A decade ago, it was still somewhat conventional to start a study by writ-ing how “esports is a novel phenomenon.” As we write this introduction in 2021, that is no longer true. Today, more than a thousand studies have been published on esports, including several books and special issues. Moreover, the work is no longer conducted purely in the “game studies” related fields, bu…
My experience with StarCraft could be mapped into three periods that represent the history of the game itself. I was introduced to real-time strat-egy (RTS) games when my cousin brought their copy of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (Blizzard Entertainment 1994) at my grandparents’ house. My brother and I got the game quickly after and, as most players from the early 1990s, I was playing es…
During f ieldwork at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, I spent most of the week explaining my research to game designers. With over 28,000 of them attending GDC that year, there was a lot of explaining to do. The most common question was not, “Why do you study what we make?” Most game developers are acutely aware that their industry is the largest and most interesting c…
Videogames are the medium of loss and death. Videogame characters frequently fall from cliffs (Super Mario Bros.), get shot (Space Inva-ders), and go bankrupt (Theme Hospital). Sometimes they die in swimming pools (The Sims), are butchered by rotating blades (Super Meat Boy), impaled (Tomb Raider), or flattened by rolling boulders (Crash Bandicoot)…
The contributors to Made in Asia/America explore the historical entanglements of video games, Asia, and America, showing how examining games offer new ways of imagining empire, race, and coalition.
Fictional Practices of Spirituality provides critical insight into the implementation of belief, mysticism, religion, and spirituality into worlds of fiction, be it interactive or non-interactive. This first volume focuses on interactive, virtual worlds - may that be the digital realms of video games and VR applications or the imaginary spaces of life action role-playing and soul-searching prac…