Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames

Description

The greatest trick the videogame industry ever pulled was convincing the world that videogames were games rather than a medium for making metagames. Elegantly defined as games about games, metagames implicate a diverse range of practices that stray outside the boundaries and bend the rules: from technical glitches and forbidden strategies to Renais

Stephanie Boluk is assistant professor in the English department and Cinema and Digital Media Program at University of California, Davis. Patrick LeMieux is an artist, game designer, and assistant professor in the Cinema and Digital Media Program at University of California, Davis.

"Digital media scholars Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux ask what do games do? They rediscover meaning for the term metagame."-Rhizomes "Interesting analysis of specific examples of the ways in which play has evolved under different circumstances."-CHOICE connect "Boluk and LeMieux shine a hundred spotlights on play's diversity in, on, around, between, through, and without video games. Their wildly eclectic book careens from competitive e-sports and video game spectatorship to hacking, modding, speedrunning, experimenting, and critiquing video games-all valid ways of engaging with the medium that tend to fall outside analyses which see these activities as merely the metagame."-Critical Inquiry