UPDATED: (TWO of my) Final Product(s)

Like I said in my last post, my final project has kind of broken into many different pieces, but I made good on the promise from my proposal and made a little ebook of my essays on games and literature, which you can find here. It's in epub format, which most e-readers, tablets, and smartphones should support with the right app, or you can read it on the web through Firefox or Chrome with the right add-on/extension. A good Chrome e-reader add-on I found is Readium.

Also, I can't post my paper on the classical unities in videogames online because it's going to be published at First-Person Scholar, but here's a link to a doc of it.

If e-readers aren't your thing, all of the essays are also available (along with some other stuff I've written on games) at my personal gaming blog, Complicate the Narrative.

Thanks for reading! Enjoy!

Breaking Down the Video Game: Resources for Reading Video Games

Are video games art? Can we look at them as 'literary' works?
What critical theories aid in understanding and distilling
meaning from video games? How can we 'read' video games?
Hopefully these resources will help to answer some of these
questions!

I've been really fascinated by +Paul Bills's research on video games, so I decided to take a few minutes to contribute some resources for his study of video game "literacy." Paul has been working on a book proposal for a work on how to "read" video games from a critical persthe medium of the 21st century, so I'm excited to see people like Paul engaging in formal analysis of games. They will, no doubt, play an integral role in the future of media studies, and realistically, they are on track to become one of the most powerful tools for audience engagement and social change.

I started off by doing a search for "reading video games," and that didn't turn up much of anything useful (mostly just a bunch of pseudo-games that teach reading). I then decided to try searching for "critical analysis of video games," and this turned up some really great material. I've divided into three categories: courses/syllabi, books, and miscellaneous (though still valuable) resources.