review essay British Game Studies? An Extended Review of Two New Publications David Surman Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy, Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006. 171 pp. ISBN 0–355–21357-X Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogame Forms and Contexts. London: I.B. Taurus, 2006. 264 pp. ISBN 1–85043–814–5 From animation to games Until relatively recently, games have not been taken seriously as cultural artefacts, and this has impacted on the perceived legitimacy of committed research into their culture, form and development. Cracks in the edifice of distinctions between high and low culture have meant a variety of scholarly work has emerged, in the past decade in particular, around the discordant mix of pop-cultural forms that circulate in mass-mediatized society. As the readers of periodicals like animation: an interdisciplinary journal will recognize, those championing the specificity of animation have carved out a suitably eccentric and fractious space from within the established research fields of film, media and cultural studies. Importantly, research is not limited to those dominant fields; issues of animation arising in medical, scientific and technical contexts offer profound insights into anima- tion (for example, Mori, 1970). This diversity of applications gives research into ‘ubiquitous’ media such as animation and games its defining interdisciplinarity. animation: an interdisciplinary journal (http://anm.sagepub.com) Copyright © 2007 SAGE (London, Los Angeles, New Delhi and Singapore) Vol 2(2): 273–282 [1746-8477(200707)]10.1177/1746847707078284 273-282 078284 Surman (HO) 21/8/07 12:27 Page 273