Glen Creeber, Royston Martin (eds.): Digital Cultures: Understanding New Media (2008)

From Facebook to the iPhone, from YouTube to Wikipedia, from Grand Theft Auto to Second Life – this book explores new media?s most important issues and debates in an accessible and engaging text for newcomers to the field.

With technological change continuing to unfold at an incredible rate, Digital Cultures rounds-up major events in the media?s recent past to help develop a clear understanding of the theoretical and practical debates that surround this emerging discipline. It addresses issues such as:

* What is new media?
* How is new media changing our lives?
* Is new media having a positive or negative effect on culture and human communication?

Each chapter contains case studies which provide an interesting and lively balance between the well-trodden and the newly emerging themes in the field.

Topics covered include digital television, digital cinema, gaming, digital democracy, mobile phones, the World Wide Web, digital news, online social networking, music and multimedia, virtual communities and the digital divide.

Digital Cultures is an essential introductory guide for all media and communication studies students, as well as those with a general interest in new media and its impact on the world around us.

Publisher Open University Press, 2008
ISBN 0335221971, 9780335221974
Length 205 pages

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Elizabeth Losh: Virtualpolitik. An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (2009)

Today government agencies not only have official Web sites but also sponsor moderated chats, blogs, digital video clips, online tutorials, videogames, and virtual tours of national landmarks. Sophisticated online marketing campaigns target citizens with messages from the government—even as officials make news with digital gaffes involving embarrassing e-mails, instant messages, and videos. In Virtualpolitik, Elizabeth Losh closely examines the government’s digital rhetoric in such cases and its dual role as media-maker and regulator. Looking beyond the usual focus on interfaces, operations, and procedures, Losh analyzes the ideologies revealed in government’s digital discourse, its anxieties about new online practices, and what happens when officially sanctioned material is parodied, remixed, or recontextualized by users.

Losh reports on a video game that panicked the House Intelligence Committee, pedagogic and therapeutic digital products aimed at American soldiers, government Web sites in the weeks and months following 9/11, PowerPoint presentations by government officials and gadflies, e-mail as a channel for whistleblowing, digital satire of surveillance practices, national digital libraries, and computer-based training for health professionals.

Losh concludes that the government’s virtualpolitik—its digital realpolitik aimed at preserving its own power—is focused on regulation, casting as criminal such common online activities as file sharing, videogame play, and social networking. This policy approach, she warns, indefinitely postpones building effective institutions for electronic governance, ignores constituents’ need to shape electronic identities to suit their personal politics, and misses an opportunity to learn how citizens can have meaningful interaction with the virtual manifestations of the state.

Publisher MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 0262123045, 9780262123044
Length 416 pages

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Nick Montfort, Ian Bogost: Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (2009)

The Atari Video Computer System dominated the home videogame market so completely that “Atari” became the generic term for a videogame console. The Atari VCS was affordable and offered the flexibility of changeable cartridges. Nearly a thousand of these were created, the most significant of which established new techniques, mechanics, and even entire genres. This book offers a detailed and accessible study of this influential videogame console from both computational and cultural perspectives.

Studies of digital media have rarely investigated platforms—the systems underlying computing. This book (the first in a series of Platform Studies) does so, developing a critical approach that examines the relationship between platforms and creative expression. Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost discuss the Atari VCS itself and examine in detail six game cartridges: Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars’ Revenge, Pitfall!, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. They describe the technical constraints and affordances of the system and track developments in programming, gameplay, interface, and aesthetics. Adventure, for example, was the first game to represent a virtual space larger than the screen (anticipating the boundless virtual spaces of such later games as World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto), by allowing the player to walk off one side into another space; and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was an early instance of interaction between media properties and video games.

Montfort and Bogost show that the Atari VCS—often considered merely a retro fetish object—is an essential part of the history of video games.

Publisher MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 026201257X, 9780262012577
Length 184 pages

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Art Silverblatt: Genre Studies in Mass Media: A Handbook (2007)

The study of various types of programming is essential for critical analysis of the media and also offers revealing perspectives on society’s cultural values, preoccupations, behavior, and myths. This handbook provides a systematic, in-depth approach to the study of media genres–including reality programs, game shows, situation comedies, soap operas, film noir, news programs, and more. The author addresses such questions as: Have there been shifts in the formula of particular genres over time? What do these shifts reveal about changes in culture? How and why do new genres–such as reality TV shows–appear? Are there differences in genres from one country to another?

Combining theoretical approaches with concrete examples, the book reinforces one’s understanding of the importance of genre to the creation, evolution, and consumption of media content. Each chapter in this reader-friendly book contains a detailed discussion of one of the theoretical approaches to genre studies, followed by Lines of Inquiry, which summarizes the major points of the discussion and suggests directions for analysis and further study. Each chapter also includes an example that illustrates how the particular theoretical approach can be applied in the analysis of genre. The author’s careful linkage of different genres to the real world makes the book widely useful for those interested in genre study as well as media and culture, television studies, film studies, and media literacy.

