historical and social conditions that gave rise to the invention of the video game and enabled its flourishing as a media form in the succeeding decades; and on the other hand, he explores the aesthetic qualities of games - both as formal, rules-governed structures and as ludic, process-dependent activities - that manifest their capacities for experimentation and expressive investigation.
The ultimate aim of this complicated, imbricated style of argumentation is to show how video games can do more than present players with problems to be solved.
At their best, video games are more than simple puzzles: they are models of potentiality.
Jagoda's argument begins in Part I with an analysis of the rise of the game as a model for strategic planning and analysis during the Cold War.
Game theory - originally propounded as a tool for understanding economic systems as game-like structures composed of multitudes of players - was adapted in the mid-20th century to predict the behaviors of the prevailing nuclear superpowers, pitting them one against another as rational actors working to maximize their own interests.
Reference
Fleshman, A. (2021, April 04). The game of critique. Retrieved July 17, 2021, from https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-game-of-critique/