Approaches to Videogame Discourse

Often, one's unique background and diversity shapes experiences in a way that poses significant challenges to such tasks as language translation or situational meaning design. The essays in this book will help readers understand how video games are shaping experiences. Summing up: Recommended * Choice *
Approaches to Video-Game Discourse is a field-shaping collection of essays which show how interesting and varied the study of online gaming can be. The book is impressive in its scope, including research about the micro-level features such as word formation and moving through to broader concerns such as the narrativity of particular games. The book should be commended for reaching beyond the study of individual games and paying attention to various paratexts such as video walkthroughs, manuals and the legal language relating to games. The scholars who have contributed to this collection embrace the full range of approaches that are found in discourse studies, using corpus driven analyses, ethnography, pragmatics, and multimodality to explore the texts and interactions of game-playing from empirically informed perspectives. The book will be of interest to linguists and new media scholars alike as a timely resource which helps us all understand how gaming is meaningful in many different ways. * Dr. Ruth Page, Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics, University of Birmingham, UK *
Finally! A concerted take on the richly, intricately discursive world of gaming. Edited collections have proved to be defining moments in digital discourse studies; this one will be no exception. * Crispin Thurlow, Professor of Language and Communication, University of Bern, Switzerland *
Fueled by a new generation of scholars, this volume sketches out videogame discourse studies as a new field of research that extends from corpus-assisted lexical analysis to the multimodal study of paratexts that surround games. The authors draw on concepts and questions from applied, media and sociolinguistics, such as language ideologies, (im)politeness, plain language, and localization. This volume offers an accessible introduction to a field of practice that is massively popular on a global scale, yet quite understudied from a language and discourse perspective. * Jannis Androutsopoulos, Professor of German and Media Linguistics, Universität Hamburg, Germany *