I found Aki Järvinen through Jesper Juul’s blog. Aki is preparing his PhD thesis, Games Without Frontiers, on “theories and methods for game studies and design” and he’s posting some work-in-progress chapters online for “user testing.” It’s very dense stuff, and I’m still making my way through the first chapter he posted, but it may be of particular interest to the budding ludologists out there.
To get an idea of the kind of stuff he’s getting into, here are the titles of the three chapters out so far:
- Chapter 3: Introduction to Game Systems, Game Elements, and Simulation
- Chapter 4: Theory of Game Elements: From Game Systems to Their Contexts
- Chapter 5: Key concepts in Psychology in Terms of Ludology
It’s fascinating to note that he’s not just studying video games, but all types of games including board games, sports, and even game shows.
If you have some time, and you’re interested in this kind of thing, you should check out the chapters. Aki is hoping to get some comments, suggestions, and insights back. Frankly, I’m not sure that I’m qualified to comment, but I sure enjoy reading it.
His work looks really awesome. Jesse Schell from CMU is doing a similar thing but from more of a design perspective – he’s also working on a text book that approaches games as a whole rather than video games specifically. So lots of fun stuff about board games, activity games, you name it. It’s still being written (we got printed manuscripts saying Do Not Distribute), but you should watch for it in the coming year. Good good stuff.
April 30th, 2006 at 7:15This seems like a great thesis… It’s just that I prefer urban form theory :)
Cheers
May 1st, 2006 at 0:42