Frans Mäyrä – författare

Cultural Game Studies provides a comprehensive framework for understanding games and play as interconnected cultural phenomena, examining their roles as art, entertainment, and human experience within contemporary society.This edited volume delivers a societally and culturally informed critical framework that enables readers to develop a nuanced understanding of game cultures and their scholarship. Rather than studying games or players in isolation, the book contextualises the uses, design, and meanings of play as an interconnected whole. Readers will gain detailed insights into the scholarly history of game studies and its key methodologies, while exploring essential themes including player identities, game production, cultural literacy, and game preservation. The book’s comprehensive approach opens new perspectives for cultural analysis and provides tools for understanding how games increasingly permeate and inform modern society and culture.This book is written for researchers, scholars, and advanced students in game studies, cultural studies, media studies, and digital humanities. It is ideal for academics seeking to deepen their theoretical understanding of game cultures, graduate students conducting research in game-related fields, and instructors teaching courses on digital culture, media theory, or contemporary cultural phenomena.

Cultural Game Studies provides a comprehensive framework for understanding games and play as interconnected cultural phenomena, examining their roles as art, entertainment, and human experience within contemporary society.This edited volume delivers a societally and culturally informed critical framework that enables readers to develop a nuanced understanding of game cultures and their scholarship. Rather than studying games or players in isolation, the book contextualises the uses, design, and meanings of play as an interconnected whole. Readers will gain detailed insights into the scholarly history of game studies and its key methodologies, while exploring essential themes including player identities, game production, cultural literacy, and game preservation. The book’s comprehensive approach opens new perspectives for cultural analysis and provides tools for understanding how games increasingly permeate and inform modern society and culture.This book is written for researchers, scholars, and advanced students in game studies, cultural studies, media studies, and digital humanities. It is ideal for academics seeking to deepen their theoretical understanding of game cultures, graduate students conducting research in game-related fields, and instructors teaching courses on digital culture, media theory, or contemporary cultural phenomena.

Offering an interdisciplinary approach to narrative, this book investigates storyworlds and minds in narratives across media, from literature to digital games and reality TV, from online sadomasochism to oral history databases, and from horror to hallucinations. It addresses two core questions of contemporary narrative theory, inspired by recent cognitive-scientific developments: what kind of a construction is a storyworld, and what kind of mental functioning can be embedded in it? Minds and worlds become essential facets of making sense and interpreting narratives as the book asks how story-internal minds relate to the mind external to the storyworld, that is, the mind processing the story. With essays from social scientists, literary scholars, linguists, and scholars from interactive media studies answering these topical questions, the collection brings diverse disciplines into dialogue, providing new openings for genuinely transdisciplinary narrative theory. The wide-ranging selection of materials analyzed in the book promotes knowledge on the latest forms of cultural and social meaning-making through narrative, necessary for navigating the contemporary, mediatized cultural landscape. The combination of theoretical reflection and empirical analysis makes this book an invaluable resource for scholars and advanced students in fields including literary studies, social sciences, art, media, and communication.