Fundamentals of Video Game Literacy

This book posits a novel framework for sense‑making and meaning‑making in the play of video games. Extending a modern, process‑oriented, audience‑inclusive philosophy of artistic meaning generation, this book grapples with the question of how to personally and critically examine video games as artistic artifacts that do not have set, predetermined, standardized forms until live play is enacted. The resulting artistic product, live gameplay, expresses both the game’s developers and its players.

This book argues that players hold three separate, concurrent perspectives during play: the embodied avatar within the simulated space, the role‑playing participant in the narrative fantasy, and the external strategist manipulating the game’s software affordances. The exciting dynamics that arise from live gameplay are the result of the tensions and harmonies between these three parallel layers of play.

Video games are systems with designed behaviors capable of a great diversity of instantiated expressions. Players are brought into that system of instantiated generation to produce truly emergent and personal gameplay. As such, players directly impact the shape and form of the gameplay artifact itself. This creates a relationship between the art, the player, and its meaning radically different from all previous art forms.

This book builds around this central premise with examinations of related subjects pertaining to video game meaning‑making, such as the ways in which video games facilitate play that is expressive of their players and the ways in which it is appropriate to compare and contextualize the differences in players’ instantiated play activities. These subjects are designed to give readers an in‑depth understanding of the dynamics of gameplay in order to facilitate richer, more meaningful encounters with video games as cultural artifacts.

This book:

• Provides a useful framework for enriching players’ experiences with video game play.
• Helps players identify and distinguish aspects of their own and game developers’ expression in gameplay.
• Posits a novel framework examining the role of player as embodied avatar, role‑player, and strategist.
• Gives players appropriate questions to better interrogate the generation of meaning from within and surrounding the system of gameplay.

Ryan Zhao is an independent researcher and lecturer specializing in video game literacy. After achieving his MS in the psychological sciences, he has worked for almost a decade in the video game industry, performing research and marketing roles for Nintendo and Xbox, and he has more than a decade of critical work through podcasts and publications Cane and Rinse, Sound of Play, and Play;Write.