The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture by Daniel Goldberg

The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture Reviews

• 
  Iset

  
  This is a collection of essays from various gamers, game critics, and game makers – sometimes, all three – on the state of gaming as a worldwide hobby today, the culture of it, and the community surrounding it. First off, let me praise the premise of this book. I’m a lifelong gamer myself, from that Millennial generation that is the first to never remember a time without computer games. I’ve had my hands on the controls since I was a tot, and it’s a passion that for me has only grown and grown. Over the years, as I’ve grown from childhood into adulthood, I’ve definitely noticed that gaming has become a global phenomenon. So many do it now that the term ‘gamer’ is starting to become amorphous – it’s just something that so many people do, like watching films or series, that it has become widely accepted, and the big budgets have skyrocketed. Gaming is not going away. It is going to be a fundamental part of the lives of future generations. But, as the phenomenon has grown, and the first generation such as myself grows up, the gaming industry and community have experienced growing pains. Certainly there’s a level of debate around multiple issues, and, fuelled by ever-present exchange of ideas through the internet, those debates have become heated. Now is absolutely the right time for this book to come out. The State of Play examines just a handful of these debates, offering commentary, and, even if the reader doesn’t agree with the views of the various authors published within, inviting us to think and participate in these debates.
  
  The book is a real mixed bag due to having so many different contributors. My first thought upon finishing it was how much I enjoyed it, and that I would recommend this important book to anyone. Given further reflection however, I did enjoy some articles more than others. For example, Leigh Alexander’s article on childhood experiences of gaming was pleasant but, I felt, unnecessary – this despite the editors pointing out that there is a real dearth on the subject. But then, I can draw upon my own childhood experiences of gaming and what it’s meant to me, so for me it just didn’t add anything new. Other articles were vaguely interesting, such as how to use Twine, or the anecdote of how an MMO duel can turn into a much more high stakes duel between “good” and “evil”, but personally I preferred the lengthier essays which really dug into the most heated debates. The chapter on violence in games could have been one of those, and it made some interesting points, but I was surprised by how short it was and wished it had gone into more depth. It is perhaps to be expected that the hardest hitting chapters dealt with the most controversial topics – racism, sexism, gender identity, and sexual orientation – topics which are big news in the wider world, never mind the gaming world.
  
  Overall it’s not the definitive guide to what’s going on in the gaming world today – and to be fair the book acknowledges this, noting that the essays can only pick out a handful amongst thousands of debates going on – but it’s an interesting effort, and the very existence of a book like this now acknowledges how gaming has become a global phenomenon, with a global community, and how the field is evolving and wrestling with the same issues that exist outside of the gaming sphere. Gaming is coming of age.
  
  7 out of 10
• 
  Jericha

  This is an incredibly uneven collection. 4 stars because I'm glad it exists; also because the pieces that are worth reading are EXTREMELY worth reading, and some of the not-so-great essays still presents valuable thoughts & ideas. Several of the pieces collected here, however, suffer from sounding much more like internet rants than actual essays, with a strange mixture of over- and under-explanation of ideas. Highlights include Leigh Alexander's lovely lyrical piece about the magic of games in childhood, Merritt Kopas' invitation to consider the possibilities of meaningful sexuality in games, and William Knoblauch's excellent, compelling "Game Over"; pieces by Zoe Quinn, anna anthropy, and Anite Sarkeesian are interesting and worthy if not wildly compelling. A few are worth skipping completely, most notably Ola Wikander's meandering and mostly meaningless piece about Judeo-Christian symbolism in Japanese games. As a whole, however, the book is very much what the title conveys: a portrait of the current state of play as it pertains to video games, both how we got here and where we might go. In this case, unusually, the book's wide variations are part of what make it such a rich and interesting work.
• 
  Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨ Campbell

  This sounds sooooo good
• 
  Matt Seraph

  There's two ways of writing about video games, one far more common than the other. The first is as celebratory fan service - burying oneself wholeheartedly in exploration of the lore, recounting of the development history, development of fan theories and art - in short, writing as an act of inward-looking appreciation and love. Let me be the first to say in the right mood, I greatly enjoy this approach.
  
  The second is to use video games as a launching point for talking about culture and human experience more broadly. Conversation in this mode burrows through video games more than spends time with them, mapping how the wider social conversations and ideas are playing out within video games, and are influenced by video games, rather than ending analysis at the boundaries of the medium.
  
