Game Focus

A good friend of mine and ex-Rockstar colleague, Thad Frogley, has written up his notes from the recent Game Focus Germany event in Hannover.

There's a movie which features footage of another friend of mine, Babsi Lippe.
Don't worry, there's only a little bit of German at the start and end:



In the text, Thad covers amongst others, Babsi's talk about gender, games and Japan, and Richard Bartle's talk about games, art and culture.

Nice.

Cult Game Studs

I've just read an awesome manifesto by a Canadian sociologist for a kind of culturally oriented game studies that I'm interested in:

The potential for game studies in my view lies in the possibility of offering an analysis of computer games and game cultures as critical locations for understanding the role of digital technologies in mediating and constituting the social interaction and organization of subjects in late modern information societies.

Simon, Bart. "Beyond Cyberspatial Flaneurie - On the Analytic Potential of Living With Digital Games" in Games and Culture, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp.62-67 (2006), DOI: 10.1177/1555412005281789

This was from the fist issue of Games and Culture, the new journal from Sage which began last year. I really must go over these back issues. It looks like there's a lot of great material there.