The new issue of the Games Studies journal, Volume 6, Issue 1 was published in December, just in case you missed it in the holiday rush. Here are the contents:
Nick Montfort: Combat in Context
Mia Consalvo, Nathan Dutton: Game analysis: Developing a methodological toolkit for the qualitative study of games
Rob Cover: Gaming (Ad)diction: Discourse, Identity, Time and Play in the Production of the Gamer Addiction Myth
Hans Christian Arnseth: Learning to Play or Playing to Learn - A Critical Account of the Models of Communication Informing Educational Research on Computer Gameplay
Joris Dormans: On the Role of the Die: A brief ludologic study of pen-and-paper roleplaying games and their rules
Thaddeus Griebel: Self-Portrayal in a Simulated Life: Projecting Personality and Values in The Sims 2 Charles Paulk: Signifying Play: The Sims and the Sociology of Interior Design
Benjamin Wai-ming Ng: Street Fighter and The King of Fighters in Hong Kong: A Study of Cultural Consumption and Localization of Japanese Games in an Asian Context
Jonas Heide Smith: The Games Economists Play - Implications of Economic Game Theory for the Study of Computer Games
Hector Rodriguez: The Playful and the Serious: An approximation to Huizinga’s Homo Ludens
Jussi Parikka, Jaakko Suominen: Victorian Snakes? Towards A Cultural History of Mobile Games and the Experience of Movement
It’s very readable and generally doesn’t suffer the usual problem of opaque (read: badly written) cultural theory texts. For some reason I particularly enjoyed the fact that Nick Montfort’s Combat in Context included the entire 2KB of machine code for Atari’s Combat game.
(Via Jesper at the Ludologist who also posted the above contents so neatly for me to poach).