  The essays in State of Play are firmly from this latter camp. Many of them analyse games and game play from the perspective of groups historically marginalized from gaming's imagined audience, to quite interesting effect. What is it like for Muslims from the middle east to play the hundreds of games about US soldiers shooting caricatures of their culture? Why does getting black hair right matter in digital representation- and why do so few games accomplish it? How can games help those of us who don't share the experience understand what it is to have trans sex, or live every day crippled by depression?
  
  Contra Gamergate and the caricature of the SJW, however, these are far from the only questions that interest the thoughtful gamer commentators included in this volume. Later essays explore how visions of the apocalypse have grown and changed in gaming with historical change, and what our current zombie wasteland obsession may be missing; why Japan has such a fascination in Christian iconography; whether the overwhelming dominance of violent video games is an inherent or path dependent feature of the industry; and (a personal favourite), what the architect of Counterstrike's Dust and Dust 2 learned from sound principles of public architecture.
  
  I'm political progressive and comfortable with the progressive essays in this collection, but readers who are not would do well to remember that opening up to this kind of criticism is what it means to be taken seriously as a art form; you get a whole range of serious, thoughtful critiques, some from people who interpret your favourite works in ways diametrically opposed to you. Writing similarly thoughtful defences of your passions or rolling your eyes and moving on with your life are both valid responses; harassment campaigns, gatekeeping about who is a 'real' gamer and pretending games are uniquely content or meaning free unlike all other cultural products, are not.
  
  For the moment, this collection is an important read because there is so little thoughtful writing of this type about one of the most important cultural products of our time. I sincerely hope in a few decades time it will have grown forgettable, simply for how commonplace works of its type have become.
• 
  MrsEnginerd

  As a video game enthusiast and recent presenter at a gender and women's studies class, the chapters of this book that deal with the subject matter are dead on and enlightening. If you don't approach these essays with an open mind you will miss the point of the narrarive: gamers or players are more than boys and 18 to 35 year old men.
  
  This compendium serves as an excellent source of material to discuss the current problems with video games as they related to moder culture. Be prepared to read the terms trope, AAA and Twine repeatedly; each essay is independently written but you get a feel that some of the issues are so ingrained into the media that these words are constantly used to construct arguments.
  
  The book is a brilliant piece of work since it is framed from the perspective of a few people, and the body of work produced cements the notion that video games are here to stay. Thus the art of producing content and the expressions of the culture must mature to reflect the quality of the people playing and not the stereotypes perpetuated by "gamer-centric" marketing.
  
  Throw in a few statistics and you will have enough material to engage anyone interested in the gaming community for hours successfully disproving the myth that women don't play video games or that they are not part of its development.
  
  A must read for teens and young adults immersed in the topic.
• 
  Nick Jones

  While State of Play purports to be an examination of "video game culture," to a far greater extent its essays are about the contributors themselves. It's largely an unfortunate assortment of self-congratulation, self-pity, and self-promotion, with video games being discussed mostly in the context of the authors' insecurities and personal preferences. There's a lot of rhetoric and a cavalcade of broad claims that go unsourced, the net effect of which is a book that reads like a series of excerpts from a teenager's blog (and a blog that was getting money for product placement by "Twine," to boot).
  
  There are two bright spots, and they not-coincidentally happen to be the only two essays which contain footnotes providing references to back up the claims presented and add some extra context. William Knoblauch's "Game Over? A Cold War Kid Reflects on Apocalyptic Video Games" and Ola Wikander's "The God in the Machine: Occultism, Demiurgic Theology, and Gnostic Self-Knowledge in Japanese Video Games" manage to move beyond narcissistic, self-indulgent complaining and actually get into dissecting how history and symbolism from the cold war and Gnosticism influenced the content of video games.
• 
  Jake Harris

  This is a mostly well-rounded, insightful collection of essays about the sections of gaming culture that typical “gamers” don’t really think about. That being said, this isn’t written for those gamers- many of the essays here are preaching to the choir. Then again, once you’re convinced Gamergate is the work of wymyn trying to “dumb down and neuter the last type of male entertainment,” as one angry commenter is quoted here, then there’s really no point in using logic to sway that opinion, is there?
  
  The essays here run the gamut from the above-mentioned examination of the culture that led to Gamergate to gaming while black to gaming while Arab to gaming while growing up during the Cold War to gaming and creating games while going through depression. Some read like extended academic journals (the last one on Judeo-Christian influences on Japanese video games comes to mind) but most are insightful, well written and thought-provoking.
  
  It’s just a pity the audience who needs to hear this books’ message about inclusiveness and acceptance probably won’t touch this book with a 10-foot pole.
• 
  Amber Lea

  I have so much to say about this book, I don't even know where to begin.
  
