Can a game take care of us? And do we want it to?

Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released on March 20, 2020—just as a pandemic kept many from family, work, restaurants, and the rest of their regularly scheduled lives. At its height, the game averaged one million copies sold per day, as players sought comfort, escape, and a virtual means of connection. In this book, game scholar Noah Wardrip-Fruin, isolated with his family by both lockdown and disability, explores the power of this game and the mixed emotions of a player and a parent trying to make it from one day to the next—while his kids’ obsession with Animal Crossing creates conflicts between them and pushback against family rules.
 
Wardrip-Fruin helps both Animal Crossing fans and newcomers understand the unexpected beneath the game’s surface: like the story of the first Animal Crossing, codesigned by an absent father seeking connection; like the hallmarks of video game manipulation, from “streak” bonuses to game-determined playtimes; like the appeal of endless shopping, in a kind of “safe” capitalism; and, of course, like the character quirks of a raccoon dog, Tom Nook, who provides a world of both safety and strange paternalism.
 
For many, this blockbuster game offered a comforting world compared to a reality of danger. In this first entry in the Replay series, Wardrip-Fruin offers an absorbing investigation of a game’s role in contemporary social life and a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone who loves or is puzzled by this Nintendo sensation.

In December 1993, gaming changed forever. id Software's seminal shooter DOOM was released, and it shook the foundations of the medium. Daniel Pinchbeck brings together the complete story of DOOM for the first time.

This book takes a look at the early days of first-person gaming and the video game studio system. It discusses the prototypes and the groundbreaking technology that drove the game forward and offers a detailed analysis of gameplay and level design. Pinchbeck also examines DOOM's contributions to wider gaming culture, such as online multiplay and the modding community, and the first-person gaming genre, focusing on DOOM's status as a foundational title and the development of the genre since 1993. Pinchbeck draws extensively from primary data: from the game itself, from the massive fan culture surrounding the title, and from interviews with the developers who made it. This book is not only the definitive work on DOOM but a snapshot of a period of gaming history, a manifesto for a development ethos, and a celebration of game culture at its best.

EnTwine: Critical and Creative Teaching with Twine is the first full-length collection devoted to teaching with the popular, digital story-telling platform Twine. Until now, few scholarly accounts have focused on how disparate communities use, share, and learn about Twine. Contributors to this volume demonstrate how Twine helps to forge communities of practice committed to learning and sharing together, inside and outside of classrooms. The book’s case studies range across humanities, STEM, industry, and activist contexts. Authors from across the world share how they use Twine in teaching—whether creating Twines for students, holding workshops, or using Twine to build communities and preserve the voices of the people who use it. Readers will find practical examples in the Twine Objects featured at the end of each section as well as a wealth of open-access resources hosted in an online repository and connected to the book’s digital version. EnTwine invites readers, teachers, students, and makers of all kinds to learn, adapt, share, and teach with Twine.

An entertaining deep dive into the world, gameplay, and evolution of the hugely successful Assassin’s Creed video game franchise​

A hooded figure stands in a bell tower overlooking medieval Jerusalem, surveying his prey. Parkour-style, he leaps down into the square to kill his target before vanishing into the crowd . . .

Released in fall 2007, Assassin’s Creed transformed video gaming. Across more than a dozen franchise entries, players engage with the eternal conflict between the Order of Assassins and the nefarious Templar Order, carrying out missions in a series of painstakingly rendered historical settings, from the Holy Lands during the Third Crusade to Renaissance Italy, the Age of Piracy, the French Revolution, and Victorian London. Everything is Permitted is an analysis of the development, evolution, gameplay, and world-building of this sprawling and distinctive franchise.

Cameron Kunzelman examines key themes and concepts that connect the games in the series. Combining close readings of the games themselves with discussion of the broader landscape of video game franchises since its initial release, he uncovers what it means for a game to be part of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Kunzelman maps the elements that contribute to the immersiveness and continual playability of the games, showing how historically inflected conspiracies and science fictional premises ground the fantastical stories the games tell on a massive scale.

