In Gaming Matters, Judd Ethan Ruggill and Ken S. McAllister offer a playful and provocative look at the computer game medium, arguing that games are:
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* Idiosyncratic, and thus difficult to apprehend using the traditional tools of media study
* Irreconcilable, or complex to such a degree that developers, players, and scholars have contradictory ways of describing them
* Boring, and therefore obligated to constantly make demands
on players' attention
* Anachronistic, or built on age-old tropes and forms of play
while ironically bound to the most advanced technologies
* Duplicitous, or dependent on truth-telling rhetoric even when they are about fictions, fantasies, or lies
* Work, or are often better understood as labor rather than play
* Alchemical, despite seeming all-too mechanical or predictable
Video games are now inarguably a major site of worldwide cultural production.
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In its assessments, Gaming Matters neither flatters game enthusiasts nor emboldens the medium's detractors. Instead, it provides a new set of lenses through which games can be examined, and in the process makes a significant contribution to the foundation of both computer game and new media studies.
