Every Game Is An Island Endings And Extremities In Video Games Riccardo Fassone by Riccardo Fassone 9781501316616, 9781501316647, 1501316613, 1501316648 instant download after payment.

Despite the pervasive rhetorics of immersion and embodiment found in industrial and social discourses, playing a video game is an exercise in non-linearity. The pervasiveness of trial and error mechanics, unforgiving game over screens, loading times, minute tweakings of options and settings, should lead us to consider video games as a medium that cannot eschew fragmentation. Every Game is an Island is an analysis and a critique of grey areas, dead ends, and extremities found in digital games, an exploration of border zones where play and non-play co-exist or compete. Riccardo Fassone describes the complexity of the experience of video gameplay and brings integral but often overlooked components of the gameplay experience to the fore, in an attempt to problematize a reading of video games as grandiosely immersive, all-encompassing narrative experiences. Through the analysis of closures and endings, limits and borders, and liminal states, this field-advancing study looks at the heart of a medium starting from its periphery.
This book explores the liminal areas of video games and video game play. When playing a video game, players encounter a number of endings, extremities, boundaries, and thresholds; these border zones separating failure and closure, agency and passivity, play and configuration, are the often overlooked substance of which video games are made. Fassone argues that through the analysis and discussion of these materials it is possible to describe the inherently fragmented experience of gameplay, and formulate novel theoretical approaches to video games. Drawing upon media theory and procedural analysis, Fassone offers an understanding of video games as both designed objects, and elements of the wider ecosystem of digital media.