I grew up playing video games from a classic Atari onward. And, if I could go back and tell my younger self his job would be to travel around the world talking, writing, and teaching about video games he never would have believed me. But, if he did, he’d be really excited about what was coming for him. I am consistently both shocked and thrilled that I get to do this as a job, and my favorite bit is often the teaching and communicating about games. It’s a blast!
I wrote
Optimizing Play: Why Theorycrafting Breaks Games and How to Fix It
This is one of the foundational books in game studies and will shake up how you think about why and how people play games.
Consalvo introduces a concept called ‘avatar capital,’ which is about the reputation and relative fame players can chase within a game and its community. To acquire that capital, players often remake rules and expectations to excel.
A cultural history of digital gameplay that investigates a wide range of player behavior, including cheating, and its relationship to the game industry.
The widely varying experiences of players of digital games challenge the notions that there is only one correct way to play a game. Some players routinely use cheat codes, consult strategy guides, or buy and sell in-game accounts, while others consider any or all of these practices off limits. Meanwhile, the game industry works to constrain certain readings or activities and promote certain ways of playing. In Cheating, Mia Consalvo investigates how players choose to play games,…
I always love to read books that do something or cover things that I’ll never be able to do on my own, and Gray crushes that in this book.
Through an awesome set of interviews with players, Gray breaks down how Black users encounter racism in gaming spaces and how they deal with the ongoing structural problems in games. Gray gives voice to perspectives that aren’t heard enough, and I learned a ton from this book.
In Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming, Kishonna L. Gray interrogates blackness in gaming at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. Situating her argument within the context of the concurrent, seemingly unrelated events of Gamergate and the Black Lives Matter movement, Gray highlights the inescapable chains that bind marginalized populations to stereotypical frames and limited narratives in video games. Intersectional Tech explores the ways that the multiple identities of black gamers some obvious within the context of games, some more easily concealed affect their experiences of gaming.
The normalization of whiteness and masculinity in digital culture inevitably…
The Model Spy is based on the true story of Toto Koopman, who spied for the Allies and Italian Resistance during World War II.
Largely unknown today, Toto was arguably the first woman to spy for the British Intelligence Service. Operating in the hotbed of Mussolini's Italy, she courted danger…
This is the book that made sports analytics mainstream. Although there were plenty of pieces in sports analytics before and after this book, none of them led to a movie starring Brad Pitt.
The book changes the way you’ll think about baseball and how the game is played. And, the analytics movement that was popularized with this book has led to a slew of rule changes in Major League Baseball. All those dynamics run through this book and its impact.
If we really want to understand games and how they work, we cannot forget about the lessons we can learn from sports.
Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only "the single most influential baseball book ever" (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what "may be the best book ever written on business" (Weekly Standard).
I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned…
Although there have been substantive developments in games since this book was published, it is a fantastic journey through the history of games up until its publication date. Knowing more about where games started and how they were developed for decades informs what games are now; really understanding games requires some history.
I found this to be a smooth, propulsive read, which is not true of a lot of video game histories.
A riveting account of the strange birth and remarkable evolution of the most important development in entertainment since television, Replay is the ultimate history of video games. Based on extensive research and over 140 exclusive interviews with key movers and shakers from gaming's past, Replay tells the sensational story of how the creative vision of game designers gave rise to one of the world's most popular and dynamic art forms.
This book is a literary historical novel. It is set in Britain immediately after World War II, when people – gay, straight, young, and old - are struggling to get back on track with their lives, including their love lives. Because of the turmoil of the times, the number of…
I always love finding work that challenges how I see things and shifts my perspective in some way. This is one of those books!
Even better, whenever I teach a group about this book and the arguments it makes about games a handful of people have a deep transformation about their understanding of games.
Reading this book will shake up how you think about video games, what they do, and how they work. And you might be in that group of people who can’t stop seeing the world in a different way because of your new perspective!
Argues for the queer potential of video games
While popular discussions about queerness in video games often focus on big-name, mainstream games that feature LGBTQ characters, like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content. Video Games Have Always Been Queer argues that the medium of video games itself can-and should-be read queerly.
In the first book dedicated to bridging game studies and queer theory, Ruberg resists the common, reductive…
When we play games we often try to optimize our approach, trying to figure out the best way to emerge victorious in a battle of wits and reflexes. Although that’s an approach that works well for us in the short-term, it also can break games, rendering what should be a set of interesting choices into following a well-trod path that was predetermined for us.
To make my case I work through a wide range of video games and sports to help reconceive how games are played and made. Optimization may seem like a good thing, but we need to be careful about what we wish for and plan carefully to avoid the traps it sets.
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