Diving into the real-world histories and ideas that the game designers used for inspiration, Kunzelman argues that the virtual conflicts between the franchise’s opposing sides offer intriguing insights into actual reality, from ethical dilemmas to the roles of freedom and fate. He demonstrates how, by incorporating themes of means and ends, control and freedom into its gameplay, the franchise engages with profound questions in a sustained, long-form way that is unique among video games. As the Assassins say, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

 

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A playful reflection on animals and video games, and what each can teach us about the other
 

Video games conjure new worlds for those who play them, human or otherwise: they’ve been played by cats, orangutans, pigs, and penguins, and they let gamers experience life from the perspective of a pet dog, a predator or a prey animal, or even a pathogen. In Game, author Tom Tyler provides the first sustained consideration of video games and animals and demonstrates how thinking about animals and games together can prompt fresh thinking about both.

Game comprises thirteen short essays, each of which examines a particular video game, franchise, aspect of gameplay, or production in which animals are featured, allowing us to reflect on conventional understandings of humans, animals, and the relationships between them. Tyler contemplates the significance of animals who insert themselves into video games, as protagonists, opponents, and brute resources, but also as ciphers, subjects, and subversive guides to new ways of thinking. These animals encourage us to reconsider how we understand games, contesting established ideas about winning and losing, difficulty settings, accessibility, playing badly, virtuality, vitality and vulnerability, and much more.

Written in a playful style, Game draws from a dizzying array of sources, from children’s television, sitcoms, and regional newspapers to medieval fables, Shakespearean tragedy, and Edwardian comedy; from primatology, entomology, and hunting and fishing manuals to theological tracts and philosophical treatises. By examining video games through the lens of animals and animality, Tyler leads us to a greater humility regarding the nature and status of the human creature, and a greater sensitivity in dealings with other animals.

Analyzing music's contributions to video games' narrative and thematic meanings.

This book provides semiotically focused analyses and interpretations of video game music, focusing specifically on the musical representation of three demographic diversity traits. Adopting a narratologist orientation to supplement existing ludological scholarship, these analyses apply music semiotics to crucial modern-day issues such as the representation of gender, race, and religion in video games.

An original and welcome contribution to the field, it considers musical meaning in relation to the aspects of gender, race, and religion. This book will help readers develop language and context in which to consider video game music in terms of society and representation and will encourage future research in these critical areas. Containing twenty-five detailed analytical case studies of musical representation in video game music, the book sets out theoretical and conceptual frameworks beneficial for interpreting musical meaning from video game soundtracks. Though players and commentators may be tempted to view a game’s soundtrack as mere background music, this research demonstrates video game music’s social relevance as a major factor impacting players’ cultural attitudes, values, and beliefs.

Part I explores immersion, interactivity, and interpretation in video game music, proposing a theory of interpretative interactivity to account for players’ semiotic agency in dialogue with their ludic agency. Part II explores musical gender representation in a trajectory from conventional gender construction, alternative femininities and masculinities, and the potential for nonbinary representational possibilities. Part III explores the musical representation of nationality, culture, and race, proposing the concept of racialized fantasy and applying frameworks from race scholarship to connect media representations of race to real-world racial justice movements. Part IV examines religion, introducing the concept of sonic iconography to connect theological meanings to the use of sacred music in video game music.
 

Settler colonial studies and Indigenous studies are often assumed to be the same intellectual project. In Indigenomicon, Jodi A. Byrd examines the differences between the two fields by bringing video game studies and Indigenous studies into conversation with Black studies, queer studies, and Indigenous feminist critique. Byrd theorizes “the image of the law of the Indigenous” as structuring dispossession in games including Assassin’s Creed, Animal Crossing, BioShock Infinite, and Demon Souls. They demonstrate how games and play might reveal histories of slavery, genocide, and theft of Indigenous lands even as their structures obscure Indigenous spatial and embodied practices that prioritize relationships with land, water, plants, and spirits. With ground and relationality defined as key concepts, Byrd centers Indigenous visions of dystopias to reveal how game spaces encode settler structures of governance even as the design of games might yet provide vital modes of resistance to Indigenous erasure.

