Silent Hill: The Terror Engine

Our friends at The University of Michigan Press have released Silent Hill: The Terror Engine, the latest volume in their Landmark Video Game series:

Silent Hill: The Terror Engine , the second of the two inaugural studies in the Landmark Video Games series from series editors Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, is both a close analysis of the first three Silent Hill games and a general look at the whole series. Silent Hill, with its first title released in 1999, is one of the most influential of the horror video game series. Perron situates the games within the survival horror genre, both by looking at the history of the genre and by comparing Silent Hill with such important forerunners as Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil. Taking a transmedia approach and underlining the designer's cinematic and literary influences, he uses the narrative structure; the techniques of imagery, sound, and music employed; the game mechanics; and the fiction, artifact, and gameplay emotions elicited by the games to explore the specific fears survival horror games are designed to provoke and how the experience as a whole has made the Silent Hill series one of the major landmarks of video game history. 

 The book, which is released under a Creative Commons license, will be available for purchase soon; but because we have connections we already have a copy of the book in the library: http://mirlyn.lib.umich.edu/Record/011236530

Video Game Book Table Display

Our library table display for March is books about video games:











The books were selected by the ULAs (Ben, Rebecca & Stephanie) and me; Stephanie put together the presentation. Come by the 2nd floor to check it out, and there are many more books in the stacks!

Books!

Books? Yeah, we've got them too...

Recently we've started to add novels, comics and art books related to video games to the collection. Like Warcraft and Halo novels, The Art of... books, and the like. These books will be in the regular AAEL books collection (i.e. not kept down in the archive room) so you can check them out and read them like any other book in the library.

The books also have their own New Books feed: http://www.lib.umich.edu/aael/feeds/aaelgamebooks.xml

New World of Warcraft Book from UofM Press

Our colleagues at the University of Michigan Press have released My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft by Bonnie Nardi. Here's the blurb:

World of Warcraft is currently the most popular online world game on the planet, with more than 12 million subscribers—officially making it an online community of gamers that has more inhabitants than the state of Ohio and is almost twice as populous as Scotland. It's a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO in gamer jargon, where each person controls a single character inside a virtual world, interacting with other people's characters and computer-controlled monsters, quest-givers, and merchants.

In My Life as a Night Elf Priest, Bonnie Nardi, a well-known ethnographer who has published extensively on how theories of what we do intersect with how we adopt and use technology, compiles more than three years of participatory research in Warcraft play and culture in the United States and China into this field study of player behavior and activity. She introduces us to her research strategy and the history, structure, and culture of Warcraft; argues for applying activity theory and theories of aesthetic experience to the study of gaming and play; and educates us on issues of gender, culture, and addiction as part of the play experience. Nardi paints a compelling portrait of what drives gamers online both in this country and in China, where she spent a month studying players in Internet cafés.

Bonnie Nardi has given us a fresh look not only at World of Warcraft but at the field of game studies as a whole. One of the first in-depth studies of a game that has become an icon of digital culture, My Life as a Night Elf Priest will capture the interest of both the gamer and the ethnographer.

You can read the book online for free, or buy a copy of the print version if you prefer atoms to bits.