Video Games: Culture, Theory, Play

In February 2002 I got sort of embroiled in a whole thing about the work of video artist Feng Mengbo. As a result I got interested in thinking about video games. As it turns out, there is an absolute enormous amount of stuff out there, and a ton of people have spent a lot of time already thinking about video games. I don't want to reinvent the wheel, nor do I have the time necessary to really concentrate on video games and really work my way through whats been written on the topic and then make an original contribution. I can't even have a comprehensive list of sites where people think about video games, since there are already a few out there. Instead I merely present some links to the stuff that I consider particularly worthwhile:

Thinking about Video Games

• Games, Gamers, and Gaming Culture
  This is an indepth collection of links to well-written academic and semi-academic articles about gaming. Serious and interesting. The Fins do it again
• Robot Street Gang
  Intelligent columns about games by gamers
• Ludology.org
  Yet another collection of useful links
• Gamespot
  This is where I go for reviews and stuff about video games
• Playing by the Rules: the Cultural Policy Challenges of Video Games
  This site has content created in the course of the 'Playing by the Rules' seminar held by the cultural policy workshop at the University of Chicago. This includes a decent (but not great) collection of links. There are also papers from the conference, including a typically Epsteinian paper by Richard Epstein
• Games, Gamers, and Gaming Culture
  This is an indepth collection of links to well-written academic and semi-academic articles about gaming. Serious and interesting. The Fins do it again
• Pimps at Sea
  The Ultimate Video Game of All Time
• Jason Rutter
  Jason is a researcher in Manchester who publishes on millenium life in general. The site includes the proceedings of a conference 'Playing with the future' about his stuff
• Thinking With My Fingers
  Torill Mortenson's blog. She studies muds and blogs and stuff. She's part of the 'the Scandanavian-Humanities & Computing-Academic blogging cluster' cluster of blogs, which includes several people working on muds, mmorpgs, and so forth.

More to come in the future.