New Book Goes 'Beyond Fun'

Drew Davidson offered this press release for a new book on the Serious Games Listserv today:

Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) Press debuts the publication of “Beyond Fun: Serious Games and Media” this month. The book features the work of more than 15 international contributors examining how games and media can impact learning.

Topics include cheating and violence in video games, the use of games in classrooms, and how media tools such as simulations and blogs can foster learning and a new digital, procedural literacy. Instead of completely separate individual articles, the contributors to “Beyond Fun: Serious Games and Media” have orchestrated the articles together, reading and writing as a whole so that concepts across the articles resonate with each other.

“We’re excited to release ‘Beyond Fun’,” says Drew Davidson, ETC Press Editor and Director of ETC in Pittsburgh, “it has evocative articles written by leading practitioners in the fields of education, learning, games and media.”

“Beyond Fun” is the second book published by ETC Press, following the initial release of “stories in between: narratives & mediums @ play” which explores the interplay between stories and media. “Stories in between” focuses around the transmedia experience of “Myst” as it moves across media from games to books to comics and more.

The ETC Press is an academic and open-source publishing imprint that distributes its work in print, electronic and digital form. Inviting readers to contribute to and create versions of each publication, ETC Press fosters a community of collaborative authorship and dialogue across media. ETC Press represents an experiment and an evolution in publishing, bridging virtual and physical media to redefine the future of publication.

For more information, please visit: http://etc.cmu.edu/etcpress

The book looks very interesting. Here’s the write-up from the ETC Press site:

This book focuses on strategies for applying games, simulations and interactive experiences in learning contexts. The contributors orchestrated this collection together, reading and writing as a whole so that concepts resonate across articles. Throughout, the promises and problems of implementing games and media in learning experiences are explored. The articles have been authored by Clark Aldrich, Ian Bogost, Mia Consalvo, William Crosbie, Drew Davidson, Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Melinda Jackson, Donna Leishman, Michael Mateas, Marc Prensky, Scott Rettberg, Kurt Squire, David Thomas, Siobhan Thomas, Jill Walker Rettberg, and Jenny Weight.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License

The articles in the book are from two special issues of On The Horizon, published in 2004 and 2005. The book is a free download through Lulu.com, and is freely distributable for non-commercial purposes, which means professors and teachers can host the electronic version on their own servers and let students use it for free. A printed version is available for $24.95.