Explores the representation of slave revolt in video games—and the trouble with making history playable

Kill the Overseer! profiles and problematizes digital games that depict Atlantic slavery and “gamify” slave resistance. In videogames emphasizing plantation labor, the player may choose to commit small acts of resistance like tool-breaking or working slowly. Others dramatically stage the slave’s choice to flee enslavement and journey northward, and some depict outright violent revolt against the master and his apparatus. In this work, Sarah Juliet Lauro questions whether the reduction of a historical enslaved person to a digital commodity in games such as Mission US, Assassin’s Creed, and Freedom Cry ought to trouble us as a further commodification of slavery’s victims, or whether these interactive experiences offer an empowering commemoration of the history of slave resistance. 

Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Made in Asia/America explores the key role video games play within the race makings of Asia/America. Its fourteen critical essays on games, ranging from Death Stranding to Animal Crossing, and five roundtables with twenty Asian/American game makers examine the historical entanglements of games, Asia, and America, and reveal the ways games offer new modes of imagining imperial violence, racial difference, and coalition. Shifting away from Eurocentric, white, masculinist takes on gaming, the contributors focus on minority and queer experiences, practices, and innovative scholarly methods to better account for the imperial circulation of games. Encouraging ambiguous and contextual ways of understanding games, the editors offer an “interactive” editorial method, a genre-expanding approach that encourages hybrid works of autotheory, queer of color theory, and conversation among game makers and scholars to generate divergent meanings of games, play, and “Asian America.”

Contributors. Matthew Seiji Burns, Edmond Y. Chang, Naomi Clark, Miyoko Conley, Toby Đỗ, Anthony Dominguez, Tara Fickle, Sarah Christina Ganzon, Yuxin Gao, Domini Gee, Melos Han-Tani, Huan He, Matthew Jungsuk Howard, Rachael Hutchinson, Paraluman (Luna) Javier, Sisi Jiang, Marina Ayano Kittaka, Minh Le, Haneul Lee, Rachel Li, Christian Kealoha Miller, Patrick Miller, Keita C. Moore, Souvik Mukherjee, Christopher B. Patterson, Pamela (Pam) Punzalan, Takeo Rivera, Yasheng She, D. Squinkifer, Lien B. Tran, Prabhash Ranjan Tripathy, Emperatriz Ung, Gerald Voorhees, Yizhou (Joe) Xu, Robert Yang, Mike Ren Yi

Over a mere three decades, the video game became the entertainment medium of choice for millions of people, who now spend more time in the interactive virtual world of games than they do in watching movies or even television. The release of new games or game-playing equipment, such as the PlayStation 2, generates great excitement and even buying frenzies. Yet, until now, this giant on the popular culture landscape has received little in-depth study or analysis.

In this book, Mark J. P. Wolf and four other scholars conduct the first thorough investigation of the video game as an artistic medium. The book begins with an attempt to define what is meant by the term "video game" and the variety of modes of production within the medium. It moves on to a brief history of the video game, then applies the tools of film studies to look at the medium in terms of the formal aspects of space, time, narrative, and genre. The book also considers the video game as a cultural entity, object of museum curation, and repository of psychological archetypes. It closes with a list of video game research resources for further study.

Exploring how Black youth are reshaping game design to dismantle stereotypes and spark social change 

In the early 2000s, digital gaming rose to cultural and economic prominence. Communities of color, however, and especially Black youth, were largely excluded from gaming culture. The rare Black character in games tended to reinforce stereotypes, while racial bias was often surreptitiously embedded in game design platforms—what decolonial scholars call “whitestream” computing. Progressive game design education initiatives and new technologies have recently begun to dismantle these barriers. Yet, because biases remain, historically excluded young people still need to actively reconfigure these digital spaces to fully develop and convey their own perspectives. 

