New Book Alert: The Player's Realm: Studies on the Culture of Video Games and Gaming

While I wouldn't usually post two book alerts in a row, when I found out that this one had finally been released, I just couldn't resist...as it includes a chapter written by yours truly! After a few delays due to copyright vs. fair use issues, The Player's Realm, edited by J. Patrick Williams and Jonas Heide Smith, is finally available at a bookstore near you. It includes chapters by many of my own favourite games authors, including Jonas Heide Smith, Mia Consalvo, Helen Kennedy and Torill Mortensen, though I'm really stoked to read everyone else's too, especially after hearing so much about these chapters over the past two years. Here's the Table of Contents (oddly, the publisher's page hasn't linked up the author names to their respective chapters, so I've inserted them myself...hope I got it right):

Introduction: From Moral Panics to Mature Games Research in Action (J. Patrick Williams, Jonas Heide Smith) 1

Section 1: Control versus Authorship 17
1. Who Governs the Gamers? (Jonas Heide Smith) 17
2. Terms of Service and Terms of Play in Children’s Online Gaming (Sara M. Grimes) 33
3. Narrative Power in Online Game Worlds: The Story of Cybertown (Nadezhda Kaneva) 56
4. Law and Disorder in Cyberspace: How Systems of Justice Developed in Online Text-Based Gaming Communities (Mel White) 74

Section 2: Discourse and Ideology 91
5. From The Green Berets to America’s Army: Video Games as a Vehicle for Political Propaganda (Aaron Delwiche) 91
6. Rhetorics of Computer and Video Game Research (Lars Konzack) 110
7. From Margin to Center: Biographies of Technicity and the Construction of Hegemonic Games Culture (Jon Dovey & Helen W. Kennedy) 131
8. Ghost Recon: Island Thunder: Cuba in the Virtual Battlescape (Rafael Miguel Montes) 154

Section 3: Experience and Identity 171
9. The Player’s Journey (Mirjam Eladhari) 171
10. Mutual Fantasy Online: Playing with People (Torill Mortensen) 188
11. From Dollhouse to Metaverse: What Happened When The Sims Went Online (Mia Consalvo) 203
12. Platform Dependent: Console and Computer Cultures (Laurie Taylor) 223

Section 4: Consumption and Community 239
13. Mapping Independent Game Design (Jason Wilson) 239
14. Desire for Commodities and Fantastic Consumption in Digital Games (Mike Molesworth & Janice Denegri-Knott) 255
15. Reading and Playing: What Makes Interactive Fiction Unique (Dan Keller) 276

I'll try to post any links to reviews of the book if there ever are any.