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ETC Press has recently announced the publication of “Toward a Ludic Architecture: The Space of Play and Games” by Steffen P. Walz. The book is a pioneering publication, architecturally framing play and games as human practices in and of space.
This is to announce the publication of issue 1(2), 2009, of Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds (Intellect): http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-issue,id=1766/.
Playground Worlds: Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games, published last year in Solmukohta, is now also available as a free download. The book features 25 articles on Nordic live action role-playing games.
The latest issue of Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media is now available. http://blogs.arts.unimelb.edu.au/refractory/category/browse-past-volumes/volume-16
It was guest edited by Justin Clemens and Tom Apperley. The contents page with links to the articles is reproduced below:
Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research has just published its latest issue (Volume 9, Issue 2, November 2009). All articles are available at http://gamestudies.org/0902
Detailed contents below:
A new edition "Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture" is now online here: http://www.eludamos.org/
The “perspectives” section deals with diverse topics such as game localization, the evolution of videogame genres, tools for game analysis and the premature burial of interactive movies. The articles include (a.o.) critical readings of games, reflections on game literacy, the player-avatar relationship, contemporary cultural attitudes in alien shooters and the results of a long term study on multiplayer gamers.
The Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA Conference are now available in the digital library.
An election of the new executive board of DiGRA will take place at the Association's AGM held at DIGRA 2009 on 02/09/09 at 7.00pm at Brunel University, Uxbirdge UK.
The new board has the important role of assuring that DiGRA contines to flourish and that it is best equipped to serve its members. We ask you to seriously consider partipcipating in creating a thriving community of academics working on different aspects of games.
Please apply in writing to Tanya Krzywinska (tankrzy - aol.com) before August 18th 2009. Please send your application in a Word file attachment. IT should be no more than one side of A4.
Information on the current candidates is available here: http://www.digra.org/news_folder/digra-agm/view
What makes a game good? or bad? or better?
This book is full of in-depth close readings of video games that parse out the various meanings to be found in the experience of playing a game. Contributors analyze sequences in a game in detail in order to illustrate and interpret how the various components of a game can come together to create fulfilling a playing experience unique to this medium. Contributors have chosen the video games in which they're interested and then they play them well
Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research has just published its latest issue.
Special Issue: EQ – 10 years Later (Volume 9, Issue 1, April 2009).
All articles are available at http://gamestudies.org/0901
After some discussion and numerous contributions on the DiGRA mailing list, the Games Research Map has finally been adapted to the DiGRA website.
It is available here: http://www.digra.org/shared/games-research-map
Please note that the page is editable by website members, so updates, corrections, and new additions are welcome! Thanks to Michael Liebe who initiated this project and graciously allowed us to host the results of his work.
GameSpace research project presents: the game design and evaluation toolkit
You can now access the public deliverable pack from the two year research project carried out by Games Research Lab in the University of Tampere from here:
The first issue of the International Journal of Role Playing is ready and has been published!
The journal is all in PDF-format, and is available from: http://journalofroleplaying.org/
The first issue is available as a PDF download.
Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research has just published its latest issue (Volume 8, Issue 2, December 2008). All articles are available at http://gamestudies.org/0802
FaVE (Facets of Virtual Environments) 2009 is a refereed international academic conference devoted to persistent, multi-user virtual environments. The recent rise of World of Warcraft®, Second Life® and similar applications has caught the imagination of the public and scholars alike, yet until now the study of virtual environments has been subordinated to a collection of subtopics of established academic disciplines.
FaVE 2009 seeks to establish virtual environments as a research field in its own right. The conference brings together under one academic umbrella current research and emerging developments in the social, technical, legal, economic, design and cultural aspects of virtual environments. To this end, FaVE 2009 invites researchers and practitioners to participate in its interdisciplinary exchange of knowledge and experience. It should be fun!
Lulu.com and Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center Team Up to Redefine the Book
Lulu.com, the premier marketplace for digital content on the Internet, is partnering with the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to showcase new creative endeavors launched through the ETC Press, a new academic publishing imprint. With Lulu.com, ETC Press has flexibility in publishing without the limitations encountered by traditional publishing.
Understanding Video Games by Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Tosca
Further information at: http://www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415977210/introduction.asp
PLAYGROUND WORLDS PUBLISHED!
The latest Nordic collection on role-playing games, Playground Worlds: Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games was published last week. Edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros (editors of Beyond Role and Play four years ago), the book features 25 papers written by authors from six countries.
KEYWORDS: role play, role-playing game, larp, pervasive game, ARG, participatory art, educational role-play, Happenings, pretence play, gaming culture, larp production, rpg criticism, rpg genre, larp design, Forge theory, jeepform, Nordic larp
An Introduction to Game Studies: Games in Culture by Frans Mäyrä
SAGE Publications, 2008.
