The second volume of Continuum’s Approaches to Digital Game Studies series, Guns, Grenades and Grunts gathers scholars from multiple disciplines to bring the weight of contemporary social theory and media criticism to bear on the public controversy and intellectually investigation of first-person shooter games. As a genre, FPS games have helped shepherd the game industry from the early days of shareware distribution and underground gaming clans to contemporary multimillion dollar production budgets, Hollywood-style launches, downloadable content, and worldwide professional gaming leagues. The FPS has been, and will continue to be a staple of the game market.
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From the Back Cover:
“Guns, Grenades and Grunts sets its sights on the first-person shooter, finally bringing much-needed analysis to one of the most popular and pervasive video game genres. From the trenches of Medal of Honor to Halo’s Blood Gulch, this collection of thoughtful essays challenges the reader/player to ponder what it means to pick up a virtual gun and navigate the ludic environments of the FPS.
The book also makes a significant contribution to games, media, and popular culture studies because, by taking up just one type of video game, it underscores the importance of analytic specificity for a medium that is often too broadly – and thus superficially – discussed.”
Nina B. Huntemann, Associate Professor, Communication and Journalism, Suffolk University, US.
“The volume offers an illuminating tutorial that historically and theoretically frames the FPS and sets up the game field for further exploration and treasure hunting, by investigating, in-depth, the psyche of the individual player – as is constituted through the interaction with the game mechanics and avatars as well as the social dynamics of multiplayer game play. This rich and varied walk through the world of FPS game studies will certainly reinvigorate the intellectual equipment of the academic warrior as it will take the public and journalistic debates on the ‘violent’ FPS genre to a new level.”
–Jan Simons, Associate Professor of New Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands