The concepts real, fiction and virtual get tossed around pretty casually around game studies. It seems that “virtual” is a lasting favorite, used to rescue any ontologically vague situation by slapping a seemingly clear category on it. The problem is that calling something virtual is far from clear, as the whole category of virtual seems to be a mess of different things only vaguely related to each other. ...

I recently gave a mock-lectio praecursoria as part of a course I’m taking. It summarises some of the work I’ve done for my dissertation. See below for more. The games I reference in the end are Depression Quest, That Dragon, Cancer, and Papers, Please. ...

Computers are built to run on metaphoric relations taken from earlier forms of technology and human experience not related to computers. An obvious example is the concept of a file, stored in a folder. That is, of course, a metaphor taken from earlier forms of organizing information in filing cabinets, when information was stored on sheets of paper instead of bits on a hard drive. ...

I gave this talk at the Games and Literary Theory -conference at Malta. It describes the contents of the paper I submitted to the conference. ...

Here is a slightly edited version of the talk I gave at the Philosophy of Computer Games 2013. ...

Because I occasionally search for this information myself, I’ll post it here for future reference to me and others. A list of journals in game studies in no particular order: Games and Culture (Sage) Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds (Intellect) International Journal of Games and Computer Mediated Simulations (IRMA-International) Entertainment Computing (Elsevier) Simulation & Gaming (Sage) Computers in Entertainment (ACM) Game Studies Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association (ETC Press) ...