In Meta-Tuning Justice, digital rhetoric scholar Laquana Cooke explores how Black youth express cultural identity and challenge dominant narratives through innovative game design. Cooke introduces the Transformative Constructionist Learning (TCL) paradigm and its core theory of “meta-tuning”—the idea that students are better able to adjust to new challenges through trial-and-error and experimentation in educational environments that correspondingly adjust to their evolving learning needs. In contrast to traditional education practices, which assume the neutrality of technology, Cooke approaches it as a tool for social transformation. Drawing on the TCL paradigm, she explores how the unique cultural algorithms and expressions (like popping and locking dance forms) that inform the programming and designs of Black youth represent a powerful form of resistance and creation. 

Through rich ethnographic case studies across multiple educational settings, and with gaming as its experimental center, this book presents a compelling vision of how TCL and meta-tuning can help make technologies more equitable. Cooke’s innovative study offers insights crucial to scholars and practitioners in game studies, Science and Technology Studies, STEM education, and racial equity in digital learning. 

Exploring how Black youth are reshaping game design to dismantle stereotypes and spark social change 

In the early 2000s, digital gaming rose to cultural and economic prominence. Communities of color, however, and especially Black youth, were largely excluded from gaming culture. The rare Black character in games tended to reinforce stereotypes, while racial bias was often surreptitiously embedded in game design platforms—what decolonial scholars call “whitestream” computing. Progressive game design education initiatives and new technologies have recently begun to dismantle these barriers. Yet, because biases remain, historically excluded young people still need to actively reconfigure these digital spaces to fully develop and convey their own perspectives. 

In Meta-Tuning Justice, digital rhetoric scholar Laquana Cooke explores how Black youth express cultural identity and challenge dominant narratives through innovative game design. Cooke introduces the Transformative Constructionist Learning (TCL) paradigm and its core theory of “meta-tuning”—the idea that students are better able to adjust to new challenges through trial-and-error and experimentation in educational environments that correspondingly adjust to their evolving learning needs. In contrast to traditional education practices, which assume the neutrality of technology, Cooke approaches it as a tool for social transformation. Drawing on the TCL paradigm, she explores how the unique cultural algorithms and expressions (like popping and locking dance forms) that inform the programming and designs of Black youth represent a powerful form of resistance and creation. 

Through rich ethnographic case studies across multiple educational settings, and with gaming as its experimental center, this book presents a compelling vision of how TCL and meta-tuning can help make technologies more equitable. Cooke’s innovative study offers insights crucial to scholars and practitioners in game studies, Science and Technology Studies, STEM education, and racial equity in digital learning. 

With the rise of drones and computer-controlled weapons, the line between war and video games continues to blur. In this book, the authors trace how the realities of war are deeply inflected by their representation in popular entertainment. War games and other media, in turn, feature an increasing number of weapons, tactics, and threat scenarios from the War on Terror.

While past analyses have emphasized top-down circulation of pro-military ideologies through government public relations efforts and a cooperative media industry, The Military-Entertainment Complex argues for a nonlinear relationship, defined largely by market and institutional pressures. Tim Lenoir and Luke Caldwell explore the history of the early days of the video game industry, when personnel and expertise flowed from military contractors to game companies; to a middle period when the military drew on the booming game industry to train troops; to a present in which media corporations and the military influence one another cyclically to predict the future of warfare.

In addition to obvious military-entertainment titles like America’s Army, Lenoir and Caldwell investigate the rise of best-selling franchise games such as Call of Duty, Battlefield, Medal of Honor, and Ghost Recon. The narratives and aesthetics of these video games permeate other media, including films and television programs. This commodification and marketing of the future of combat has shaped the public’s imagination of war in the post-9/11 era and naturalized the U.S. Pentagon’s vision of a new way of war.

Upon its premiere in 1992, Midway’s Mortal Kombat spawned an enormously influential series of fighting games, notorious for their violent “fatality” moves performed by photorealistic characters. Targeted by lawmakers and moral reformers, the series directly inspired the creation of an industrywide rating system for video games and became a referendum on the wide popularity of 16-bit home consoles. Along the way, it became one of the world’s most iconic fighting games, and formed a transmedia franchise that continues to this day.

