REVIEW: Playthrough Poetics: Gameplay as Research Method (nonfiction) edited by Milena Droumeva

Playthrough Poetics is nonfiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

The idea behind this book is that game scholarship tends to flatten video games into text for close reading, and that gameplay is a valid and necessary way to research and explore the immersiveness of video games. Each contributor used different methods to incorporate actual gameplay experience into their analyses of different games. URLs to associated YouTube videos are included - I never got around to watching any of them, but I assume some of them include gameplay footage.

This is the most academic/scholarly work I've sat and read through from start to finish in a very long while. I'm not sure I'd have managed it if it hadn't been such a short work. The focus on actual gameplay experiences did make for more interesting reading, although the way the various authors approached it worked more for me in some chapters than others. My favorite was Chapter 2, Robyn Hope's "Pathologic 2 and the Phenomenology of Illness."