Publisher M.E. Sharpe, 2007
ISBN 076561670X, 9780765616708
Length 258 pages

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Ian Bogost: Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (2006)

In Unit Operations, Ian Bogost argues that similar principles underlie both literary theory and computation, proposing a literary-technical theory that can be used to analyze particular videogames. Moreover, this approach can be applied beyond videogames: Bogost suggests that any medium—from videogames to poetry, literature, cinema, or art—can be read as a configurative system of discrete, interlocking units of meaning, and he illustrates this method of analysis with examples from all these fields. The marriage of literary theory and information technology, he argues, will help humanists take technology more seriously and hep technologists better understand software and videogames as cultural artifacts. This approach is especially useful for the comparative analysis of digital and nondigital artifacts and allows scholars from other fields who are interested in studying videogames to avoid the esoteric isolation of “game studies.”

The richness of Bogost’s comparative approach can be seen in his discussions of works by such philosophers and theorists as Plato, Badiou, Zizek, and McLuhan, and in his analysis of numerous videogames including Pong, Half-Life, and Star Wars Galaxies. Bogost draws on object technology and complex adaptive systems theory for his method of unit analysis, underscoring the configurative aspects of a wide variety of human processes. His extended analysis of freedom in large virtual spaces examines Grand Theft Auto 3, The Legend of Zelda, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Joyce’s Ulysses. In Unit Operations, Bogost not only offers a new methodology for videogame criticism but argues for the possibility of real collaboration between the humanities and information technology.

Publisher MIT Press, 2006
ISBN 026202599X, 9780262025997
Length 243 pages

Keywords and phrases
game engines, ludology, Sim City, videogames, Gonzalo Frasca, cellular automata, unit operations, ontology, narratology, Star Wars Galaxies, Janet Murray, Alain Badiou, first-person shooter, Thousand Plateaus, Stephen Wolfram, Tetris, Human Genome Project, psychoanalysis, Lev Manovich, Raph Koster

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Karen Collins: Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design (2008)

A distinguishing feature of video games is their interactivity, and sound plays an important role in this: a player’s actions can trigger dialogue, sound effects, ambient sound, and music. And yet game sound has been neglected in the growing literature on game studies. This book fills that gap, introducing readers to the many complex aspects of game audio, from its development in early games to theoretical discussions of immersion and realism. In Game Sound, Karen Collins draws on a range of sources—including composers, sound designers, voice-over actors and other industry professionals, Internet articles, fan sites, industry conferences, magazines, patent documents, and, of course, the games themselves—to offer a broad overview of the history, theory, and production practice of video game audio.

Game Sound has two underlying themes: how and why games are different from or similar to film or other linear audiovisual media; and technology and the constraints it has placed on the production of game audio. Collins focuses first on the historical development of game audio, from penny arcades through the rise of home games and the recent rapid developments in the industry. She then examines the production process for a contemporary game at a large game company, discussing the roles of composers, sound designers, voice talent, and audio programmers; considers the growing presence of licensed intellectual property (particularly popular music and films) in games; and explores the function of audio in games in theoretical terms. Finally, she discusses the difficulties posed by nonlinearity and interactivity for the composer of game music.

Publisher MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 026203378X, 9780262033787
Length 200 pages

Keywords and phrases
PlayStation, arcade games, LucasArts, iMUSE, MIDI, wavetable synthesis, dynamic music, Grim Fandango, Konami, FM synthesis, surround sound, Super Mario Bros, Sega Genesis, Nintendo DS, Commodore 64, sound chips, subtractive synthesis, diegetic, Intellivision, diegesis

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Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz, Matthias Böttger (eds.): Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level (2007)

Computer and video games are leaving the PC and conquering the arena of everyday life in the form of mobile applications (such as GPS cell phones, etc.) – the result is new types of cities and architecture. How do these games alter our perception of real and virtual space? What can the designers of physical and digital worlds learn from one another? Space Time Play presents the following themes: the superimposition of computer games on real spaces and convergences of real and imaginary playspaces; computer and video games as practical planning instruments. With articles by Espen Aarseth, Ernest Adams, Richard A. Bartle, Ian Bogost, Gerhard M. Buurman, Edward Castranova, Kees Christiaanse, Drew Davidson, James Der Derian, Noah Falstein, Stephen Graham, Ludger Hovestadt, Henry Jenkins, Heather Kelley, James Korris, Julian Kücklich, Frank Lantz, Lev Manovich, Jane McGonigal, William J. Mitchell, Kas Oosterhuis, Katie Salen, Mark Wigley, and others.

Authors Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz, Matthias Böttger, Drew Davidson, Heather Kelley, Julian Kücklich
Publisher Springer, 2007
ISBN 376438414X, 9783764384142
Length 495 pages

Keywords and phrases
SimCity, Pac-Man, computer games, video games, gamespace, id Software, Perplex City, locative media, game designers, first-person shooter, virtual worlds, Augmented Reality, Linden Lab, ubiquitous computing, LARP, Counter-Strike, MMORPGs, Super Mario Bros, Spacewar, Blizzard Entertainment

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