Everyday Literacies

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.