Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Making New Media: Creative Production and Digital Literacies
Almost a case of another day another title in the New Literacies series. Today we heard from our colleague Andrew Burn in London that his book, Making New Media: Creative Production and Digital Literacies is out.
Readers who are familiar with Andrew's work will know exactly what to expect -- an interesting and accessible book that achieves an impressive balance of theory and practice, description and analysis, and that is loaded with rich examples that ground the book in ways we can readily identify with.
"Making New Media offers a series of case studies from the author's work with students and teachers from the mid-90s to the present day, charting the dramatic rise of new media in schools. Work across a wide range of media is presented: computer animation, digital video and film, computer games and machinima. The author tackles the vital contemporary themes of literacy and creativity, making an innovative argument for the combination of traditions of social semiotics and cultural studies in the study of literacy and new media. This volume should be read by every undergraduate and graduate student, as well as any faculty member, involved with or interested in any aspect of new media".
Congratulations, Andrew. We enjoyed watching this book evolve and are thrilled that it is out and about.
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Perceiving Play
Enormous congratulations to Torill Mortensen on the publication of her new book, Perceiving Play: The Art and study of Computer Games. Having had the good fortune to read this book in manuscript form, we can unequivocally state that it's the best introduction to computer games theorising and research available! Avid academic games scholars are going to find the scope of the book engaging--and may encounter interesting new ways of theorising games and game play. computer game play and games research.
And everyone interested in digital culture should read the book, anyway, to see how cleverly Torill addresses some major copyright issues she encountered in wanting to reproduce screen grabs from computer games in her text.
Here's the blurb from the back of the book:
Computer games are increasingly prevalent, and cause both curiosity and concern in the general public, so understanding these games and play is important. Game researchers need to work quickly to document, report, and analyse the effect of computer games on our modern society as an increasing amount of people make new and drastically different choices in how they spend their time. Perceiving Play: The Art and Study of Computer Games looks at the directions and findings of this research, and examines how game research integrates the studies of social science, ethnography, textual analysis an criticism, economy, law and technology.
