"Ringbearers" collects together essays by established and leading figures within Game Studies, each focused on different aspects of the Massively Multiplayer Online game "The Lord of the Rings Online."
The authors played the game extensively, yet they each come to it with different questions. Some essays focus on what players do with and in the game, whether that means asking about the opportunities provided for role-play or asking how the knowledge that fans bring to the game informs their experience of it. Others focus on the design of the game: for example the handling of narrative and its temporal dimensions, the articulation of core themes into ludic form, or the representational and aural strategies used. Moral rhetorics solicit discussion from various perspectives, as does the treatment of horror and the 'other'. Particular game mechanics are analysed in detail such as the game's crafting economy, or, more generally, the development of improbable conventions that players have learned to accept as the grammar of games.
As well as Design, Media and Game Studies students and scholars, "Ringbearers" will also prove of interest to those studying adaptation and to scholar-fans of JRR Tolkein's massively influential and popular fictional work.

Videogame, player, text examines the playing and playful subject through a series of analytical essays focused on particular videogames and playing experiences. With essays from a range of internationally renowned game scholars, the major aim of this collection is to show how it is that videogames communicate their meanings and provide their pleasures. Each essay focuses on specific examples of gameplay dynamics to tease out the specificities of videogames as a new form of interaction between text and digital technology for the purposes of entertainment. That modes of engagement with the videogame text are many and varied, and construct the playing subject in different ways, provides the central theme of Videogame,player, text. Online play, clan membership, competitive or co-operative play, player modification of game texts, and the solo play of a single player are each addressed through individual analyses of the gameplay experiences produced by, for example, The Sims, Grand Theft Auto, Prince of Persia, Doom, Quake, World of Warcraft, StreetFighter and Civilisation. -- .

From the sanctioned to the forbidden, the suggestive to the blatant, evocations of sex have saturated cinema with a heady distillation of fleshly passions. Whether laced in the rapturous rhetorics of romance or seeking to pack a harder erotic punch, cinematic representations of sex and sexual desire have provided cinema with one of its major attractions. Sex and the Cinema traces the numerous factors and contexts -- artistic, institutional, political and socio-cultural -- that have shaped the way that sex appears in film. How does cinema mediate sex? Why is sex presented often in transgressive terms? What ideals and values inform its depictions? Given that cinematic representations of sex have perhaps caused more controversy than any others, Sex and the Cinema charts the cultural norms and contestations that are often diversely in play and explores forms and themes such as narrative, incest, romance, sado-masochism and 'real' sex. Films discussed include "Don't Look Now," "Intolerance," "The Blue Angel," "Now, Voyager," "Basic Instinct," "Written on the Wind," "Evil Dead II," "Emmanuelle," "A Taste of Honey," and "The Night Porter."

From the sanctioned to the forbidden, the suggestive to the blatant, evocations of sex have saturated cinema with a heady distillation of fleshly passions. Whether laced in the rapturous rhetorics of romance or seeking to pack a harder erotic punch, cinematic representations of sex and sexual desire have provided cinema with one of its major attractions. Sex and the Cinema traces the numerous factors and contexts -- artistic, institutional, political and socio-cultural -- that have shaped the way that sex appears in film. How does cinema mediate sex? Why is sex presented often in transgressive terms? What ideals and values inform its depictions? Given that cinematic representations of sex have perhaps caused more controversy than any others, Sex and the Cinema charts the cultural norms and contestations that are often diversely in play and explores forms and themes such as narrative, incest, romance, sado-masochism and 'real' sex. Films discussed include "Don't Look Now," "Intolerance," "The Blue Angel," "Now, Voyager," "Basic Instinct," "Written on the Wind," "Evil Dead II," "Emmanuelle," "A Taste of Honey," and "The Night Porter."

Videogame, player, text examines the playing and playful subject through a series of analytical essays focused on particular videogames and playing experiences. With essays from a range of internationally renowned game scholars, the major aim of this collection is to show how it is that videogames communicate their meanings and provide their pleasures. Each essay focuses on specific examples of gameplay dynamics to tease out the specificities of videogames as a new form of interaction between text and digital technology for the purposes of entertainment. That modes of engagement with the videogame text are many and varied, and construct the playing subject in different ways, provides the central theme of Videogame,player, text. Online play, clan membership, competitive or co-operative play, player modification of game texts, and the solo play of a single player are each addressed through individual analyses of the gameplay experiences produced by, for example, The Sims, Grand Theft Auto, Prince of Persia, Doom, Quake, World of Warcraft, StreetFighter and Civilisation. -- .

The first in the field to focus on the key aspects of videogames themselves as a distinctive medium, this is a rich and original read for gamers as well as students and researchers of popular culture internationally, which reviews the passionate gamer/game relationship viz all types of games from "Doom" to "EverQuest". Videogames now rival Hollywood cinema in popularity and profits and there are huge followings for titles such as "Tomb Raider" or "The Sims". Exactly what games offer, however, as a distinct form of entertainment, has received scant attention. This book is a valuable contribution to this new field. Its main focus is on key formal aspects of games and the experiences and pleasures offered by the activities they require of the player. A wide range of games are considered, from first-person shooters to third-person action-adventures, strategy, sports-related and role-playing games. Issues examined in detail include the characteristics of gameplay and its relationship with narrative, genre, virtual landscapes, realism, spectacle and sensation. Lively and accessible in style, this book is written for both an academic readership and the wider audience of gamers and those interested in popular culture.