Game Studies

Game Writing

Narrative Skills for Videogames Edited by Chris Bateman, University of Bolton, UK This second edition adds four new chapters providing even wider coverage of the craft of game writing, including script formatting, video game micronarratives, and massively multiplayer online games. Through the insights and experiences of professional game writers, Game Writing captures a snapshot of the narrative skills employed in today's game industry. This unique collection of practical advice provides the foundations to the craft of game writing, detailing aspects of the process from the basics of narrative and nonlinear narrative to writing comedy for games and creating compelling characters.

UK January 2021 • US January 2021 • 432 pages • 55 bw illus PB 9781501348969 • £27.99 / $34.95 • HB 9781501348952 • £96.00 / $120.00 ePub 9781501348976 • £25.98 / $31.45 ePdf 9781501348990 • £25.98 / $31.45 Bloomsbury Academic

Digital Zombies, Undead Stories

Narrative Emergence and Videogames Lawrence May, University of Auckland, New Zealand Through analysis of zombie-themed case study video games and a digital ethnography of their online player communities, this book develops a framework for understanding how collective gameplay generates experiences of narrative, as well as the narrative dimensions of players’ creative activity on social media platforms. Narrative emergence is addressed as a powerful form of player experience in multiplayer games, one which makes individual games’ boundaries and meanings fluid and negotiable by players. UK February 2021 • US February 2021 • 256 pages • 7 bw illus ePdf 9781501363528 • £88.50 / $108.00 Bloomsbury Academic

Media

Video Games and Intermediality Edited by Michael Fuchs, University of Graz, Germany

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com

Video games not only employ various media within themselves (cinematics, embedded books, and in-world television screens, to name a few), but also play a vital role in allowing players to explore transmedia storyworlds. At the same time, video games are frequently thematized and remediated in film, television, and literature. Intermedia Games—Games Inter Media brings together an international group of contributors to discuss intermedial phenomena in video games and the intermedial networks surrounding them, deepening readers’ understanding of the convergence culture of the early twenty-first century and video games’ role within it.

Board Games as Media

Paul Booth, DePaul University, USA Leading expert Paul Booth explains the growth in popularity of board games today and unpicks what it means to read a board game, how players know what a game is communicating, what games do to us as players, and how we decide which games bring us pleasure and which are just a waste of cardboard. With little scholarly research in this still-emerging field, Board Games as Media underscores the importance and relevance of board games in the ever-evolving world of gaming.

UK January 2021 • US January 2021 • 256 pages • 21 bw illus PB 9781501357176 • £21.99 / $29.95 • HB 9781501357169 • £90.00 / $120.00 ePub 9781501357183 • £21.92 / $26.95 ePdf 9781501357190 • £21.92 / $26.95

HB 9781501363542 • £90.00 / $120.00 ePub 9781501363535 • £88.50 / $108.00

Intermedia Games—Games Inter

Austria & Jeff Thoss, Independent Scholar,

Bloomsbury Academic

UK August 2020 • US August 2020 • 296 pages • 34 bw illus PB 9781501368127 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781501330490 ePub 9781501330506 • £29.22 / $35.95 ePdf 9781501330513 • £29.22 / $35.95 Bloomsbury Academic

Unstable Aesthetics

Game Engines and the Strangeness of Modding Eddie Lohmeyer, University of Central Florida, USA Eddie Lohmeyer investigates historical episodes of art modding practices—the alteration of a game system’s existing code or hardware to generate abstract spaces—situated around a recent archaeology of the game engine: software for rendering two and three-dimensional gameworlds. The contemporary artists highlighted throughout this book—Cory Arcangel, Krista Hoefle, and Brent Watanabe, among others—were attracted to the architectures of engines because they allowed them to explore vital relationships among abstraction, technology, and the body. Through key moments in game engine history, Lohmeyer formulates a rich phenomenology of video games by focusing on the liminal spaces of interaction among system and body, or rather the strangeness of art modding.

UK February 2021 • US February 2021 • 208 pages • 68 bw illus HB 9781501364907 • £90.00 / $120.00 ePub 9781501364891 • £88.50 / $108.00 ePdf 9781501364884 • £88.50 / $108.00 Bloomsbury Academic