  The intro is awful. It's like, "Hey guys, we just want to fix your games because they're racist/ sexist/ homephobic/ transphobic, why are you mad?" when a much better intro would have been, "Hey guys, we see you love games, and we'd like to build a gaming community around diversity, inclusiveness, and new types of games we've never seen before."
  
  The latter is a good message and a respectable goal. Great! Sign me up! But the first message often gets treated as if it's the second by people who aren't listening to themselves, then when people get mad the reason for their anger gets confused.
  
  Like bruh, the gaming community isn't attacking you, you're attacking the gaming community.
  
  YEAH I SAID IT. But hang on, hear me out. Or don't. It's your life.
  
  So, because it's relevant: I have lady parts and I am a gamer, and I was once told that "video games aren't for girls" by a seven year old jerk who didn't want to let me have a turn playing Mortal Kombat. Other than that, no one has ever expressed to me that they give a single shit about my gender. Do I believe that women receive gender-specific harassment? Yes. I think there are crappy things that people only say to women. Do I think women get harassed just BECAUSE they are women? Not unless they get unlucky and run into a bitter husk of a human being who has it out for women. Do I think these bitter husks make up a vast majority of gamers? NO.
  
  Now, do I think female game critics get dump trucks full of harassment? YES. There's no doubt in my mind. Years ago I made a post about how I agreed with something Anita Sarkeesian said and a hate mob appeared and yelled at me. Which at the time made me think man, maybe being a woman on the internet really IS dangerous and scary.
  
  In retrospect I now realize what that mob was so angry about, and in retrospect I can see they weren't a bunch of MRAs, Incels, MGTOWs and whatever other fringe group. Most of them were actually trying to talk to me but I was so terrified that I wasn't listening. (I was in the mind set of, "This is it, this is the angry hate mob I've been warned about. They found me." Turns out they literally didn't care about anything I was doing, they just wanted to talk/yell about Anita.)
  
  So okay, I'm someone who has always been annoyed by hypersexualized women in video games because it's so distracting and gross. And I'm all for attractive female characters, trust me. I like a good looking lady as much as the next guy. But sometimes it grotesque. And not in a fun Silent Hill type of way. If a game has a girl with crazy egg boobs and I feel like at any moment I'm about to get a glimpse of her asshole, I say no thank you to that game and move on.
  
  I think the reason some game critics inspire hate mobs is because they act as if a majority of games are unforgivably sexist/racist/etc. I think almost anyone would understand why I'm not interested in games with women who are grotesquely sexy. I can't imagine anyone would fault me for not wanting to play them. BUT if I claimed that games in general are sexist and I don't feel comfortable playing any of them, I'm going to sound ridiculous to anyone who's played more than two games in their life.
  
  But a lot of game critics act as if the extreme cases are the norm. One essay in here claims that women in games are more sexualized now than ever, giving two examples of female characters who are sexier now than they were originally. The claim that women are more sexualized than ever before is absurd. Yes, all female characters are sexier now than they were when they were 8-bit, but the idea that 2015 was the height of sexy female game characters is...come on. Look at Laura Croft. She went from grossly weird sex symbol to normal looking person. This shit goes both ways. I would say if anything, they're as sexy as they've always been, but to me things seem much, much better.
  
  But hey, if we tell a game developer we don't want them to make a hypersexualized character and they do it anyway...that's fine! They're allowed to say no to our business if they'd rather appeal to whoever in is into that shit.
  
  The thing is I have a really hard time believing that gamer culture is filled with people who hate diversity and that most gamers don't want people out there making more inclusive games. Like I personally hate "interactive stories" but do I want to stop you from making and enjoying them? No. Now, if you told me that you want to make every game an "interactive story"...I'm going to get hostile, real fast, because no. gtfo.
  
  But that's how game critics talk. They have a problem with games people love and they tell them they're wrong to like them and they say those games shouldn't exist. That's why people get angry. It's not like hey, we want to get in here and make the types of games we want to see." It's "we have a problem with your games and we want to put a stop to them."
  
  There was recently a controversy where a developer got yelled at because all of his characters are white (and I think dudes) and he refused to change them. Why is that a problem? In my mind, you shouldn't tell a developer what to make any more than you should tell an artist what to paint. But that's what's happening. And that is the problem.
  
  Now if someone was dictating that all his characters had to be white and diversity isn't allowed, yeah, that is racist. That is a problem worth railing against. If you go to make a game with more diversity because you're sick of seeing so many white male characters and you get backlash for simply making that game, that is a problem. If every character in every video game was white...that's a problem. People should be free to make and play the games they want.
  
  But if you need every game to be a game you like that has what you want, you're wrong. Grow up.
  
