Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Studying Videogames is the first book to look at videogames as media texts. Written specifically for advanced level/undergraduate students it covers a broad range of games, industry contexts, and research findings. The book challenges conventional media-analysis approaches; sets out the history, present, and future of games; and interrogates claims about their "social effects." Featuring student activities, interviews with key players in the industry, and an extended case study of the Grand Theft Auto cycle, Studying Videogames seriously engages with this powerful media.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

McDougall (Newman University College, UK) and O'Brien (Smestow School, UK) offer an introductory textbook specifically targeting students enrolled in media-studies programs. The book reviews the multifaceted nature of video games and attempts to supplement what the authors perceive to be conceptual limitations at the heart of traditional media-studies approaches. Classroom exercises, activities, and projects--along with a decidedly British cultural perspective--point to an intended audience of British students between 14 and 20 years of age. This age range precipitates an inconsistency in the language and tone used in the writing, which is a dissonant hybrid of colloquial diction and formal, theoretical analysis. The book comprises three sections that relate video games to existing media studies concepts, the media industry, and social effects research. The authors follow these with a chapter that uses the Grand Theft Auto game series as an illustrative case study for the various approaches. Neither exhaustive nor overly simplistic, the book manages to highlight the inherent complexity and multifaceted nature of video games studies and includes useful summaries, chronologies, a glossary, and a bibliography of multimedia sources. Summing Up: Optional. Comprehensive collections supporting study of video games at the lower-division undergraduate level. J. A. Saklofske Acadia University