Category: Book Announcements

In Mondo Nano Colin Milburn takes his readers on a playful expedition through the emerging landscape of nanotechnology, offering a light-hearted yet critical account of our high-tech world of fun and games. This expedition ventures into discussions of the first nanocars, the popular video games Second Life, Crysis, and BioShock, international nanosoccer tournaments, and utopian nano cities.…

The book is concerned with narrative in digital media that changes according to user input—Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN). It provides a broad overview of current issues and future directions in this multi-disciplinary field that includes humanities-based and computational perspectives.

In the world of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), Faunasphere was but a blip on the screen in its short public life from 2009 to 2011. Its devoted players, many of them middle-aged women, entered a world that did not build on common fantasy or science-fiction tropes. There was no evil to defeat or realms…

The Formation of Gaming Culture: UK gaming magazines, 1981-1995 by Graeme Kirkpatrick describes how games played on computers became computer games. By analysing the first gaming magazines, which were published in Britain in the 1980s, the book shows how a culture of reception and appreciation was formed around games produced for home computers and circulated in…

Games are increasingly becoming the focus for research due to their cultural and economic impact on modern society. However, there are many different types of approaches and methods than can be applied to understanding games or those that play games. This book provides an introduction to various game research methods that are useful to students…

Nike+, Foursquare, Opower, Khan Academy: more and more products, services, and organizations are infused with elements from games and play. But what are the social ramifications of this “gameful world”? Can game design energize society to solve mankind’s challenges, or will algorithmic incentive systems become our new robot overlords?

Joost Raessens writes… We are glad to announce that the digital version of our book Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures is now available online as a free download from http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=524070. The book is available under a Creative Commons license. The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has a special program that financially…

What does love have to do with gaming? As games have grown in complexity, they have increasingly included narratives that seek to engage players with love in a variety of ways. While media attention often focuses on violent emotions and behavior in gaming, love has always been central to the experience. We love to play…

It is a pleasure to announce that Amsterdam University Press has now published the edited volume “Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures”. See http://nl.aup.nl/books/9789089646392-playful-identities.html (see also Table of Contents + Endorsements below).

Advances in technology have enabled animators and video game designers to design increasingly realistic, human-like characters in animation and games. Although it was intended that this increased realism would allow viewers to appreciate the emotional state of characters, research has shown that audiences often have a negative reaction as the human likeness of a character…

In this era of big media franchises, sports branding has crossed platforms, so that the sport, its television broadcast, and its replication in an electronic game are packaged and promoted as part of the same fan experience. Editors Robert Alan Brookey and Thomas P. Oates trace this development back to the unexpected success of Atari’s Pong in…

Rank-and-file game developers bring videogames from concept to product, and yet their work is almost invisible, hidden behind the famous names of publishers, executives, or console manufacturers. In this book, Casey O’Donnell examines the creative collaborative practice of typical game developers. His investigation of why game developers work the way they do sheds light on…