Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers, Steve Anderson’s latest article, composed entirely in Scalar, has just been published by G|A|M|E The Italian Journal of Game Studies (No. 4; Vol. 1). According to Anderson, Associate Professor of the Practice of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, the article focuses on the cultural discourse surrounding digital games as they have been refracted by the lenses of American film and television. It considers a broad cross-section of Hollywood’s depictions of games, tracing their evolution from objects of fascination and technological possibility in the 1970s and 1980s to catalysts for antisocial behavior in the 1990s and 2000s.
Anderson’s overall aims in this piece dovetail well with Scalar’s structural affordances. The goal of the article’s organization, according to Anderson, is to enable readers to explore the project according to their own areas of interest rather than by necessarily following a sequence of linear arguments. To this end, the argument put forward in each section has been conceived with minimal dependence on adjacent elements. In addition to the thematic sections of the article, readers can also explore the complete collection of clips via a Media Chronology page.
The collection of clips included in the article also constitutes a sub-archive within the critical media-sharing site Critical Commons, where all original media files may be viewed or downloaded for further use. Reader-viewers are thus, according to Anderson, invited to investigate the media and arguments put forward in the article, not as definitive or exclusive readings, but as interpretive beginnings, which will hopefully be generative of further discussion and research.
See Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers here.