[Air-L] Book Announcement – Guns, Grenades and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games

[Gerald Voorhees]

I'm pleased to announce the publication of a book I helped edit.  Please
encourage your library to obtain a copy.



The second volume of Continuum’s Approaches to Digital Game Studies series,
Guns, Grenades and Grunts gathers scholars from multiple disciplines to
bring the weight of contemporary social theory and media criticism to bear
on the public controversy and intellectually investigation of first-person
shooter games. As a genre, FPS games have helped shepherd the game industry
from the early days of shareware distribution and underground gaming clans
to contemporary multimillion dollar production budgets, Hollywood-style
launches, downloadable content, and worldwide professional gaming leagues.
The FPS has been, and will continue to be a staple of the game market.



>From the Back Cover:



“Guns, Grenades and Grunts sets its sights on the first-person shooter,
finally bringing much-needed analysis to one of the most popular and
pervasive video game genres. From the trenches of *Medal of Honor* to *
Halo’s* Blood Gulch, this collection of thoughtful essays challenges the
reader/player to ponder what it means to pick up a virtual gun and navigate
the ludic environments of the FPS.

The book also makes a significant contribution to games, media, and popular
culture studies because, by taking up just one type of video game, it
underscores the importance of analytic specificity for a medium that is
often too broadly – and thus superficially – discussed.”



Nina B. Huntemann, Associate Professor, Communication and Journalism,
Suffolk University, US.



“The volume offers an illuminating tutorial that historically and
theoretically frames the FPS and sets up the game field for further
exploration and treasure hunting, by investigating, in-depth, the psyche of
the individual player - as is constituted through the interaction with the
game mechanics and avatars as well as the social dynamics of multiplayer
game play. This rich and varied walk through the world of FPS game studies
will certainly reinvigorate the intellectual equipment of the academic
warrior as it will take the public and journalistic debates on the
‘violent’ FPS genre to a new level.”

--Jan Simons, Associate Professor of New Media Studies, University of
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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Gerald Voorhees, PhD

Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies

Speech Communication/New Media Communication

Oregon State University

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