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Playing Oppression
A striking analysis of popular board games’ roots in imperialist reasoning—and why the future of play depends on reckoning with it. Board games conjure up images of innocuously enriching entertainment: family game nights, childhood pastimes, cooperative board games centered around resource management and strategic play. Yet in Playing Oppression, Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson apply the incisive frameworks of postcolonial theory to a broad historical survey of board games to show how these seemingly benign entertainments reinforce the logic of imperialism. Through this lens, the commercialized version of Snakes and Ladders takes shape as the British Empire’s distortion of Gyan Chau...
Playing Oppression
A striking analysis of popular board games’ roots in imperialist reasoning—and why the future of play depends on reckoning with it. Board games conjure up images of innocuously enriching entertainment: family game nights, childhood pastimes, cooperative board games centered around resource management and strategic play. Yet in Playing Oppression, Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson apply the incisive frameworks of postcolonial theory to a broad historical survey of board games to show how these seemingly benign entertainments reinforce the logic of imperialism. Through this lens, the commercialized version of Snakes and Ladders takes shape as the British Empire’s distortion of Gyan Chau...
Swords of the Viking Age
This title surveys some 60 examples of swords made and used in northern Europe during the Viking Age, from the mid 8th to the mid-11th century. It contains an illustrated overview of blade types and construction, pattern-welding, inscriptions and handle forms and Jan Petersen's classification.
Debugging Game History
Essays discuss the terminology, etymology, and history of key terms, offering a foundation for critical historical studies of games. Even as the field of game studies has flourished, critical historical studies of games have lagged behind other areas of research. Histories have generally been fact-by-fact chronicles; fundamental terms of game design and development, technology, and play have rarely been examined in the context of their historical, etymological, and conceptual underpinnings. This volume attempts to “debug” the flawed historiography of video games. It offers original essays on key concepts in game studies, arranged as in a lexicon—from “Amusement Arcade” to “Embodi...
Avatars at Work and Play
Avatars at Work and Play brings together contributions from leading social scientists and computer scientists who have conducted research on virtual environments used for collaboration and online gaming. They present a well-rounded and state-of-the-art overview of current applications of multi-user virtual environments, ranging from highly immersive virtual reality systems to internet-based virtual environments on personal computers. The volume is a follow-up to a previous essay collection, ‘The Social Life of Avatars’, which explored general issues in this field. This collection goes further, examining uses of shared virtual environments in practical settings such as scientific collabor...
Sami Art and Aesthetics
During the last five decades we have witnessed an increase in activity among artists identifying themselves as Sami, the only recognised indigenous people of Scandinavia. At the same time, art and duodji (traditional Sami art and craft) have been organized and institutionalized, not least by the Sami artists themselves. Sami Art and Aesthetics discusses and highlights these developments and places them in historical and contemporary contexts for an international audience. At stake are complex, changing terms regarding the creative and the political agencies. The question is not how indigeneity, identity, people, art, duodji, and aesthetics correspond to conventional Western ideas, rather it is how they interact with the Sami and their neighbouring cultures and societies. The volume is written by some of the foremost art historians and literary scholars in Sami art, craft, architecture, culture, and indigenous studies. Artists presented include Johan Turi, Ivar Jaks, Outi Pieski, Folke Fjellstrom, Katarina Pirak Sikku, Geir Tore Holm, and Silje Figenschou Thoresen.
The Social Life of Avatars
Virtual reality (VR) technology has been developed commercially since the early 1990s [1]. Yet it is only with the growth of the Internet and other high-bandwidth links that VR systems have increasingly become networked to allow users to share the same virtual environment (VE). Shared YEs raise a number of interesting questions: what is the difference between face-to-face interaction and interaction between persons inside YEs? How does the appearance of the "avatar" - as the graphical representation of the user has become known - change the nature of interaction? And what governs the formation of virtual communities? This volume brings together contributions from social scientists and computer scientists who have conducted research on social interaction in various types of YEs. Two previous volumes in this CSCW book series [2, 3] have examined related aspects of research on YEs - social navigation and collaboration - although they do not always deal with VRIVEs in the sense that it is used here (see the definition in Chapter 1). The aim of this volume is to explore how people interact with each other in computer-generated virtual worlds.
Space Time Play
Computer and video games are leaving the PC and conquering the arena of everyday life in the form of mobile applications—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?
A Casual Revolution
How casual games like Guitar Hero, Bejeweled, and those for Nintendo Wii are expanding the audience for video games. We used to think that video games were mostly for young men, but with the success of the Nintendo Wii, and the proliferation of games in browsers, cell phone games, and social games video games changed changed fundamentally in the years from 2000 to 2010. These new casual games are now played by men and women, young and old. Players need not possess an intimate knowledge of video game history or devote weeks or months to play. At the same time, many players of casual games show a dedication and skill that is anything but casual. In A Casual Revolution, Jesper Juul describes th...
Computer Games as Professional Sport, digital original edition
Competitive video and computer game play is nothing new; what is new in the world of digital gaming is the emergence of professional computer game play. This BIT explores how a form of play becomes a sport, with professional players, agents, referees, leagues, tournaments, sponsorships, and spectators.
