In amongst the recent flurry of game design books, The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology attempts to move beyond formalist and technical concerns to touch on game’s sociological and phenomenological dimensions. Review by Aphra Kerr

Morality and Immortality - the games industry under siege

spring_alpha, a multiplayer online game still in development, combines the narrative of building a social utopia with the question of the user’s relationship to the game software. Reviewed by Matthew Fuller

FACT’s recent conference, Situationist Sim City: Critical Video Gaming Conference, June 28, 2004, attempted to analyse how the ‘virtual’ world of games infects and informs ‘real’ life and vice versa.

For a while now, old, long outdated video game consoles of the 80s such as the Atari 2600 or the Vectrex have been enjoying something of a renaissance. They've found their way into the canon of good taste; a multitude of records and T-shirts are testimony to that.

The Psychosemiotic Intervention of the Computer Game on the Politico-Virtual Model of Post-Communist Net Centric Macro-Sociology.

God games are a genre of video games which position the player as an invisible controller/manager/all-seeing-being of a simulated real-time world. From the early days of pixellated three-quarter view landscapes with tiny bit-mapped creatures running around, to today's slick, beautifully rendered, near-photographic 3D panoramas with convincing creatures and stunning special effects, the task remains the same: to nurture, coerce and assist the inhabitants or bully, maim and generally subject your populace to a lighter shade of Armageddon.

Tom McCarthy on the recent Converging Stories conference at the ICA

Exceeding the minor scale on which it occurred, and somehow moving beyond its host institution’s low-key support, the ICA’s July new media event Radical Entertainment pulled off a small feat of transformation.

Buried away in the summer programme of the ICA, the new media show Radical Entertainment represented an ambitious attempt to anthologise recent interdisciplinary work focused on the digital domain.

The first person (shooter) video game is an environment seen ‘through the eyes’ of the player character. This projection of the players presence onto/into the game space allows the player to construct and develop an extension of their ego as a negotiator between their physical self and the fantasy space implied by the games constructs.

The resultant character is rarely if ever seen. This 'seer' in some ways acting as a sacrificial other to the player in their journey through the rules and behaviours of the synthesised space.

Only a few years ago, academics and computer games seemed an unlikely combination. Except for the odd psychologist tracing the roots of street violence to children’s bedrooms, Tetris, Doom, Myst and the like were regarded as symptoms of a decaying culture, rather than cultural objects worthy of study.