Review of Steve Jones The Meaning of Video Games

Despite the rather ambitious title, this book is a subtle investigation of various factors surrounding a video game text that have not been taken up in either the narrative or ludology camps. Jones makes cogent arguments that the meaning of video games is developed within the following structures:
The boundaries between different media and reality (chpt 1, chpt 4)
Fan groups and their
a) Drive to collect (chpt 2)
b) Their distributed knowledge (chpt 3)
b) Creation of new content (chpt 3)
Marketing, particularly when it crosses into its own entertainment (chpt 3)
The platform (and the concept’s necessary perspective through social construction) (Chpt 5)
Expectations and feedback from the audience (chpt 6)
While these are good reminders, and a useful frame, Jones is less helpful in helping understand how the meaning of games might differ from other types of media. He develops a few readings of games where the form and content are shown to be in harmony – and his reading of Katamari is quite an improvement over Wark – but overall there are few tools to do closer readings. This is not so much a problem of Jones text as the state of the art in which it appears – but in a book about context this is important.
A somewhat more troubling problem is that the image of textual studies Jones projects seems to have at its core a self-determining liberal subject who knows what kind of critical edition or game they ‘want’. Its hard to briefly trace this rather subtle assumption, but I think its the product of a change in perspective where the object at the center of the critical inquiry takes second place to the peripheral events. This is fine if it is openly acknowledged, but if not the question must be asked: why this object? why this center? Otherwise we end up with a particular text replacing the transcendent author as the source and structuring center of all meaning in a given field.
Overall however a useful series of questions that opens up the construction of meaning in games to a wider set of social acts.