  Like here's an example that has nothing to do with sexism, racism, or any other ism: There's an essay in here about post-apocalyptic games, and the author arrogantly assumes that if you like them it's because you're a narcissist who thinks you'd outlive everyone else in a nuclear apocalypse and you're playing out your narcissistic fantasy. And he makes the argument that post-apocalyptic games are a problem and he basically says that they should punish you for winning and if they don't they're encouraging a mentality that's bad for society.
  
  Okay. I like post-apocalyptic games. A LOT. You know why? Because I would definitely die first. I like post-apocalyptic games because I get to cheat death. I am an extremely high risk for a particularly deadly kind of cancer, and I really enjoy imagining I would survive against very bad odds even though I don't think I would. I think we're all afraid we're going to die before we're ready, and we all like to imagine what it would be like to survive when we shouldn't. It's thrilling to be like "Holy shit, everything is radioactive and I know I should be dead, but here I am, kicking ass and taking names." In a video game I can take a light jog carrying 200 pounds of guns and amour through a radioactive wasteland, and in real life I have to go to the doctor every six months to get a biopsy to make sure I'm going to see my next birthday. ALSO, in game I'm the good guy, helping strangers rebuild their lives and making the wasteland a better place. If you're going to criticize me for something, make fun of me for being a way better person in a video game than I am in real life.
  
  This author doesn't know me or my motivations. But he thinks he does. He also thinks he has special insight that the rest of us don't have. You want to know what that insight is? It's that nuclear war is dangerous and not a good thing.
  
  Yes. Thank you. I feel so enlightened.
  
  Seriously, he keeps making the point that gamers these days don't know anything about the threat of nuclear war because the cold war is over. As if North Korea isn't a thing. What is the alternate reality this guy lives in where nuclear war isn't a threat anymore? Also, why does he think he's the only gamer that remembers the cold war? The average gamer is 30.
  
  BUT THIS IS WHAT I MEAN. Anita Sarkeesian literally says, "We don't want to take your toys away." and the very next essay literally says, "They have astutely and correctly identified what is going on here. Their toys are being taken away, their tree houses are being boarded up."
  
  These are people who think they're victims, but they're flinging wild accusations and acting like total assholes, and they can't see it. They just think they're being attacked because of sexism, racism, and homophobia. And not because of their garbage opinions and attitudes.
  
  Do I think there was/is sexism in gaming? Yes. I think it used to be really bad. I think we've made a lot of progress. I think there's more that could be done, but I think we've come along way and that's exciting. People are listening to what gamers want! I don't understand why we have to be bitter that straight white guys get to have their games too. It's not like all they do is play games where they commit hate crimes.
  
  Anyway, like three of the essays in here are okay. I'd give them at least three stars, so that's why I didn't give this whole book one star. I also picked up the game Deadly Premonition because of this book, and it made me want to see Blazing Saddles because one essay mentioned that they wanted to see a game handle race the way Blazing Saddles does.
  
  There's one essay in here from the point of view of a Arab man who plays American Shooters and that's an interesting perspective. And while Anita Sarkeesian's opinions have since become like nails on a chalkboard to me, I actually enjoy reading things by Zoe Quinn. Obviously it's annoying that she pretends that everyone hates her because she's a lady game developer and not because her ex told everyone she's a monster, but she's a good writer and she does a good job of stating her opinions without continually insulting everyone which, considering her peers, is amazing. I can't help but feel impressed by her diplomacy.
• 
  Nathan Albright

  The best way of reviewing a book such as this is to state at the outset that the authors of its various essays are writing for an openly and avowedly “progressive” audience. This book is not writing to an audience of anyone who would remotely be considered a decent or moral or upstanding person by any godly standard. Nor is this game meant for those who are fundamentally mainstream in their cultural focus. No, this book is written by and for people on the far leftist end of the political spectrum, people who rant against God, against straight white males, against a gamer culture that recognizes the authors of these essays as being deliberate in their attempts to pervert and corrupt video games to support a decadent and immoral social agenda. The community supported and represented includes the usual suspects of racial minorities, sexual deviants, and those who support them. It is filled by articles that prematurely claim the demise of a traditional gamer culture and a very small and incestuous group of deviant game designers who give plaudits and encouragement and support to each other and who claim that despite their sexuality and various kinks and resulting mental problems that they are not broken or damaged, probably trying to convince themselves as much as the readers of this book.
  
