Games & Activities

How do we reconcile a videogame industry's insistence that games positively affect human beliefs and behaviors with the equally prevalent assumption that games are “just games”? How do we reconcile accusations that games make us violent and antisocial and unproductive with the realization that games are a universal source of human joy?
In Games are not, David Myers demonstrates that these controversies and conflicts surrounding the meanings and effects of games are not going away; they are essential properties of the game's paradoxical aesthetic form. Games are not focuses on games writ large, bound by neither digital form nor by cultural interpretation. Interdisciplinary in scope and radical in conclusion, Games are not positions games as unique objects evoking a peculiar and paradoxical liminal state – a lusory attitude – that is essential to human creativity, knowledge, and sustenance of the species.

Ringbearers collects together essays by established and leading figures within Game Studies, each focused on different aspects of the Massively Multiplayer Online game The Lord of the Rings Online.

The authors played the game extensively, yet they each come to it with different questions. Some essays focus on what players do with and in the game, whether that means asking about the opportunities provided for role-play or asking how the knowledge that fans bring to the game informs their experience of it. Others focus on the design of the game: for example the handling of narrative and its temporal dimensions, the articulation of core themes into ludic form, or the representational and aural strategies used. Moral rhetorics solicit discussion from various perspectives, as does the treatment of horror and the 'other'. Particular game mechanics are analysed in detail such as the game's crafting economy, or, more generally, the development of improbable conventions that players have learned to accept as the grammar of games.

As well as Design, Media and Game Studies students and scholars, Ringbearers will also prove of interest to those studying adaptation and to scholar-fans of JRR Tolkein's massively influential and popular fictional work.

In this new anthology, the editors of the widely acclaimed The Political Interests of Gender (1988) make a compelling case for reconstructing feminist theory in critical-realist terms, fostering more robust, multi-dimensional approaches to analyses of the political interests of gender.

Leading gender studies’ scholars utilise different research traditions to investigate topics including human rights, women’s movements, gendered labour markets, international monetary policy, equality policy, and queer politics. This unique anthology includes theoretical and empirical work, illustrating how to build bridges between materialist and discursive theoretical frameworks for understanding the politics of gender. It will be a trend-setting text for advanced gender studies political science, and sociology courses, as well as for professionals in these fields.

In this new anthology, the editors of the widely acclaimed The Political Interests of Gender (1988) make a compelling case for reconstructing feminist theory in critical-realist terms, fostering more robust, multi-dimensional approaches to analyses of the political interests of gender.

Leading gender studies’ scholars utilise different research traditions to investigate topics including human rights, women’s movements, gendered labour markets, international monetary policy, equality policy, and queer politics. This unique anthology includes theoretical and empirical work, illustrating how to build bridges between materialist and discursive theoretical frameworks for understanding the politics of gender. It will be a trend-setting text for advanced gender studies political science, and sociology courses, as well as for professionals in these fields.

This inquiry concerns the cultural history of the chess-player. It takes as its premise the idea that the chess-player has become a fragmented collection of images, underpinned by challenges to, and confirmations of, chess’s status as an intellectually-superior and socially-useful game, particularly since the medieval period. Yet, the chess-player is an understudied figure. No previous work has shone a light on the chess-player itself. Increasingly, chess-histories have retreated into tidy consensus. This work aspires to a novel reading of the figure as both a flickering beacon of reason and a sign of monstrosity. To this end, this book, utilising a wide range of sources, including newspapers, periodicals, detective novels, science-fiction, and comic-books, is underpinned by the idea that the chess-player is a pluralistic subject used to articulate a number of anxieties pertaining to themes of mind, machine, and monster.