Issue 1.4: Yo Ho Ho, It's a Gamer’s Life for Me!
Game & Word: Volume 1, Issue 4
Game & Word: Volume 1, Issue 4
“Yo Ho Ho, It’s a Gamer’s Life for Me!”
Summary: In this special transitional issue, we’ll wrap up our discussion on the nature of video games, while setting the stage for a whole month of historical, literary, economic, and philosophical analyses… with PIRATES!
Previous Issues: Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3
Table of Contents (Issue 4: Monday, Jan. 24, 2022)
Letter from the Publisher
Special Feature: “Yo Ho Ho, It’s a Gamer’s Life for Me!”
Food for Talk: Discussion Prompts
Further Reading
Game & Word-of-Mouth
Footnotes
Letter from the Publisher
Good morning, dear readers!
To start the week off right, I want to extend a big, warm welcome to all my new subscribers! If you’ve discovered Game & Word through this week’s Switch Weekly issue, thank you for joining me! (And thank you, Chris, for the shout-out!)
In case you haven’t heard of Switch Weekly, it’s a weekly roundup of all Nintendo Switch news and releases. It’s also a lovely community on Discord. Check it out!
Secondly, this is a longer-than-usual post, chock full of beautiful screenshots, so Gmail users might see a truncated version of this email. If this happens to you, just click the “View entire message” link next to where it says “[Message clipped]” to read the rest.
As always, I highly welcome and value your feedback. And if you enjoyed reading, I’d really appreciate you clicking the “heart” button at the top or bottom of the post—it really helps with my discoverability. Now, with all that out of the way… anchors aweigh, mateys!1
Arrrrgh,
-Jay
Special Feature: Yo Ho Ho, It’s a Gamer’s Life for Me!
Ahoy, me hearties!
Last week, we examined the concept of a “genre,” and how video game genres work differently from film and book genres. Namely, we categorize movies and books according to thematic similarities, whereas we group video games by mechanical similarities.
To illustrate this, I’m going to see how one thematic genre—PIRATES—plays out across four games, all from different mechanical genres.