New Books in Game Studies

Oct 12 2024 99 ep. 19

New Books in Game Studies Podcast artwork

Interviews with scholars of game studies about their books.

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Maurice Suckling, "Paper Time Machines: Critical Game Design and Historical Board Games" (Routledge, 2024)

Oct 12 2024 35 mins

James Dunnigan’s memorable phrase serves as the first part of a title for this book, where it seeks to be applicable not just to analog wargames, but also to board games exploring non-expressly military history, that is, to political, diplomatic, social, economic, or other forms of history. Don’t board games about history, made predominantly out of (layered) paper, permit a kin

Jordan Minor, "Video Game of the Year: A Year-By-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977" (Abrams, 2023)

Sep 26 2024 17 mins

Pong. The Legend of Zelda. Final Fantasy VII. Rock Band. Fortnite. Animal Crossing: New Horizons. For each of the 40 years of video game history, there is a defining game, a game that captured the zeitgeist and left a legacy for all games that followed. Through a series of entertaining, informative, and opinionated critical essays, author and tech journalist Jordan Minor investigat

Marta Fijak and Artur Ganszyniec, "How and Why We Make Games" (CRC Press, 2024)

Sep 18 2024 32 mins

How and Why We Make Games (CRC Press, 2024) delves into the intricate realms of games and their creation, examining them through cultural, systemic, and, most notably, human lenses. It explores diverse themes such as authorship, creative responsibility, the tension between games as a product and games as a form of cultural expression, and the myth of a universal audience. The book

Hey, Robot!

Sep 16 2024 28 mins

Today, we’re playing with voice assistants and thinking about the role of voices in gaming with our guest, game designer and NYU professor Frank Lantz. Over the past nightmare year of the coronavirus, many of us have been hunkered down, trying to figure out how to pass the time with our families. Board game sales on Amazon were up 4,000% percent in March, when Americans began sh

Jordan Magnuson, "Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice" (Amherst College Press, 2023)

Sep 04 2024 35 mins

Scholars, critics, and creators describe certain videogames as being “poetic,” yet what that means or why it matters is rarely discussed. In Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice (Amherst College Press, 2023), independent game designer Jordan Magnuson explores the convergences between game making and lyric poetry and makes the surprising proposition that videogames can

Sarah Malanowski and Nicholas R. Baima, "Why It's Ok to Be a Gamer" (Routledge, 2024)

Sep 03 2024 24 mins

If you enjoy video games as a pastime, you are certainly not alone—billions of people worldwide now play video games. However, you may still find yourself reluctant to tell others this fact about yourself. After all, we are routinely warned that video games have the potential to cause addiction and violence. And when we aren’t being warned of their outright harms, we are told w

Christopher B. Patterson and Tara Fickle, "Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) about Us" (Duke UP, 2024)

Aug 24 2024 40 mins

Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) about Us (Duke UP, 2024) 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 rev

Tore C. Olsson, "Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

Aug 06 2024 75 mins

Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption II, set in 1911 and 1899, are the most-played American history video games since The Oregon Trail. Beloved by millions, they’ve been widely acclaimed for their realism and attention to detail. But how do they fare as re-creations of history? In Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past (St Martin's Press

Sören Schoppmeier, "Playing American: Open-World Videogames and the Reproduction of American Culture" (De Gruyter, 2023)

Jul 19 2024 25 mins

Videogames have always depicted representations of American culture, but how exactly they feed back into this culture is less obvious. Advocating an action-based understanding of both videogames and culture, this book delineates how aspects of American culture are reproduced transnationally through popular open-world videogames. Playing American: Open-World Videogames and the Repr

Souvik Mukherjee, "Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: Development, Culture(s) and Representations" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Jul 01 2024 25 mins

While there has been considerable research on digital cultures in the Indian Subcontinent, video games have received scant attention so far. Yet, they are hugely influential. Globally, India is perceived as a ‘sleeping giant’ of the video game industry with immense untapped potential, and Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan also have developed significant gaming c