Category: Book Announcements

Announcing the publication of their new book, Approaches to Videogame Discourse: Lexis, Interaction, Textuality (Bloomsbury, 2019, ed. Astrid Ensslin and Isabel Balteiro): The first significant collection of research in videogame linguistics, Approaches to Videogame Discourse features an international array of scholars in linguistics, media and communication studies exploring lexis, interaction and textuality in digital games.…

John Sharp and David Thomas are happy to announce the publication of: Fun, Taste, & Games: An Aesthetics of the Idle, Unproductive, and Otherwise Playful (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/fun-taste-games) A new book in  MIT Press Play Thinking series. This compact tome proposes a fun-centered aesthetic framework for understanding and appreciating games. This project is the result of a long meditation…

Rudy McDaniel and Joey Fanfarelli are proud to announce their newest book with Routledge. Designing Effective Digital Badges is a hands-on guide to the principles, implementation, and assessment of digital badging systems. Informed by the fundamental concepts and research-based characteristics of effective badge design, this book uses real-world examples to convey the advantages and challenges of badging…

Out now: The Playful Citizen. Civic Engagement in a Mediatized Culture Proud to announce the release of The Playful Citizen: Civic Engagement in a Mediatized Culture, a book edited by René Glas, Sybille Lammes, Michiel de Lange, Joost Raessens, and Imar de Vries and published by Amsterdam University Press in the new Games and Play book series.  Here’s the…

Announcing Gina Bloom’s new book Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater. Published by University of Michigan Press, it is also available open access. Rich connections between gaming and theater stretch back to the 16th and 17th centuries, when England’s first commercial theaters appeared right next door to gaming houses and blood-sport…

Announcing Liam Mitchell’s book Ludopolitics: Videogames against Control What can videogames tell us about the politics of contemporary technoculture, and how are designers and players responding to its impositions?  To what extent do the technical features of videogames index our assumptions about what exists and what is denied that status?  And how can we use…

Jaroslav Švelch announcing the release of their book Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games. The book covers the social history of computer games in 1980s Czechoslovakia in seven chapters, starting with technology policies and hardware manufacturing, and ending with activist games about the 1988-89…

Andrew Reinhard is putting the “dig” in DiGRA with the new book, Archaeogaming: An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games published by Berghahn Books. You can learn more about the book on the publisher’s website. It’s in English with a Spanish edition set for late 2019.

A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames by Brendan Keogh is being released with MIT Press in the next month: Our bodies engage with videogames in complex and fascinating ways. Through an entanglement of eyes-on-screens, ears-at-speakers, and muscles-against-interfaces, we experience games with our senses. But, as Brendan Keogh argues in A Play of Bodies, this…

“Machinima. Dal videogioco alla videoarte” [“Machinima. From video game to video art”] is now available from Mimesis Edizioni in Italy. Featuring eight contributions from recognized international scholars, the book examines machinima as an artistic practice, concentrating on the work of Phil Solomon, Jon Rafman, Cory Arcangel, Body Condon, Bill Viola, Rewell Altunaga and other practitioners.

By Rob Gallagher, Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Videogames-Identity-and-Digital-Subjectivity/Gallagher/p/book/9781138228986