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Making Games
An argument that production tools shape the aesthetics and political economy of games as an expressive medium. In Making Games, Stefan Werning considers the role of tools (primarily but not exclusively software), their design affordances, and the role they play as sociotechnical actors. Drawing on a wide variety of case studies, Werning argues that production tools shape the aesthetics and political economy of games as an expressive medium. He frames game-making as a (meta)game in itself and shows that tools, like games, have their own "procedural rhetoric" and should not always be conceived simply in terms of optimization and best practices.
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?
Video Game Ecologies and Culture
Video Game Ecologies and Culture examines the environments that video games affect and are impacted by. The edited collection engages with the notion of ecology as a critical concept that allows to study video game conceptions of human, posthuman, and natural environments and explore the entangled eco-cultural formations in video games and gaming. The contributions discuss the theme of video game ecologies with an interdisciplinary emphasis on the cultural, political, social, and ecological discourses pertaining to the medium and reflect on the relations and imaginaries developed through eco/critical video game practices. These interrelations are carved out in essays on relationality, kinship, and capitalist ruins, immersion in virtual marine ecosystems, video games and the commodification of ecocriticism, eco-colonial power formations, playing and recording nature, gender and post-anthropocentric game worlds, time-loop chronotopes, and ludoaffective dissonance and survival in video games.
The Rule Book
How games are built on the foundations of rules, and how rules—of which there are only five kinds—really work. Board games to sports, digital games to party games, gambling to role-playing games. They all share one thing in common: rules. Indeed, rules are the one and only thing game scholars agree is central to games. But what, in fact, are rules? In The Rule Book, Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola explore how different kinds of rules work as building blocks of games. Rules are constraints placed on us while we play, carving a limited possibility space for us. They also inject meaning into our play: without rules there is no queen in chess, no ball in Pong, and no hole in one in golf. S...
The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters
From vampires and demons to ghosts and zombies, interest in monsters in literature, film, and popular culture has never been stronger. This concise Encyclopedia provides scholars and students with a comprehensive and authoritative A-Z of monsters throughout the ages. It is the first major reference book on monsters for the scholarly market. Over 200 entries written by experts in the field are accompanied by an overview introduction by the editor. Generic entries such as 'ghost' and 'vampire' are cross-listed with important specific manifestations of that monster. In addition to monsters appearing in English-language literature and film, the Encyclopedia also includes significant monsters in Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, African and Middle Eastern traditions. Alphabetically organized, the entries each feature suggestions for further reading. The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters is an invaluable resource for all students and scholars and an essential addition to library reference shelves.
Creative Tools and the Softwarization of Cultural Production
This book explores how creativity is increasingly designed, marketed, and produced with digital products and services — a process referred to as softwarization. If ‘being creative’ has developed into one of the paradigmatic architectures of power for framing the contemporary subject, then an essential component of this architecture involves its material and symbolic configuration through tools. From image editors to digital audio workstations, video editors to game engines, these modern tools are used by creatives every day, and mastering these increasingly complex technologies is now a near-compulsory pathway to creative work. Despite their ubiquity in cultural production, few have sought to theorize them in aggregate and with interdisciplinary breadth. By bringing disparate creative and methodological traditions in one volume, this book provides a comprehensive overview of approaches for understanding this complex, emerging, and dynamic field that speaks beyond the disciplinary categories of ‘tool,’ ‘instrument,’ and/or ‘software’. It makes a unique intervention in the fields of cultural production and the cultural and creative industries. ​
Good
What is the good life—for me, for us, for the cosmos? Good is an ecocritical enquiry into ethical and political dimensions of aesthetics. Following Aristotle’s lead, it starts with ethics as the question concerning what is the good life for me, moving on to politics as the good life for us. Like Aristotle, between ethics and politics it inserts the question of the good life for you and me—the question of love. In the end—which is where we all live today—it goes beyond Aristotle’s human-centred approach, insisting that the good life cannot be thought or lived without including technologies and ecologies. A truly cosmopolitan politics is a politics of the cosmos. Learning from indigenous cultures, it speaks from and with nature and machines in the form of gods and ancestors. Packed with examples from banking apps to cave art, economic manifestos to cookery, passing through music, painting, poetry, and film, the book evokes critical traditions from across the world to present a lucid and accessible case for decolonial and ecocritical aesthetics.
Enacting Platforms
An analysis of the game engine Unreal through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, as well as a critique of the platform studies framework itself. In this first scholarly book on the Unreal game engine, James Malazita explores one of the major contemporary game development platforms through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, revealing how Unreal produces, and is produced by, broader intersections of power. Enacting Platforms takes a novel critical platform studies approach, raising deeper questions: what are the material and cultural limits of platforms themselves? What is the relationship between the analyst and the platform of study, and how ...
Intellivision
The engaging story of Intellivision, an overlooked videogame system from the late 1970s and early 1980s whose fate was shaped by Mattel, Atari, and countless others who invented the gaming industry. Astrosmash, Snafu, Star Strike, Utopia—do these names sound familiar to you? No? Maybe? They were all videogames created for the Intellivision videogame system, sold by Mattel Electronics between 1979 and 1984. This system was Atari’s main rival during a key period when videogames were moving from the arcades into the home. In Intellivision, Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman tell the fascinating inside story of this overlooked gaming system. Along the way, they also analyze Intellivisionâ€...
Persona Studies
The definitive and first major text on personas in contemporary culture Modern social media and communication technologies have reshaped our identities and transformed contemporary culture, revealing an expanded and intensified reforming of our collective online behavior. Billions of people worldwide are increasingly engaged in the production, presentation, and modification of their public selves—curating personas through various social media and fundamentally altering how we interact in the twenty-first century. The study of persona is essential to understanding contemporary culture, yet literature in this emerging field is scarce. Filling a gap in current knowledge, Persona Studies: An I...
