Rafael_Ch2_Eskelinen_C

"and perhaps a series of events produced by manipulating equipment and following formal rules constitutes a game"
I think a video game can not be cataloged as a manipulation of equipment, instead of manipulation the right language to use is "Reaction" in a video game we react to the "artificial narrative" presented to us by the game and the rules we follow are not dictated by the player, instead, the rules are followed by the player, following the narrative of the game.

Betsy_Ch2_Aarseth_Q

Aatseth states "digital literature is real literature" and "digital literature is still literature, pure, if not simple. When I can read a Harry Potter novel on my palm pilot, paper is no longer an inegral part of literature's material or ideological foundations."

I agree literature can be placed digitally in different places, websites, palm pilots, readings on iTunes. But my question is, how does the 'publishing' come in to context? Can people essentually publish their own work? Or do you still have to go to a publisher. There is a difference between copywriting, publishing, and just placing on the web for everyone to see digitally. How could or will those lines be drawn?

Nick_Ch2_Aarseth_Q

Aarseth states in his essay, "games are games, a rich and extremely diverse family of practices, and share qualities with performance arts, material arts, and verbal arts" (p. 47). So then, I think it's important to ask why we feel the need to group video games into a different category. Why do we study video games as narrative? I understand (Mark) that video games do have strong narrative components, some more than others, but I think they are clearly their own thing.

Anyway my questions is simply why does academia lump video games into narrative? Or is it just because everything is narrative in this postmodern world of ours?