The Game Thing: Ludology and other Theory Games

Abstract

The current state of computer games studies is critically examined in this paper by means of an analysis of the recently released computer game, The Thing. Game studies is an emerging area of humanities scholarship, an emergence that exhibits characteristically ambivalent processes of defining its own object and staking out its own field of expertise from other areas of academic competence. A principal dynamic of these processes concerns the opposition between ‘ludological’ and narratological theorisations of the computer game. This opposition is examined for both its limitations and its productive potential by means of consideration of The Thing game and its relation to John Carpenter's cinematic iteration of the original short story from which it is adapted. This consideration leads away from the question of the specificity of the computer game object to some concluding speculations about the relation of contemporary computer games to the broader computer culture within which games are taking on an increasingly significant profile.