This book traces Mortal Kombat’s history as an American product inspired by both Japanese video games and Chinese martial-arts cinema, its successes and struggles in adapting to new market trends, and the ongoing influence of its secret-strewn narrative world. After outlining the specific elements of gameplay that differentiated Mortal Kombat from its competitors in the coin-op market, David Church examines the various martial-arts films that inspired its Orientalist imagery, helping explain its stereotypical uses of race and gender. He also posits the games as a cultural landmark from a moment when public policy attempted to intervene in both the remediation of cinematic aesthetics within interactive digital games and in the transition of public gaming spaces into the domestic sphere. Finally, the book explores how the franchise attempted to conquer other forms of media in the 1990s, lost ground to a new generation of 3D games in the 2000s, and has successfully rebooted itself in the 2010s to reclaim its legacy.

How AI, games, and interactive fiction are transforming storytelling, learning, and play.

In Narrative Interplay in the Digital Era, leading scholars and artists explore how digital narratives, alternate reality games, and AI-driven storytelling reshape how we create, experience, and teach interactive fiction. This collection moves beyond traditional analysis and examines the social and artistic dimensions of interactivity, highlighting how narratives unfold dynamically through player engagement and machine collaboration.

Organized into three sections—alternate realities, digital interactive fiction, and the politics of gaming—this book reveals the evolving role of play and interactivity in contemporary education, creative expression, and online culture. Contributors offer insights from inside the creative process, centering the perspectives of game designers and artists to shed light on how interactive stories emerge at the intersection of technology and human imagination.

A practical resource for researchers in game studies, electronic literature, and digital storytelling, this collection also speaks to educators and creators eager to explore how AI and interactivity are redefining the future of narrative.
 

A potent new book examines the overlap between our ecological crisis and video games
 

Video games may be fun and immersive diversions from daily life, but can they go beyond the realm of entertainment to do something serious—like help us save the planet? As one of the signature issues of the twenty-first century, ecological deterioration is seemingly everywhere, but it is rarely considered via the realm of interactive digital play. In Playing Nature, Alenda Y. Chang offers groundbreaking methods for exploring this vital overlap.

Arguing that games need to be understood as part of a cultural response to the growing ecological crisis, Playing Nature seeds conversations around key environmental science concepts and terms. Chang suggests several ways to rethink existing game taxonomies and theories of agency while revealing surprising fundamental similarities between game play and scientific work.

Gracefully reconciling new media theory with environmental criticism, Playing Nature examines an exciting range of games and related art forms, including historical and contemporary analog and digital games, alternate- and augmented-reality games, museum exhibitions, film, and science fiction. Chang puts her surprising ideas into conversation with leading media studies and environmental humanities scholars like Alexander Galloway, Donna Haraway, and Ursula Heise, ultimately exploring manifold ecological futures—not all of them dystopian.

Game streamers and live commentators are producing increasingly comprehensive analyses of gameplay, yet scholarship still tends to flatten the experiential media of video games into text for close reading. By shifting focus toward the immersiveness of video games, Playthrough Poetics makes the case for gameplay as a necessary, alternate method. Contributors to this volume engage widely with the activity of play through autoethnographies, meta-analyses of self-broadcasting, new procedural methods like gamespace soundwalking, as well as the affective aspects of games research. In doing so, they model new possibilities for academic players and gamers alike.

Rigorous scholarship meets cultural practice in this innovative, multi-modal edited collection that includes video essays and offers transcripts of the playthroughs themselves. Readers (and viewers) will come away with a toolkit of models, case studies, and conceptual frameworks for analyzing video games through gameplay. This volume is a fresh return to the joy of play: the poetics of games as contemporary forms of storytelling and interactivity.

With contributions from Ashlee Bird, Brandon Blackburn, Milena Droumeva, Kishonna Gray, Robyn Hope, Ben Scholl, Maria Sommers, Ashlyn Sparrow, Christine Tran, and Aaron Trammell.