  In terms of its contents, the book is made up of a bit more than a dozen essays that together make up about 250 pages of material. Most of the essays focus on either the quirky and hipster sorts of games that are made by these people, their praise of the deviant content of others, their deliberate delight in perverting the “real” world in their creation of fictional worlds, their praise of anti-biblical gnostic trends in roleplaying games [1], and their ranting about the hostility of gamers to their immoral and wicked social and political agenda. As is frequently the case in writings by leftist authors, there is an inherent contradiction. On the one hand, the text seeks sympathy for a supposedly subaltern group, but then prematurely shows its triumphalism against godly social norms, on the one hand claiming a broad solidarity but on the other hand engaging in name-calling and the same sort of bullying behavior it decries in others, on the one hand it blames straight white males for the damage that this world has suffered while on the other hand claiming to not be damaged or broken at all. The authors cannot keep on the same script, agreeing as to what they hate, but unable to keep their lies straight.
  
  So, what is to make of this book, since it’s not a book that is worth reading and was likely only worth writing as a twisted and demented sort of therapy on the part of its various authors, much like the worthless trash that this ilk creates in terms of their games, which are repeatedly cited and praised as if they were artistic masterpieces rather than the masturbatory fantasies of decadent would-be social elites whining because they lost their minimum wage jobs as baristas and could not cope with the depression of their partners, or whining because they could not find the right sort of “natural” hairdo for their avatars in video games. In a sense, this book does not represent a text worth reading, although it likely will be popular within a certain sort of leftist video game players and those who generally support such causes, but rather it represents evidence that will likely be used against these authors if they make their gaming process too public, and as evidence that whatever hostility is being shown towards them is deserved based on their openly confessed desire to corrupt gaming culture and promote a deviant social and political agenda for all who care to see it, and who are able to stomach reading it.
  
  [1] See also:
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
• 
  Nelson Zagalo

  A book on videogame culture for people outside the domain. We could say that it serves as a good entry point for people trying to understand the game scene, mainly not games but its actors, the culture creators, with their worries and concerns.
  
  To be clear the book is more like a curated set of texts, previously written by the authors, and invited by Goldberg to be part of this book. Some of these texts can be found online, in blog posts or personal websites, which justifies the lack of depth in most of the analysis, staying more at the conversation level, with no references, citations neither any other quantitative or qualitative support to much of the claims discussed about. This is easy to explain, even if we can find some academics, most of the authors are game journalists, critics or makers.
  
  This said, I must advise that if you’ve followed game culture during the last five years, there’s absolutely nothing to learn here, however if you’re starting now, this can be an interesting point to dive in.
• 
  morbidflight

  I have mixed feelings about this volume. First, it's a pretty good primer on essays on games and culture (though not academic). Second, it feels like I've read most of these online before and I feel a bit put out because I expected this to be an edited volume of new contributions. So feeling 1 makes me positive and feeling 2 makes me negative, which nets the whole thing about 2-3 stars and really, it's a decent compilation in hard copy so it can sit nicely at 3 stars. I wouldn't bother buying an ebook version though.
  
  Oh, by the way, if you expect this book to focus on games more than game culture or game players, then re-read the title.
• 
  Marco Gallardo

  Como toda recopilación de varios autores, contiene piezas muy buenas y algunas no tanto. Da un panorama muy amplio de los temas que no se exploran comúnmente en los videojuegos y de las personas que los valoramos, es muy interesante.
• 
  Renay

  Thoughts:
  http://ladybusiness.dreamwidth.org/20...
• 
  Kim Pallister

  Collection of really good essays, 2 or 3 of which are worth the price of admission on their own.
• 
  Johann

  Just a few essays had application outside of the mudslinging of gamer-gate..
• 
  Nick Carraway LLC

  1) "More than any other form of creative expression, video games are highly dependent on, and to a certain extent an offshoot of, advances in computing and digital technology. This means games have traditionally been engaged with and discussed as products of technology rather than products of culture, which is why most game criticism still tends to read a lot like a review of a mobile phone or a car. [...]
  Video game production has historically been prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, giving big-name publishers a virtual monopoly on production, sales, and marketing. As a result, the cultural identity of the 'gamer' was from an early stage largely appropriated and shaped by the dominant corporate interests of the industry. This created a consumption-centric culture with its own norms and value systems, clustered around a small number of brands and big-budget franchises while showing little concern for identities other than the prime demographic of the young, white, Western male." ---Daniel Goldberg & Linus Larsson, "Introduction"
  
  2) "Everywhere, it seemed, we saw a puzzle, a mystery. Why was that bundle of twigs leaning against an old oak? Why did some stones glitter when you struck them, and others stank of gunpowder? Under this log, a salamander, and under that, a nest of beetles. There were loamy, unseen living things always scuttling just out of reach. We left notes and signs wherever we could get away with it, and it felt like important work. [...]
  There were, there had to be, gorgeous infrastructures beyond what I could reach, just waiting for me to know the right words. The whole world was a blinking prompt, daring me, ENTER COMMAND." ---Leigh Alexander, "Advent"
  
