What we play as scholars is as important as what we read. Gaming is experiential, and there is no substitute for this activity. Many — if not most — of the best thinkers in the field recognize this, and a wealth of books and articles on the topic of games and digital play are sustained by myriad first-person references to in-game experience. This is not idle boasting: This is the digital.

For the sake of contrast, take a moment and reflect on how frequently the average specialist in, say, the contemporary novel talks about her personal experience as a reader. Or, more pointedly, how often she explicitly roots her critique in first-hand knowledge of the construction of fiction.

While this approach may meet with skepticism in conventional academe, the most compelling contemporary scholarship in fields like game studies comes, in fact, from scholar-hybrids, whose intellectual production is not limited to (or by) the written word. See, e.g., Ian Bogost, DJ Spooky, Nick Montfort, Stuart Moulthrop, Jane McGonigal, and a host of others. This blurring of conventionally distinct intellectual categories (theoria and praxis) is, I think, a demand of digitality, and merits further consideration (indeed, it is not unrelated to the issues raised in my last post).

But I want to use this post to innaugurate a new “feature” of this blog, Now Playing. With it, I intend simply to make mention of the games in which I am currently invested, and offer perhaps a word or two about them.

Sometimes it is hard to identify a single game which defines recent experience, but occasionally it is a simple matter. This week, it is clearly Might and Magic, Clash of Heroes (Ubisoft, 2009). Exclusive to the Nintendo DS, this is the first game I’ve played on the DS that feels as though it makes use of that platform’s peculiar affordances (dual screen display, single touch screen, minimal resolution, stylus). An RPG-puzzler hybrid in the tradition of Puzzle Quest, Clash of Heroes boasts an amusing, even coherent, story line, charming graphics, and an engaging puzzle form (one loosely based on another offering from one of the developers, Critter Crunch).

The low-res graphics, tiny sprites, and ambiguous puzzle are well-served by the detailed narrative, which works to define and re-define the specifics of the puzzle in order to keep you engaged, even as you are seeing (quite literally) the same tiny icons on the screen, again and again. I am just over 20% of my way into the game, and it remains a compelling play.