Melanie Swalwell's homepage

The Pleasures of Computer Gaming: Essays on Cultural History, Theory and Aesthetics. Melanie Swalwell and Jason Wilson, Eds. It’s available for purchase here or check it out at Addall.com

Publications Record

In press and forthcoming (under construction)

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BA(Hons) Mq, PhD UTS

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

I am a new media and cultural studies scholar. 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 currently working on 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.

Since 2004 I have been a lecturer in the Media Studies Programme at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. You can find my institutional homepage here, though as I am off campus at the moment, it’s somewhat out of date.

Read a recent interview I did on my NZ games research with Marty Weil on his ephemera blog (23 May 2008).

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NZTronix
This is a research team 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
Media release: Conserving Digital Heritage, VUW Public
Affairs, 17/10/07.

’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. Some pieces that may be of
interest from the research, thus far:

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

(forthcoming 2008) 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.

(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, Here’s 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.