Espen Aarseth: Game Studies from The Hobbit to Minecraft

Espen Aarseth, professor in Game Studies, is the Head of the Center of Computer Games Research at IT University of Copenhagen and the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Game Studies. We talk to Espen about founding computer games research as an academic discipline, the Games study programme at ITU, what a game is (entertainment? sports? waste of time? cultural artefact? social activity? storytelling? shared illusion?), PewDiePie, how the established narratological concepts of literary theory succeed or fail in describing games, playing The Hobbit over a landline phone in the 1980s, and Dungeons Dragons.Recorded on 12 October 2017.