Melanie Swalwell's homepage

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BA(Hons) Mq, PhD UTS

melanie [dot] swalwell [at] gmail [dot] com

I am a scholar of digital media arts, cultures and histories. My research centres on newer media with particular attention to media arts and digital games, as well as the intersections of these. I am concerned with questions of aesthetic and affective experience and the implications of these for theories of audience reception, engagement and meaning making. Much of my research attends to experimental media uses, and the issues that are raised by the creations of media artists, modders, and independent game developers. I also undertake research with different communities of practice (lanners, collectors, home coders).

I am the 2009 recipient of the State Library of New South Wales’ Nancy Keesing Fellowship. My project there is entitled “The Production and Reception of Computer Games in 1980s Australia”.

I am also currently finishing a suite of projects on the history of digital games in New Zealand. Outcomes include traditional and interactive journal articles, a monograph (in preparation), an exhibition of historic photographs, an online, community database of early NZ software, as well as revived examples of such software.

I lecture in the Screen and Media Department at Flinders University, where I am coordinate the Bachelor of Media degree.

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Publications Record

In press and forthcoming (email me if you’d like access to files)

Melanie Swalwell and Jason Wilson (eds) The Pleasures of Computer Gaming: Essays on Cultural History, Theory and Aesthetics, is available for purchase here.

’The New Zealand Story’: A Cultural History of the Early Computer Gaming Industry in New Zealand
Few people know that New Zealand made a range of digital games in the
1980s – arcade, console and home computer. I am working on a book manuscript of my research into this period. Some pieces that may be of
interest from the research, thus far:

(2008) 1980s Home Coding: the art of amateur
programming, Aotearoa Digital Arts New Media Reader, Stella
Brennan and Susan Ballard (eds), Auckland: Clouds.

(forthcoming) Melanie Swalwell & Michael Davidson
Malzak, Ludologica Retro: Volume 1: Vintage Arcade
(1971-1984), Matteo Bittanti and Ian Bogost (eds).

(2007) “The Remembering and the Forgetting of Early Digital
Games: From novelty to detritus and back again” Journal of
Visual Culture, special issue, Detritus & the Moving Image, Amelie
Hastie, ed., vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 255-273.

NZTronix
This is a related research team effort, which formed following my historical research into NZ’s early digital games production. We are concerned with the preservation of New Zealand’s unique early software.

NZTronix Team Research Blog
Go to my Early NZ Software Database

Read an article I wrote about our research: “Towards the Preservation of Local Computer Game Software: Challenges, strategies, reflections”, Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, (special issue on cultural memory and digital preservation, ed. Will Straw and Jessica Santone). For full text, go here

And here’s a recent interview I did on game preservation for ABC TV’s “Good Game”, for a story called Console conservation, 2 March 2009.

(2006) “Castoffs from the Golden Age” (multimedia
design/programming by Erik Loyer), Vectors: Journal of Culture and
Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, issue 3, April.

“Cast-offs from the Golden Age” is a work of 
fragments: there are moments of fascination and serendipity, as well
as the occasional dead end. You are the researcher who is charged
with uncovering the history of early digital games in New Zealand.
Early on you discover that this will be no easy task. Nevertheless,
a picture of the early NZ games industry gradually emerges from your
pursuit of various avenues of inquiry. Was it what you expected?
Play it and add your reflections to the database.

(2005) “Early Games Production in New Zealand”, DiGRA Conference: “Changing Views: Worlds in Play”, 17-20 June, DiGRA Proceedings.

Also, an English summary of a brief article, Planspiel Ost, on game production in the former East Germany (Kerstin Grosch, trans). There are some interesting similarities to the NZ situation.