  3) "What excites me about being black is being connected to a history of resistance, innovation, and improvisation---a history extruded out from under the most inhumane physical, psychological, and systemic oppressions in human history. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is only trenchant, angry, and darkly funny because it rebelliously gives voice to an existence that defied all the forces that tried to suppress it. Of course, I don't have to live inside any of that understanding if I don't want to. I can take from it as I want or need. Canadian poet Dionne Brand once remarked that, 'To live in the Black diaspora is I think to live as a fiction---a creation of empires, & also self-creation."
  Yes, the empires of the video game landscape---big publishers like EA, Ubisoft, and Activision---are making slow, stumbly tentative progress. But it's really the self-creation of black video game characters and universes that I hold out the most hope for." ---Evan Narcisse, "The Natural"
  
  4) "You decide to cope with everything feeling too big and too serious the best way you know how: by being totally absurd.
  You and your friend find an Angry Birds piggy bank and fill it with sequins because, let's face it, you're still a game designer and care about particle physics. You climb up to the roof of the theater where he works at two in the morning, throw the stuffed bird off the roof, and scream 'FUCK VIDEO GAMES!' into the night as a sacrifice to the gods of gaming for better luck. It's ridiculous. It's asinine. It's cathartic." ---Zoe Quinn, "A Game I Had to Make"
  
  5) "Every game needs some kind of goal or endgame. In this one, women are kind of like the ball being tossed between competing men. Other times we're the point system. Still other times, we're the damsel waiting to be rescued and victoriously smooched by the gentleman hero. More often than not, we're the final boss in need of a strategic takedown, barring the way between the male player and his final triumph. [...] If you want to know what 'objectification' means, that's a good place to start.
  Our game metaphor grows out of Anita's study of her own harassment and Katherine's sociological work on the wider phenomenon of harassment in gaming. Both of our analyses converge on one key point: harassment happens because the dehumanization it entails takes the shape of gaming itself, with all the suggestions of play and inconsequentiality therein. If it's just a game, then it's not real, and if it's not real then no one can get hurt and no harm is truly done. The corollary to this, of course, is that if people believe no one is really being hurt, then no one will be punished or held accountable for the harm." ---Anita Sarkeesian and Katherine Cross, "Your Humanity is in Another Castle"
  
  6) "In a way that might be disturbing, I really liked that permanence, that ability to see my performance of Doom inscribed on the virtual space. I could walk back through the space and see where I blasted that imp or squished that zombie under a door. In more recent violent video games, like Hotline Miami, this gets even more detailed. [...] I don't think it is simply ordering these spaces that is so satisfying, but personalizing them with my performance." ---Cara Ellison & Brendan Keogh, "The Joy of Virtual Violence"
  
  7) "We play games because games are stupid, like drawer pulls are stupid. Flappy Bird is a game that accepts that it is stupid. It offers us an example of what it might feel like to conclude that this is enough. That it's enough for games just to be crap in the universe, detritus that we encounter from time to time, and that we might encounter as detritus rather than as meaning. That we might stop to manipulate them without motive or reason, like we might turn a smooth rock in our palms before tossing it back into the big ocean, which devours it. For no matter how stupid it is to be a game, it is no less stupid to be a man who plays one." ---Ian Bogost, "The Squalid Grace of Flappy Bird"
  
  8) "Equally interesting is the post-apocalyptic landscape The Last of Us presents. In Fallout's post-nuclear worlds, bomb-ravaged decimation makes perfect sense, but The Last of Us imagines how nature might reclaim man-made cities. Instead of burned-out buildings and piles of rubble, a lush green overgrowth takes over.
  This nature reclamation theme appears in a handful of recent pop culture outbreak narratives (in two films, Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys and M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening; the NBC show Revolution; and Margaret Atwood's splendid book The Year of the Flood) but it strikes a tone seldom seen in video games, which tend to rely on the dark, eerie mood of horror films. Without humanity, the world doesn't collapse---it just moves on. In this way, The Last of Us shuns the anthropocentrism apparent not just in zombie games, but in most first-person shooters." ---William Knoblauch, "Game Over?"
  
