Daily Archives: February 26, 2004

Videogame Studies Gets All High Falutin’

An article appeared in the New York Times today titled “The Ivy-Covered Console”. It is an interesting read.

There are several things about it that irritate me, however. I will try to get to some of them later, however, let me mention something included in it that I had never thought of before. In the article, they mention that some videogame researchers are doing what they call, “close gameplay,” “in which a researcher plays critical scenes of a game repeatedly, analyzing the details, perhaps searching for an anomaly the programmers have buried in the code or simply arriving at some resolution.”

This is the first I’ve heard of this. Does anyone actually do this? And if so, what do you get out of it? It seems to be a very odd thing to me. If anyone out there practices “close gameplay” let me hear about it.