In The Queer Games Avant-Garde, Bonnie Ruberg presents twenty interviews with twenty-two queer video game developers whose radical, experimental, vibrant, and deeply queer work is driving a momentous shift in the medium of video games. Speaking with insight and candor about their creative practices as well as their politics and passions, these influential and innovative game makers tell stories about their lives and inspirations, the challenges they face, and the ways they understand their places within the wider terrain of video game culture. Their insights go beyond typical conversations about LGBTQ representation in video games or how to improve “diversity” in digital media. Instead, they explore queer game-making practices, the politics of queer independent video games, how queerness can be expressed as an aesthetic practice, the influence of feminist art on their work, and the future of queer video games and technology. These engaging conversations offer a portrait of an influential community that is subverting and redefining the medium of video games by placing queerness front and center.

Interviewees:
Ryan Rose Aceae, Avery Alder, Jimmy Andrews, Santo Aveiro-Ojeda, Aevee Bee, Tonia B******, Mattie Brice, Nicky Case, Naomi Clark, Mo Cohen, Heather Flowers, Nina Freeman, Jerome Hagen, Kat Jones, Jess Marcotte, Andi McClure, Llaura McGee, Seanna Musgrave, Liz Ryerson, Elizabeth Sampat, Loren Schmidt, Sarah Schoemann, Dietrich Squinkifer, Kara Stone, Emilia Yang, Robert Yang

Written for all gaming enthusiasts, this book fuses Latinx studies and video game studies to document how Latinx masculinities are portrayed in high-budget action-adventure video games, inviting Latinxs and others to insert their experiences into games made by an industry that fails to see them.

The book employs an intersectional approach through performance theory, border studies, and lived experience to analyze the designed identity “Player Juan.” Player Juan manifests in video game representations through a discourse of criminality that sets expectations of who and what Latinxs can be and do. Developing an original approach to video game experiences, the author theorizes video games as border crossings, and defines a new concept—digital mestizaje—that pushes players, readers, and scholars to deploy a Latinx way of seeing and that calls on researchers to consider a digital object’s constructive as well as destructive qualities.

Silent Hill: The Terror Engine, the second of the two inaugural studies in the Landmark Video Games series from series editors Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, is both a close analysis of the first three Silent Hill games and a general look at the whole series. Silent Hill, with its first title released in 1999, is one of the most influential of the horror video game series. Perron situates the games within the survival horror genre, both by looking at the history of the genre and by comparing Silent Hill with such important forerunners as Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil. Taking a transmedia approach and underlining the designer's cinematic and literary influences, he uses the narrative structure; the techniques of imagery, sound, and music employed; the game mechanics; and the fiction, artifact, and gameplay emotions elicited by the games to explore the specific fears survival horror games are designed to provoke and how the experience as a whole has made the Silent Hill series one of the major landmarks of video game history.

Simulating Good and Evil shows that the moral panic surrounding violent videogames is deeply misguided, and often politically motivated, but that games are nevertheless morally important. Simulated actions are morally defensible because they take place outside the real world and do not inflict real harms. Decades of research purporting to show that videogames are immoral has failed to produce convincing evidence of this. However, games are morally important because they simulate decisions that would have moral weight if they were set in the real world. Videogames should be seen as spaces in which players may experiment with moral reasoning strategies without taking any actions that would themselves be subject to moral evaluation. Some videogame content may be upsetting or offensive, but mere offense does not necessarily indicate a moral problem. Upsetting content is best understood by applying existing theories for evaluating political ideologies and offensive speech.
 

StarCraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 1998) is a real-time strategy video game, placing the player in command of three extraterrestrial races fighting against each other for strategic control of resources, terrain, and power. Simon Dor examines the game’s unanticipated effect by delving into the history of the game and the two core competencies it encouraged: decoding and foreseeing. Although StarCraft was not designed as an e-sport, its role in developing foreseeing skills helped give rise to one of the earliest e-sport communities in South Korea. 

