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Feminism in Play
Feminism in Play focuses on women as they are depicted in video games, as participants in games culture, and as contributors to the games industry. This volume showcases women’s resistance to the norms of games culture, as well as women’s play and creative practices both in and around the games industry. Contributors analyze the interconnections between games and the broader societal and structural issues impeding the successful inclusion of women in games and games culture. In offering this framework, this volume provides a platform to the silenced and marginalized, offering counter-narratives to the post-racial and post-gendered fantasies that so often obscure the violent context of production and consumption of games culture.
What Is a Game?
What is a videogame? What makes a videogame "good"? If a game is supposed to be fun, can it be fun without a good story? If another is supposed to be an accurate simulation, does it still need to be entertaining? With the ever-expanding explosion of new videogames and new developments in the gaming world, questions about videogame criticism are becoming more complex. The differing definitions that players and critics use to decide what a game is and what makes a game successful, often lead to different ideas of how games succeed or fail. This collection of new essays puts on display the variety and ambiguity of videogames. Each essay is a work of game criticism that takes a different approach to defining the game and analyzing it. Through analysis and critical methods, these essays discuss whether a game is defined by its rules, its narrative, its technology, or by the activity of playing it, and the tensions between these definitions. With essays on Overwatch, Dark Souls 3, Far Cry 4, Farmville and more, this collection attempts to show the complex changes, challenges and advances to game criticism in the era of videogames.
Frankenstein and STEAM
Charles E. Robinson, Professor Emeritus of English at The University of Delaware, definitively transformed study of the novel Frankenstein with his foundational volume The Frankenstein Notebooks and, in nineteenth century studies more broadly, brought heightened attention to the nuances of writing and editing. Frankenstein and STEAM consolidates the generative legacy of his later work on the novel's broad relation to topics in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM). Seven chapters written by leading and emerging scholars pay homage to Robinson's later perspectives of the novel and a concluding postscript contains remembrances by his colleagues and students. This volume not only makes explicit the question of what it means to be human, a question Robinson invited students and colleagues to examine throughout his career, but it also illustrates the depth of the field and diversity of those who have been inspired by Robinson's work. Frankenstein and STEAM offers direction for continuing scholarship on the intersections of literature, science, and technology. Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Ability Machines
Video games are both physically and cognitively demanding—so what does that mean for those with a disability or mental illness? Though they may seem at odds, Ability Machines illuminates just how vital video games are to understanding our bodies and abilities. In Ability Machines, Sky LaRell Anderson shows us how video games can help us imagine what our abilities mean and how they engage us physically, behaviorally, and cognitively to envision our agency beyond limitations. On the surface, this can mean games provide power fantasies; more profoundly, games can fundamentally reshape cultural and personal understandings of mental health, illness, disability, and accessibility. Video games are indeed ability machines that produce a reimagined state of agency. Featuring a comparative analysis of key video game titles, including Metal Gear Solid V, Wolfenstein II, Celeste, Devil May Cry 5, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Hades, Nier: Automata, and more, Ability Machines tackles larger questions of ability and how our bodies relate to interactive media.
Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons
On the fiftieth anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, a collection of essays that explores and celebrates the game’s legacy and its tremendous impact on gaming and popular culture. In 2024, the enormously influential tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons—also known as D&D—celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. To mark the occasion, editors Premeet Sidhu, Marcus Carter, and José Zagal have assembled an edited collection that celebrates and reflects on important parts of the game’s past, present, and future. Each chapter in Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons explores why the nondigital game is more popular than ever—with sales increasing 33 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic, de...
How to Play Video Games
Forty original contributions on games and gaming culture What does Pokémon Go tell us about globalization? What does Tetris teach us about rules? Is feminism boosted or bashed by Kim Kardashian: Hollywood? How does BioShock Infinite help us navigate world-building? From arcades to Atari, and phone apps to virtual reality headsets, video games have been at the epicenter of our ever-evolving technological reality. Unlike other media technologies, video games demand engagement like no other, which begs the question—what is the role that video games play in our lives, from our homes, to our phones, and on global culture writ large? How to Play Video Games brings together forty original essays...
Video Game Art Reader
This volume of VGAR critically analyzes video game art as a means of survival. Though "survival strategy" exists as a defined gaming genre, all video games--as unique, participatory artworks--model both individual and collaborative means of survival through play. Video games offer opportunities to navigate both historical and fictional conflicts, traverse landscapes devastated by climate change or nuclear holocaust, and manage the limited resources of individuals or even whole civilizations on earth and beyond. They offer players a dizzying array of dystopian scenarios in which to build and invent, cooperate with others (through other players, NPCs, or AI) to survive another day. Contributor...
Group Dynamics for Teams
Grounded in psychology research but with a practical focus on organizational behavior issues, Group Dynamics for Teams helps readers understand and participate in teams more effectively in day-to-day work. Best-selling author Daniel Levi and new co-author David A. Askay thoroughly examine basic group dynamics concepts, such as goals, norms, cooperation, and communication, as well as review the main challenges that teams face, such as conflict, decision making, problem solving, creativity, and valuing diversity. Throughout the book are discussions of the organizational context of teams, including the impacts of organizational culture, virtual teamwork, rewarding teams, and team building.
100 Greatest Video Game Characters
Though in existence for only a few decades, video games are now firmly established in mainstream culture all around the planet. Every year new games are produced, and every year new favorites emerge. But certain characters have become so iconic that they withstand both time and the shifting interests of players. Such creations permeate other elements of popular culture—from graphic novels to film—and are known not only to dedicated gamers but to the general public as well. In 100 Greatest Video Game Characters, readers can learn about some of the most popular and influential figures that have leapt from computer monitors and television screens and into the public consciousness. The entri...
Videogames and Horror
Videogames are full of horrors – and of horror, a facet of the media that has been largely overlooked by the academic community in terms of lengthy studies in the fast-growing field of videogame scholarship. This book engages with the research of prominent scholars across the humanities to explore the presence, role and function of horror in videogames, and in doing so it demonstrates how videogames enter discussion on horror and offer a unique, radical space that horror is particularly suited to fill. The topics covered include the construction of stories in videogames, the role of the monster and, of course, how death is treated as a learning tool and as a facet of horror.
