Book Review: Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca, Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. 293 pp. ISBN 978—0415977210, $35.00 (pbk)

889 The strongest contribution of this book is its combination of a global perspective (from Ireland to Argentina to China) with a concentration on non-deterministic influences. The exemplars from all over the world set this book apart from any other new media offering right now. The authors’ rejection of any deterministic perspective resulted in holistic approaches that led to nuanced analyses. However, it should be noted that some of these studies are fairly old for a 2008 book. With the exception of two essays, the authors conducted their research prior to 2003. This reviewer notes that the study is relevant to current scholars only as a benchmark; much has changed since then, culturally as well as institutionally. On a second note, the editors in the introduction celebrate the range and variety of their methods. The book adds some much needed qualitative work to a field dominated by content analyses and survey work. However, some more stringent practitioners of ethnography would take issue with the liberal employ of the term. Depth interviews, for example, does not an ethnography make, at least by anthropological or sociological standards. For example, one of the studies culled data from a sample of just six bloggers. Though that particular chapter was useful for its descriptions of blogging routines, the study should have been labeled a ‘pilot study’ or expanded. These mild criticisms aside, the book is a worthwhile buy for academics interested in new media, or really, in any kind of journalism studies. It not only surveys the literature to date on digital newsrooms, web routines, and normative practices, but it also documents a specific temporal point in this third wave of research and provides a solid platform from which researchers may leap into the fourth wave.