Daniel L. Gardner, "Thresholds of Digital Gameplay" (MIT Press, 2025)
About this episode
Daniel L. Gardner discusses how interfaces and peripheral elements impact digital gameplay in his book 'Thresholds of Digital Gameplay'.
Contemporary digital gameplay is only accessible by navigating an ecosystem of interfaces that support its computational nature. Account logins, controllers, and an assortment of menus, settings, and other peripheral-to-gameplay elements support a range of practical and necessary functions that result from the transformation of gameplay into digital gameplay, as well as broader shifts toward an increasingly networked and data-driven world. The games industry has adopted usability testing on top of play testing to evaluate how these interfaces may influence the accessibility and success of their game software, but how embedding gameplay within webs of software, hardware, and platform infrastructures impacts the medium, players, and production has not yet been fully explored. In Thresholds of Digital Gameplay (MIT Press, 2025), Daniel Gardner demonstrates how a series of interfaces and other elements on the periphery of digital gameplay fundamentally alter the phenomena of gaming. This book examines non-gameplay-centered material or mechanical attachments that surround and enclose gameplay while directing or mediating our experience of it—for example, access controls…
People in this episode
Guest: Daniel L. Gardner
Topics covered
- digital gameplay
- interfaces
- usability testing
- games industry
- accessibility
- networked world
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: MIT Press
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