Apart from the game’s clear landmark status, StarCraft offers a unique insight into changes in gaming culture and, more broadly, the marketability and profit of previously niche areas of interest. The book places StarCraft in the history of real-time strategy games in the 1990s—Dune II, Command & Conquer, Age of Empires—in terms of visual style, narrative tropes, and control. It shows how design decisions, technological infrastructures, and a strong contribution from its gaming community through Battle.net and its campaign editor were necessary conditions for the flexibility it needed to grow its success. In exploring the fanatic clusters of competitive players who formed the first tournaments and professionalized gaming, StarCraft shows that the game was key to the transition towards foreseeing play and essential to competitive gaming and e-sports. 

"In May 2000 I was fired from my job as a reporter on a finance newsletter because of an obsession with a video game.

It was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

So begins this story of personal redemption through the unlikely medium of electronic games. Quake, World of Warcraft, Eve Online, and other online games not only offered author Jim Rossignol an excellent escape from the tedium of office life. They also provided him with a diverse global community and a job—as a games journalist.

Part personal history, part travel narrative, part philosophical reflection on the meaning of play, This Gaming Life describes Rossignol’s encounters in three cities: London, Seoul, and Reykjavik. From his days as a Quake genius in London’s increasingly corporate gaming culture; to Korea, where gaming is a high-stakes televised national sport; to Iceland, the home of his ultimate obsession, the idiosyncratic and beguiling Eve Online, Rossignol introduces us to a vivid and largely undocumented world of gaming lives.

Torn between unabashed optimism about the future of games and lingering doubts about whether they are just a waste of time, This Gaming Life also raises important questions about this new and vital cultural form. Should we celebrate the “serious” educational, social, and cultural value of games, as academics and journalists are beginning to do? Or do these high-minded justifications simply perpetuate the stereotype of games as a lesser form of fun? In this beautifully written, richly detailed, and inspiring book, Rossignol brings these abstract questions to life, immersing us in a vibrant landscape of gaming experiences.

“We need more writers like Jim Rossignol, writers who are intimately familiar with gaming, conversant in the latest research surrounding games, and able to write cogently and interestingly about the experience of playing as well as the deeper significance of games.”
—Chris Baker, Wired

“This Gaming Life is a fascinating and eye-opening look into the real human impact of gaming culture. Traveling the globe and drawing anecdotes from many walks of life, Rossignol takes us beyond the media hype and into the lives of real people whose lives have been changed by gaming. The results may surprise you.”
—Raph Koster, game designer and author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design

“Is obsessive video gaming a character flaw? In This Gaming Life, Jim Rossignol answers with an emphatic ‘no,’ and offers a passionate and engaging defense of what is too often considered a ‘bad habit’ or ‘guilty pleasure.’”
—Joshua Davis, author of The Underdog

“This is a wonderfully literate look at gaming cultures, which you don't have to be a gamer to enjoy. The Korea section blew my mind.”
—John Seabrook, New Yorker staff writer and author of Flash of Genius and Other True Stories of Invention

digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

What makes a real game? Who is a gamer? And what type of play do we value?
 
On the surface, the 2015 game Undertale didn’t seem like much, supported by fan funding and with minimalist retro graphics. But despite its pixelated monsters and dated role-playing mechanics, Undertale invited fans and players to rethink their very relationship with gaming and game characters. Players encountered an extraordinary range of possible play experiences, with paths through the game’s unassuming world leading to both empathy and extreme violence, offering room for reflection and growth. Players could befriend (sometimes queer) monsters or kill them, for instance, appealing to each monster’s unique personality to negotiate survival and find community.
 
Contextualizing this game’s success in the wake of the Gamergate online harassment campaign and meditating on questions of violence and authenticity, writer and game scholar Anastasia Salter offers a profound exploration of this game sensation and a personal story of hope at a time when Salter was otherwise “done” with games. Undertale’s unique structure helped make it synonymous with “indie” games, built outside of the studio as a passion project and inspiring similar passion among its many fans even a decade later. But Undertale’s story also speaks to an auteur dream: What game developer Toby Fox and his collaborators accomplished on a small budget, with relatively simple tools, has left people replaying, arguing, and creating in its wake.
 
As we enter a cultural moment where intense interest is shifting towards flashy creativity, powered by generative artificial intelligence, Undertale reminds fans and newcomers of the power of thoughtful and intentional human design.