EXCITE Game Speaker Series #01: Reading Games Well

Reading Games Well: A New Lens on Interpretive Play

Tracy Fullerton

Professor and Director

USC Game Innovation Lab

This talk will introduce the ideas from “The Well-Read Game: On Playing Thoughtfully,” a new book from The MIT Press Playful Thinking Series by Tracy Fullerton and Matthew Farber in which they discuss the personal experiences we have when we play games. Fullerton and Farber call these personal experiences “readings” because they involve so many of the same inherent aspects of engaging with literary, cinematic, and other expressive texts. And, in discussing a game that is experienced in such a way, Fullerton and Farber call it “well-read” rather than well-played because they want to emphasize the personal, interpretive, and meaningful nature of that experience and the way in which it relates to our readings of texts of all kinds. 

The concept of the “well-read game” is based on a convergence of literary, media, and play theories. Specifically, the works of Louise Rosenblatt’s reader-response theory, Brian Upton’s situational game theory, Tracy Fullerton’s playcentric design theory, and Bernie DeKoven’s well-played game philosophy. Each of these theories, from their own perspective, challenges notions of a separate, objective, or authorial meaning in a text and underscores the richness that arises from the varied responses of readers who, in essence, co-author the meaning of each text through their active engagement with it. When taken together, these theories point to a richer understanding of what a game is and how we might better value our experiences with games to become more thoughtful readers of their essential meanings.

Tracy Fullerton is an experimental game designer, professor, author and was the founding director of the USC Games program. Her research center, the Game Innovation Lab, has produced a number of influential independent games, including Cloud, flOw, Darfur is Dying, The Night Journey and Walden, a game, which was named “Game of the Year” at Games for Change 2017 and “Developer Choice” at IndieCade 2017. Tracy is the author of “Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games” and “The Well-Read Game: On Playing Thoughtfully,” co-authored with Matthew Farber.