  9) "It's a simple move, but it effectively shifts sex to being an everyday, normal, maybe even kind of boring thing that isn't the ultimate goal of your character but is just a part of their daily life. Later in the game, you might get in a car and sing along to the radio with a character you fucked earlier, or fight hordes of aliens alongside them. [...]
  Sex here isn't a quest or minigame; it's not part of the goal structure of the game at all. It's true that Saint's Row doesn't depict sex mechanically---but it doesn't have to. And actually, by de-emphasizing sex as a goal and refusing to allow the player monogamous relationships, the game mirrors a queer politic of deprivileging romantic relationships and elevating friend relationships. In other words, this means trying to treat everyone we're close to in our lives with the same respect and tenderness that heteronormative culture tells us to reserve for our One True Love. In this sense, Saint's Row IV does more interesting work aroud sex than the games it's satirizing." ---merritt kopas, "Ludus Interruptus"
  
  10) [Spoilers: Deadly Premonition]
  "When this switch occurs, it is much more than a multiple personalities trope Fight Club-style---"It was me all along!"---No, when Zack understands who he really is---that he is Zach and that York is the fake with whom he has been conversing all this time---the game implicitly switches the places of the player and the played, the ruler and the ruled, the creator and the created. The personality that we believed to be 'us' was really 'him' all along; the alien of the story is, in fact, its protagonist. In story terms, this is really the moment of redemption for Morgan. It is the point where knowledge destroys ignorance, where the dichotomy between creator and created is finally inverted. He is himself the 'god of the game' that we, in all our vanity, believed ourselves to be." ---Ola Wikander, "The God in the Machine"
• 
  Jina

  Overall, I really enjoyed reading this collection of essays. As a girl that grew up identifying as a gamer, it was very interesting and opened my eyes to how lucky I was. I didn’t ever deal with any sexual harassment or hate speech for being a girl in the gaming world. I had some guy friends question if I was legit gamer, which was annoying, but I could quickly shut them up about it. I somehow completely missed Gamergate (I think that’s because I’m not really on Twitter), so it was enlightening to read how that effected people and the gaming community. There were two articles, however, that I felt were a bit “left field.” One was a black man complaining about how there is no hair in video games that reflects his own style and the other was a poly-gay-trans-woman advocating for more detailed, positive sex/body exploration in video games. As a very white girl with high texture hair - I, too, have never found my exact hairstyle in video games, so no - it’s not racist of video game makers to not have included it in their stock. As the author mentions, but dismisses, it’s because curls are high texture and a lot of work for graphic artists and coding (just watch the behind-the-scenes on the movie Brave). Also, body exploration video games would be classified as “porn” and could never be mainstream in today’s society. While I agree that the relationship building aspects of video games does a poor job teaching us how to build a meaningful, romantic relationships (say the obviously right thing (whether or not you mean it) and you’ll get sex), I don’t think the author is being realistic in the change they are advocating for. Personally, I don’t believe a computer game will ever teach us how to create a meaningful relationship.
• 
  Enrique del Castillo

  Back when I bought this book in 2015, I didn't expect most of the issues discussed in these essays to still be around in 2019. That's both the most interesting and depressing thing about The State of Play, that this industry hasn't changed much in the past years, and an updated collection of essays could deal with the same topics, along with newer problems in the video game industry.
  
  As any collection of essays, not all of them are great, but overall the quality of the writing and the approach to the themes by the different authors is pretty good; I would recommend this book to anyone that cares about videogames beyond the most basic stuff and I hope we eventually get a 2020 edition.
• 
  sam

  This collection of essays tackles a wide variety of topics that are present in game culture -- from both a development and consumer aspect. Five years after publication this book gives a somewhat historical background to relevant discrimination, mental health, sexuality, war, religion, and terrorism discussions still happening in the industry today (in the year 2020, and I don't think it will be changing anytime soon, unfortunately). I would recommend this as a succinct introduction to these extremely prevalent _human_ topics if you love games and are looking to have an informed voice in industry conversation.
• 
  Thomas Myers

  I was enthralled the whole way through, with one notable exception (complainer-in-chief Anita Sarkeesian). The book features 16 essays on video games on disparate topics from multiplayer rules of behavior to a lengthy discussion of post-apocalyptic storylines. I will admit that the book tackles identity issues I am not exposed to on a daily basis, but they are certainly discussions worth having.
• 
  Angel Veliz

  Very fun book, I read this when I was trying to decode the little things when it came to gaming. Its.!ore of a nostalgia based book where I get to decipher how games were developed. I recommend this book for someone who knows about the culture and history about entertainment.
• 
  Sean Massa

  This is a really great series of essays on games. Some are better than others, but there's something great in here for every game enthusiast to learn from, I'm sure.
• 
  Syed Koushik

  Hated it
• 
  Alice, as in Wonderland

  I gave this book five stars because although I stumbled a little at the beginning, the book is such a comprehensive snapshot of gaming today, whether you're invested heart and soul into it or whether you'd like to inhabit a different planet from it entirely. The thing is that video games are here to stay and not only that, video games are now heavily mainstream. The perception of an isolated niche enjoyment has and should be broken as well as its isolation as a straight white cis male-only club. I would also have rearranged the book somewhat, beginning with connections of people and video games and then pushing into how that affects us in reality... for better or for worse.
  
