Media Studies

This Gaming Life by Jim Rossignol

Owning the Olympics edited by Monroe Price and Danial Dayan

This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities

Jim Rossignol

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

In recent years, computer and video games have achieved new levels of sophistication and credibility. Quite apart from the enormous amount of revenue they generate (7 billion dollars in 2005), educators and researchers have praised the new genre of networked games known as MMOGs (massively multi-player online games) for offering important new learning environments. Others predict that games will soon be elevated to the status of books and film, attracting reviews and commentary in the most prominent cultural outlets.

This prediction is supported by the rise of what is known as The New Games Journalism (NGJ). Based initially in the UK but increasingly influential in the US as well, the NGJ marks a striking departure from the trade and industry oriented publications that once covered this area. Its practitioners disavow any intention to sell products and write about games instead in a distinct literary manner which combines personal experience with broad cultural analysis.

This Gaming Life, Rossignol's first book, at once employs and develops the conventions that have defined NGJ as a genre. Part memoir, part ethnography, part journalistic essay, this beautifully written, thoughtful and richly detailed narrative portrays gaming cultures in three cities, London, Seoul, and Reykjavik in a way which should appeal to readers with little, no, or a considerable gaming experience.

Jim Rossignol is one of the leading practitioners of the NGJ; and his articles have appeared in numerous publications, including PC Gamer (UK), The Escapist, Wired, and The Guardian.

Spring 2008
240 Pages

Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China

Edited by Monroe Price and Daniel Dayan

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Since Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympic Games by the International Olympic Committee in 2001, it has been widely anticipated that they will be a highly significant media event. The media attention that the Beijing Olympics have received has, in fact, begun to transform China internally and globally, and these evolving changes merit close analysis.

The significance of this event derives largely from the way it offers China the opportunity to project a revised image of itself and its global role to national and international audiences. This opportunity is nevertheless fraught with potential risks. As a media event, the official narratives are vulnerable to interruption and contradiction, perhaps especially because their efficacy depends on symbolic elements which are simultaneously powerful and fragile. Owning the Olympics offers new perspectives for examining the Olympic Games and examines the ways in which key actors struggle to retain or upset the symbolic constitution of this major event. In short, Owning the Olympics describes the battlefield on which competing actors and interests vie to determine the meaning of this global happening.

Monroe Price is Adjunct Full Professor at Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania and Director of the Project for Global Communication Studies.

Daniel Dayan is Professor of Media Sociology at Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris.

Spring 2008
320 Pages