Things move fast in the world of the videogame and videogame scholarship. Given that videogames constitute a new arena for academic study, many of the recent publications have tended to address games in a rather generalist manner, often as a means of mapping the field. Any intersection between the world of the scholar and the world of the videogame, therefore, has to be carefully negotiated. This collection represents a series of frozen analytic moments, and an opportunity for reflection among a range of critics approaching games from different places and with varied disciplinary backgrounds. It takes a 'bottom-up' approach, seeking not to survey the entire field, but instead to move closer to the experience of playing particular games. The experience of being-in-the-world of a game is contingent on the particular design, across a range of dimensions, of a given game and that design provides the formal and structural features of a game. Within the terms of the narratology/ludology debate that so characterized early public discussions about the action of scholarship in relation to videogames, it might be assumed that any focus on games as texts refers only to their non-interactive elements. The essays address a game or group of games in detail and in so doing go some way towards addressing the very complex and diversely rendered relationship between videogame text, play and performance. The experience of playing games, in all its various affective colouring, occurs through the interchange between technology, aesthetics and the player's own particular investments.