The Counterfeit Coin argues that games and related entertainment media have become almost inseparable from fantasy. In turn, these media are making fantasy itself visible in new ways. Though apparently asocial and egocentric—an internal mental image expressing the fulfillment of some wish—fantasy has become a key term in social contestations of the emerging medium. At issue is whose fantasies are catered to, who feels powerful and gets their way, and who is left out. This book seeks to undo the monolith of commercial gaming by locating multiplicity and difference within fantasy itself. It introduces and tracks three broad fantasy traditions that dynamically connect apparently distinct strata of a game (story and play), that join games to other media, and that encircle players in pleasurable loops as they follow these connections.

— Sheila C. Murphy, author of How Television Invented New Media

“The Counterfeit Coin is ideal for scholars of film interested in learning more about video games and for video game scholars interested in psychoanalysis and comparative media studies. It also intervenes into the ongoing debates within game studies about how games generate meaning, be that by virtue of mechanics, code, and procedural elements, or narrative elements found in other media forms, like story and plot.”— Ari Gass, Film Quarterly