An Introduction to Game Studies is the first introductory textbook for students of game studies. It provides a conceptual overview of the cultural, social and economic significance of computer and video games and traces the history of game culture and the emergence of game studies as a field of research.
Key concepts and theories are illustrated with discussion of games taken from different historical phases of game culture. Progressing from the simple, yet engaging gameplay of Pong and text-based adventure games to the complex virtual worlds of contemporary online games, the book will guide students towards analytical appreciation and critical engagement with gaming and game studies.
Call for submissions—IndieCade: International Festivals of Independent Games @ Open Satellite, July 10-13, 2008
Game artists and designers from around the world are invited to submit their work. IndieCade welcomes independent interactive media of all types, from art to commercial to academic, from ARG to abstract, from serious to shooter. Entrants will also be considered for year-round international showcase exhibitions.
Submissions Close Midnight April 11, 2008 PST. For more information and eligibility details, and to enter, visit http://www.IndieCade.com
MIT Press has authorized what is probably one of the first blog-based peer reviews for a forthcoming book by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, digital media writer, artist, and professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego (http://grandtextauto.org/2008/01/22/expressive-processing-an-experiment-in-blog-based-peer-review/) . Every weekday over the next ten weeks, Wardrip-Fruin will post a section of his new manuscript, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, on the popular Grand Text Auto blog (where he is a regular author)(http://grandtextauto.org/), with the hope of receiving quality feedback from the site's readers. The GTxA community represents a vibrant network of media scholars, artists, designers and gaming professionals who are perfectly suited to critique this inherently cross-disciplinary work. When Doug Sery, the editor at MIT, asked Wardrip-Fruin who would be the ideal reviewers for the manuscript, his first instinct was to somehow bring the process to the blog: "I immediately realized that the peer review I most wanted was from the community around Grand Text Auto."
This is an open invitation to a collaborative effort into mapping digital play around the world. Currently only scattered information on the popularity and forms of engagement with digital games in global context exist. Often particularly in media statements are nevertheless made that concern “all gamers”, even if researchers emphasise how both games and playing takes multiple forms and claims about some particular game or group of players do not necessarily apply to another. In the spirit of the recent “Situated Play” conference (DiGRA 2007), we propose a collaborative effort of collecting together research, observation and data about forms of play around the world. See: www.gamescultures.org, an open beta of wiki resource about global games cultures.
Last weekend the Values at Play research project launched its website, http://www.valuesatplay.org, which offers a wealth of game design ideas and scholarship about games and values. Valuesatplay.org has also begun accepting submissions for its Social Impact Game Contest. The Values At Play project, a collaboration between Hunter College’s innovative Tiltfactor Lab (http://www.tiltfactor.org) and New York University, is an inquiry into the ideas and belief systems latent in video games.
There were a bug in bibtext and endnote converters, and the names were in wrong format. That issues is now corrected. Please. let me know if you notice anything odd in exporters or in dl in general.
/Petri
A new DiGRA Hardcore Column is out. This time, Jose Zagal wonders where we want our research community to go, and more importantly who is the next generation of game scholars that is going to help us get there? Column at http://www.digra.org/hardcore/hc17.
The new edition of Hardcore has been published. Christian Gerstner argues the case for a School of Wow. Is it possible? Should it be considered, or as he argues, does it lie in the realms of Thirdspace?
Announcing the launch of the International Journal of Computer Games Technology, which aims to bring together both the research and development aspects of games technology, covering the whole range of entertainment computing and interactive digital media. The focus will be on three research and development frontiers: first, to expand the technology frontier in terms of both hardware and software for games, second, to validate innovative procedures including algorithms and architectures for games, and finally, to explore novel applications of games technology both for entertainment and serious games.
Some old news are popping up to recent changes list as I needed to change their permissions to prevent trackback spam. Old news might pop up in future if I have missed some post that have favorable permissions for spamming.
Apologies for any inconveniences caused by this.
/Petri
Call for examples of innovative teaching methods
Hold a game show for your final exam? Use improv theatre techniques to playtest game levels? Let us know about it so we can showcase your brilliant teaching methods at the IGDA Education SIG Curriculum Workshop.
You need not be in attendance at GDC to share your examples, video, photo or even just a description will be helpful. Whether you are planning to attend the workshop or not, we'd love hear examples of the innovative teaching methods that you use in your games classes. We are especially interested in seeing and sharing the video or photos you've taken of these methods in action. So, if you've gone beyond lectures, quizzes and handouts to explore game studies in interesting and unique ways, please let us know!
Contact Tracy Fullerton at tfullerton at cinema.usc.edu.