Start off the New Year right...

...with some reading from Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media, published by SAGE.

Dal Yong Jin and I have an article published in the latest issue of Games and Culture (2008, Vol.3 Issue 1, pp. 38-58) titled, "Age of New Media Empires: A Critical Interpretation of the Korean Online Game Industry."

The table of contents along with access to the text can be found here at the Sage Journals Online website: http://gac.sagepub.com/content/vol3/issue1/

Alongside articles that take up games in the Asia-Pacific, our paper is a combination of political economy and ethnography from our research on Korean online games.

Abstract: In this article, the authors attempt to ascertain the factors involved in the swift growth of online games in the context of broader sociocultural elements. Through political economy and ethnographic analysis, they show that online games, like other forms of technology, are sociocultural products that have been historically constituted by certain forms of knowledge and social practice. First, they map out the forces driving their development by examining government policies and competition among online games companies in Korea. They then explore capital flow to investigate the major players in the market. Finally, they explore the sociocultural elements contributing to the diffusion of online games in the cultural milieu specific to Korea.

Key Words: ethnography • Korea • online games • policy • political economy

Happy New Year all, and happy reading! All accusations of geeking out apply.

The Banff Consensus

Remember those two intense days in September I spent sequestered at the Banff Centre for an Innovation Summit? Well, thanks to the hard working folks at THECIS et al, the results are in and the fruits of that labour are on display in a very concise report called "The Banff Consensus: Integrating the Creative Capabilities of Western Canada into the Global Innovation System."

CPROST is getting a bunch of the hardcopies off the presses sent to us shortly, but you can access the report in pdf form here on the THECIS website as well!

My specific contribution is on page 12.
I saw it as my Coles notes from the Summit, and they saw it in a similar way, so there it is!

Publication in Internet Research Annual

More lovely surprises in the mail, my own copy of the latest AOIR Internet Research Annual. It contains selected papers from the Association of Internet Researchers Conference from 2005 that got flagged for the publication and underwent subsequent revisions. The final product looks great. The editors did a fabulous job keeping everything going and making the process as painless as possible!

New this year from Peter Lang Publishers, is the Internet Research Annual Volume 4, edited by Mia Consalvo and Caroline Haythornthwaite. It is #33 in the Digital Formations series.

My contribution: Florence Chee/Richard K. Smith: Online Gamers and the Ambiguity of Community: Korean Definitions of Togetherness for a New Generation.

Specs:
Year of Publication: 2007
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Wien, 2007. VI, 213 pp.
ISBN 978-0-8204-7857-9 pb.

For more info, book synopsis, contents, and ordering, go here.