Here are my thoughts and comments related to me my research on videogames and culture.
Bryan-Mitchell Young aka jccalhoun


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There are a few books coming out this year that I'm keeping my eye on. I don't know what it is but I seem to have a desperate need to own pretty much every book related to videogames as soon as it comes out.
Coming out from MIT press is First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game. I don't know much about it, but it has an interesting title.

Also from MIT press is Handbook of Computer Game Studies. Of course this is not to be confused with the Video Game Theory Reader which I believe is being edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, whose last collection The Medium of the Video Game I was not impressed with, but he does have a pretty good list of contributors.

Barry Atkins brings us More than a game: The computer game as fictional form
which, according to the publisher is, "...The first academic work dedicated to the study of computer games in terms of the stories they tell and the manner of their telling. Taking its cue from practices of reading texts in literary and cultural studies, it considers the computer game as a new and emerging mode of contemporary storytelling..." To which I say, "Run! Run Now!" I kid because I love. ..or something like that. He does have a chapter on Sim city which should be interesting.

James Newman writes the simply titled Videogames (which at amazon.co.uk is listed as the less simple, Computer and Video Games) seems to be an introductory text that doesn't seem to be aimed at us heap big academic types but more of a casual crowd. not that there's anything wrong with that.

The last book coming out this year is Digital Play. I don't know much about it since all I could finr out about it was the amazon.co.uk listing. The listing says "From Atari to Microsoft, Space Invaders to The Sims, the authors uncover the successive crises that forced game makers, faced with constant instabilities in the global entertainment sector, to become increasingly innovative." so not sure what kind of slant this book has.

You might think it odd that descpite being american, i refer to the uk amazon site. Well, I have found that the uk site seems to list books earlier than the US one and that when doing a rendom search on books in the same catagories as other gaming books I get better results. go figure

One book that seems to have been published last year, but I can't really justify buying is Mariosofia. I can't justify buying it mainly because it seems to be in Finnish. I know from my site stats that there is at least one Finnish speaker who visits here, so perhaps you can check it out.

So, much reading lies ahead of us in the coming year. but right now I have to go watch Farscape reruns on SciFi.
posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 9:00 PM

 
Hey all this is a test. I'm trying to be all kool & the gang and use a blogging tool. I'm using w.bloggar. Let's see how it works...
posted by Bryan-Mitchell at 12:38 AM

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First-Person Shooters Aren't Like Movies and That is a Good Thing --A paper about why Shooters aren't like films and how comparisons to them do a disservice to what Shooters are.

That paper was presented at the 2002 PCA under the title "More Than Moving Pictures: Developing New Criteria For Designing and Critiquing Computer Games. The presentation version can be found here. The handout I distributed can be found here.

Identification in First-Person Shooters

Flow in Multi-player FPS gaming (.rtf file)

my reviews

here are a couple of reviews I wrote for joystick101.org

Mark J. P. Wolf's The Medium of the Video Game.
Arthur Asa Bergers Video Games: A Popular Culture Phenomenon.