[ecrea] Book Announcement - Dungeons, Dragons and Digital Denizens: The Digital Role-playing Game

I'm pleased to announce the publication of a book I helped edit!

Apologies for cross-posting.


- Gerald

The first title in Continuum's Approaches to Game Studies series, *Dungeons,
Dragons and Digital Denizens* is a collection of scholarly essays that
seeks to represent the far-reaching scope and implications of digital
role-playing games as both cultural and academic artifacts. As a genre,
digital role playing games have undergone constant and radical revision,
pushing not only multiple boundaries of game development, but also the
playing strategies and experiences of players.



Divided into three distinct sections, this premiere volume captures the
distinctiveness of different game types, the forms of play they engender
and their social and cultural implications. Contributors examine a range of
games, from classics like *Final Fantasy* to blockbusters like *World of
Warcraft* to obscure genre bending titles like *Lux Pain*. Working from a
broad range of disciplines such as ecocritism, rhetoric, performance,
gender, and communication, these essays yield insights that enrich the
field of game studies and further illuminate the cultural, psychological
and philosophical implications of a society that increasingly produces,
plays and discourses about role playing games.



http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=159141&SearchType=Basic



*"Dungeons, Dragons and Digital Denizens* is as captivating as it sounds, a
state of the art collection with provocative essays interrogating video
games through close readings of game narrative, landscape, and digital
structure. Space, time power, knowledge, language, and identity furnish
rich interpretive accounts of an especially interesting array of games.



--Bonnie Nardi, Professor in the Department of Informatics, University of
California, Irvine



"The digital role-playing game is a strange hybrid: the conventions of pen
and paper games translated to the computer; stories and games mixed in new
ways. This anthology is an excellent guide, presenting a range of inspiring
new approaches for anyone interested in role-playing games.”



--Jesper Juul, Visiting Assistant Arts Professor, New York University Game
Center, author of *Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional
Worlds*



"*Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens* is an exceptionally coherent and
well-integrated collection. This collection is theoretically rich and
engaging while remaining focused on the nuance and detail of a wide variety
of games. The volume is essential reading for advanced scholars and
students in game studies seeking to develop literary and cultural
theoretical models of digital gaming as a mode of authorship, expression
and critique. The papers in this collection push the envelope on the
analysis of digital role playing games and provide fertile ground for
further debate and new case studies as the landscape of digital gaming
continues to change. This is a volume of papers by serious game scholars
who can both attend to the detail and nuances of specific games as well as
offer theoretical engaged and suggestive analysis."



-- Bart Simon, Associate Professor, Director, Centre of Technoculture, Art
and Games, Concordia University, Montreal


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