Semioclast

Steven Poole has released a newly revised copy of his book Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames. The best part is that he’s made the book available via a free (as in beer and as in speech) PDF download.

Poole describes the book as, “a book about the aesthetics of videogames - what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics.”

Also, check out his new book Unspeak, a book “which analyses state-of-the-art rhetorical weaponry, from community through sound science and ethnic cleansing to the war on terror.” Rhetorical weapons? Terror? Now you’re speaking my language!

Via Videoludica (once removed).

Eludamos.org is a new, peer reviewed, online game studies journal. Their 2007 issue (they’re published biannually) is online now.

ELUDAMOS positions itself as a publication that fundamentally transgresses disciplinary boundaries. The aim is to join questions about and approaches to computer games from decidedly heterogeneous scientific contexts (for example cultural studies, media studies, (art) history, sociology, (social) psychology, and semiotics) and, thus, to advance the interdisciplinary discourse on digital games.

This approach does not exclude questions about the distinct features of digital games a an aesthetic and cultural form of articulation, on the contrary, the issue is to distinguish their media specific characteristics as well as their similarity to other forms of aesthetic and cultural practice. That way, the editors would like to contribute to the lasting distinction of international game studies as an academic discipline.

They currently have an open CFP for their 2008 (so much for biannual) issue. Full CFP below the fold.

Via Grand Text Auto

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In this installation of DiGRA’s Hardcore series, “Un-Situated Play? Textual Analysis and Digital Games,” Diane Carr takes up a textual studies approach to digital games:

The shortcomings associated with analysis that focuses ‘on the game itself’ are widely and casually acknowledged, yet ‘textual analysis’ as a methodology remains rarely or broadly defined in Game Studies literature. Sometimes broad definitions are appropriate, but when the topic under discussion is a methodology (or its limitations) something more specific is probably called for. I don’t think that we can satisfactorily critique textual analysis just by listing the things that it does not do, and I suggest that defining the textual analysis of games should involve making reference to theories of text. Otherwise, why call it ‘textual’ analysis? In fact, various versions of textual analysis could be proposed, depending on the theory of text that’s being evoked in each case.

The whole piece is well worth a read. I think that many of us who study games from within English departments take for granted that games can be read as “texts.” Carr’s piece argues (as I have recently) that textual analysis has its problems when applied to the analysis of digital games, but that we should look towards textual analysis as a model that can be integrated into game studies.