Jim Rossignol

Got this book through Early Reviewers over two years ago. Jim Rossignol is a games journalist who uses some of his physical travels as a narrative framework to reflect on his virtual explorations. I picked out the book on the Early Reviewers list because of my interest in media geographies, but also as a media studies grad student who hasn't read very much about digital gaming and has a slight aversion to gaming culture. Rossignol doesn't really follow through on the conceit "Travels in Three Cities," especially in the second section, on Seoul, which is poorly researched and based on a lot of vaguely digital Orientalist observations -- and half of the section has nothing to do with Seoul or East Asian gaming cultures at all. Also, in championing gaming, Rossignol is way too celebratory of all the ways in which gamers can and could unconsciously help corporations and researchers discover things about human behavior (along the lines of crowdsourcing). There are media scholars who would see this as exploiting gamers' unpaid digital labor, and I'd tend to agree with them. And finally, Rossignol's writing is kind of repetitive (though maybe the parts where he restates the same points in a single paragraph got edited out in the final edition) and there are long stretches of geeky navel-gazing that failed to hold my attention as a non-gamer. Still, some parts are engaging and I learned a little.… (more)