Oh, be still my historian heart: a new journal has been announced (first issue forthcoming this winter), entitled Historical Studies of Digital Entertainment Media. Since I've gotten surprisingly enthusiastic responses from all of my professors, even the technophobes, on my plans for an article on the history of virtual worlds in China, I'm thrilled that a dedicated space for this sort of discourse is opening up soon. No details yet on what sort of things are going to be included in the first issue, but it is setting up to be an accessible slice of academia:
The How They Got Game project is pleased to announce that we will be starting up a new journal, with the title Historical Studies of Digital Entertainment Media. The new journal will be edited by Matteo Bittanti and Henry Lowood (me). We have been working with a group of authors for the first issue, which we hope will be published Winter 2009. The theme for this first issue will be "Digital Games: Historical and Preservation Studies." We hope soon to be able to announce the members of the editorial board. Did we mention that the journal will be published exclusively on-line? We will be using the Open Journal System of the Public Knowledge Project, which has a good track record as a publishing system for refereed academic and scholarly publications. We intend that authors will retain all rights to their contributions. Of course, ideas are welcome for future issues and contributions to the journal.
The trend towards open access academic journals is pretty cool; I don't think JSTOR is ever going to go entirely by the wayside, but there's increasing acceptance of online-only and open access publishing (a definite positive for academics vying for tenure in a publish-or-perish world). I'll be keeping tabs on this one as it develops — Eludamos is pretty interesting, but this journal sounds tailor made for some of my interests. Huzzah! Historical Studies of Digital Entertainment Media [How They Got Game via GameSetWatch]