You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A lot of work has been done talking about what masculinity is and what it does within video games, but less has been given to considering how and why this happens, and the processes involved. This book considers the array of daily relationships involved in producing masculinity and how those actions and relationships translate to video games. Moreover, it examines the ways the actual play of the games maps onto the stories to create contradictory moments that show that, while toxic masculinity certainly exists, it is far from inevitable. Topics covered include the nature of masculine apprenticeship and nurturing, labor, fatherhood, the scapegoating of women, and reckoning with mortality, among many others.
Learning the Virtual Life offers ways to consider the local and global effects of digital media on educational environments, as well as the cultural transformations of how we now define learning and literacy.
Videogames were once made with a vast range of tools and technologies, but in recent years a small number of commercially available 'game engines' have reached an unprecedented level of dominance in the global videogame industry. In particular, the Unity game engine has penetrated all scales of videogame development, from the large studio to the hobbyist bedroom, such that over half of all new videogames are reportedly being made with Unity. This book provides an urgently needed critical analysis of Unity as ‘cultural software’ that facilitates particular production workflows, design methodologies, and software literacies. Building on long-standing methods in media and cultural studies, ...
This volume proposes “speaking up” and “talking back” as new theoretical access points for studying feminist activism in digital spaces. Drawing on the influential work of bell hooks, it highlights social justice interventions by feminist/queer/decolonial actors, groups, and collectives who recover the digital as a space for activist organizing and campaigning. In presenting a variety of sociocultural issues, such as gender violence, queer discrimination, or migrant hostility, the book centers empowerment practices in their digital forms, showcasing interventions in Asia, Europe, and the Americas—thereby critically examining the conditions for marginalized voices to speak up, talk back, and be heard in digital publics. In focusing on activist practices, formats, experiences, and scholarship, the contributions analyze many facets of digital feminist contention, including resistance storytelling, hashtag activism, grassroots journalism, or diaspora podcasting. This international and interdisciplinary volume will interest students and scholars of Media and Communication, Social Movements and Activism, Cultural Studies, Gender and Queer Studies, and Race and Ethnicity.
Digital gaming is today a significant economic phenomenon as well as being an intrinsic part of a convergent media culture in postmodern societies. Its ubiquity, as well as the sheer volume of hours young people spend gaming, should make it ripe for urgent academic enquiry, yet the subject was a research backwater until the turn of the millennium. Even today, as tens of millions of young people spend their waking hours manipulating avatars and gaming characters on computer screens, the subject is still treated with scepticism in some academic circles. This handbook aims to reflect the relevance and value of studying digital games, now the subject of a growing number of studies, surveys, conf...
Digital Playgrounds explores the key developments, trends, debates, and controversies that have shaped children’s commercial digital play spaces over the past two decades. It argues that children’s online playgrounds, virtual worlds, and connected games are much more than mere sources of fun and diversion – they serve as the sites of complex negotiations of power between children, parents, developers, politicians, and other actors with a stake in determining what, how, and where children’s play unfolds. Through an innovative, transdisciplinary framework combining science and technology studies, critical communication studies, and children’s cultural studies, Digital Playgrounds foc...
This book brings together essays on game history and historiography that reflect on the significance of locality. Game history did not unfold uniformly and the particularities of space and place matter, yet most digital game and software histories are silent with respect to geography. Topics covered include: hyper-local games; temporal anomalies in platform arrival and obsolescence; national videogame workforces; player memories of the places of gameplay; comparative reception studies of a platform; the erasure of cultural markers; the localization of games; and perspectives on the future development of ‘local’ game history. Chapters 1 and 12 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Brings together stories, theories, and research that can further inform the ways in which writing teachers situate and address intellectual property issues in writing classrooms. The essays in the collection identify and describe a wide range of pedagogical strategies, consider theories, present research, explore approaches, and offer both cautionary tales and local and contextual successes.