Kris's collection of random items found while RSSing, Google Reading or FFFFounding, it may not always be attributed, but it's stuff i like.

i work at alt group, i rarely twitter, a bot does pretend to be me. I like lookwork, irony and peanut butter. Email me.

The Ludology vs. Narratology Debates 

Yesterday, as I was poking around the Game Studies page on Wikipedia, I came across this articulation of a very significant debate within the game studies community:

TThis disagreement has been called the ludology vs. narratology debates. The narratological view is that games should be understood as novel forms of narrative and can thus be studied using theories of narrative (Murray, 1997; Atkins, 2003). The ludological position is that games should be understood on their own terms. Ludologists have proposed that the study of games should concern the analysis of the abstract and formal systems they describe. In other words, the focus of game studies should be on the rules of a game, not on the representational elements which are only incidental (Aarseth, 2001; Eskelinen, 2001; Eskelinen, 2004).