ELUDAMOS is an international, multi-disciplined, biannual e-journal that publishes peer-reviewed articles that theoretically and/or empirically deal with digital games in their manifold appearances and their sociocultural-historical contexts.

Mechanics are something that are created, tweaked, modified, and fine tuned, until exactly the intended experience is created for the audience.

Before you start designing your own games, mods, or levels, it is important that you have a firm understanding of the game design basics. This includes understanding the heart of the video game medium, mechanics, interplay, variation, and counterpoint. On top of this, it wouldn't hurt to become familiar with the critical theories I've developed.

The “procedural” piece tags how games express ideas. Games are procedural because they use rules to represent things. When you interact with a game, there are a set of procedures, or rule-based systems, that define what your tappings and wagglings mean in the context of the game's world.

What is the “feel” of a game? Every gamer knows it and can easily recall the sensation, the kinesthetic feeling, of controlling some virtual avatar or agent. It’s what causes you to lean left and right as you play, swinging your controller wildly as you try to get Mario to move just a little faster. It’s the feeling of masterfully controlling some object outside your body, making it an extension of your will and instinct. This “virtual sensation” is in many ways the essence of videogames, one of the most compelling, captivating, and interesting emergent properties of human-computer interaction.

A video game is half-real: we play by real rules while imagining a fictional world. We win or lose the game in the real world, but we slay a dragon (for example) only in the world of the game. In this thought-provoking study, Jesper Juul examines the constantly evolving tension between rules and fiction in video games. Discussing games from Pong to The Legend of Zelda, from chess to Grand Theft Auto, he shows how video games are both a departure from and a development of traditional non-electronic games. The book combines perspectives from such fields as literary and film theory, computer science, psychology, economic game theory, and game studies, to outline a theory of what video games are, how they work with the player, how they have developed historically, and why they are fun to p

"The Video Game Theory Reader 2" picks up where the first "Video Game Theory Reader" (Routledge, 2003) left off, with a group of leading scholars turning their attention to next-generation platforms - the Nintendo Wii, the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 - and to new issues in the rapidly expanding field of video games studies. The contributors are some of the most renowned scholars working on video games today including Henry Jenkins, Jesper Juul, Eric Zimmerman, and Mia Consalvo. While the first volume had a strong focus on early video games, this volume also addresses more contemporary issues such as convergence and MMORPGs. The volume concludes with an appendix of nearly 40 ideas and concepts from a variety of theories and disciplines that have been usefully and insightfully applied to the study of video games.

Steven Johnson (who used himself as a test subject for the latest neurological technology in his last book, Mind Wide Open) takes on one of the most widely held preconceptions of the postmodern world--the belief that video games, television shows, and other forms of popular entertainment are detrimental to Americans' cognitive and moral development.

Well, as it happens, I know the reasons why there are (currently) no great video game critics. Here are the reasons:

The meaning of most art is usually found within abstractions. So the problem is not that video games don't have interesting narratives; the problem is that it's hard to decide what it is about video games that is interesting

There may never be a Lester Bangs for video games, but given the number of critics fighting for ignored games and celebrating forgotten titles, it seems safe to say that he is here in spirit.

There's virtually nothing we can point to today as "game criticism." And we badly need it.

When you strip away the experience of play, not just how sound and image come together, but the interactivity that defines the medium, a lot of the greatest video games (great both in the sense of being pleasurable to play and in their aesthetic achievement) can sound, well, stupid.

The issue of whether videogames can be considered art is a recurring one whenever gamers gather.

Games are facing steady and relentless public attack to no small degree because no one has made the affirmative case for this medium: we simply get bogged down in arguing that Grand Theft Auto isn't as bad as people think it is.

Games can be valuable on many levels. Their status as art is simply one of them. Right now, we are seeing defenses of games emerging on multiple levels.