[Combat - 27 games in one]

While my blogcation continues I did take some time last week to review Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort's excellent book Racing the Beam for Rhizome. The text gets under the hood of the Atari 2600 Video Computer System (VCS) and considers the game design of several key titles in relation to the underlying technical capabilities of the console. The book is the first in a new series on Platform Studies that the authors are editing for MIT press. Montfort and Bogost on the essence of platform:

Platform is the abstraction level beneath code, a level which has not yet been systematically studied. If code studies are new media's analogue to software engineering and computer programming, platform studies are the humanistic parallel of computing systems and computer architecture, connecting the fundamentals of new media work to the cultures in which they were produced and the cultures in which coding, forms, interfaces, and eventual use are layered upon them.

Cruise on over to Rhizome to read the review if you are interested - I think the text is pretty much required reading for anyone in game studies or media scholarship.