  The book has great essays by the people I anticipated buying the book in the first place, such as Ibrahim discussing what it is like to be an Arab playing the ubiquitous "shoot Arabs in the face" games like Call of Duty ALL MILITARY SHOOTERS, Sarkeesian (and Cross) discussing two sides of harassment that women are subject to inside and outside the game, and Quinn's evolving creation of Depression Quest which led her to both fame and then intensive infamy. However, though I did love those essays, the book is definitely strongly bolstered by the other collaborators.
  
  I never knew about Twine before this book, and the usage of it by people who are not tied to coding but rather than written word (and how even without realistic death animations and so forth, simplistic gaming is gaming in its storytelling) was an eye opening experience. Both Anthropy and Lopas use it as methods of queer and outside of the box storytelling, somewhat amusing if only for the fact that with its content so progressive, its gameplay was once the foundation of what this entire culture came out of. And though I would have put Johnston's essay on level design closer to the front of the book, his essay gives a deep insight to level design and architecture in video games, and how the limitations (not of graphics but of line of sight) forces certain things upon us. Not to mention how much thought needs to go into them, because a good level design tends to go unnoticed - it's what's around us, not in front of us - but a bad one everyone notices.
  
  Narcisse's irritations and undercurrent of despair every time he is forced to choose a non-black hairstyle and pretend because the game developers either never employ black hairstyles outside of humor or cannot recreate them due to lack of knowledge despite providing a thousand options for other race's styles speak to the frustration of how easy it is to be yourself, a white person, but somewhat impossible if you want to be just about anything else. I really liked his nuances about representation - it isn't just about getting a character that is black, it's about getting a variety of characters who are black with variations of that race explored or even mentioned. He wants everything and no, that is not asking too much.
  
  On the flipside of viewing games just in the now, Knoblauch shares his decades-long observation of the apocalypse in video games, from the stressful reality and the certitude of utter destruction in Cold War times to a backdrop, occasionally even a pleasant one, to the typical sense of survival.
  
  There's just so many essays that I want to pluck out individually and hand to friends with varying interests, whether that's history, queer culture, being a poc, making a game - but not only would that ruin the copy I have, I think the book is worth reading as a whole. Everyone could benefit from reading these topics tied into gaming, and definitely not just gamers. The book gives us a vivid snapshot of gaming now, a mainstream no longer a niche enjoyment, but an explosion of culture shaping pop that is screaming in agony as those of us who have always been there but unmentioned for so long drag it steadfast forward.
• 
  Thomas Hale

  A solid collection of essays exploring various aspects of videogame culture (as it says in the title). This came out in 2015, in the immediate wake of the Gamergate shitshow, and that's reflected in a good chunk of the chapters exploring online abuse and the homogeneous white supremacy of "gamer" identity. Dan Golding's chapter on the cultivation of "the Gamer" is particularly strong. This is far from the only topic though: merritt kopas has a great piece on sex and sexuality in games; Hussein Ibrahim discusses what it's like to be portrayed as "the bad guy" in a culture still dependent on racist shorthand; and Ola Wikander finishes the collection with a chapter on Gnostic religious imagery in Japanese games of the 90s. Worth picking up for anyone interested in some good discussion of contemporary game culture.
• 
  Debbie

  The State of Play is not the type of book I would normally pick up. Although it's anthropological in purpose, I think, which I like, it's a collection of (mostly) essays about video games, both historically and in current times. As a video game watcher (when my husband or son are playing) but not a video game player, I wasn't certain that I would enjoy the level of analysis this book strove to meet.
  
  However, all told, I feel like I'm a better person for having read it. First, the essays deepened my understanding of video games as a cultural and personal influence. Second, they helped me to appreciate video games as both an art form and as a touchstone for many people of my generation. Finally, the essays helped me think more deeply about the things in video games now that both me, like the shooting, sexual marketing, etc. I can totally see myself using some of these essays to discuss video game culture and history with my high school students, too, which is an added bonus.
  
  - Leigh Alexander - female writing about how programming and video games called to her as a child.
  - Ian Shanahan - male writing about his experience with competition in online games, when people make assumptions about you racial identity based on a screen name.
  - anna anthropy - trans-female writing about the rise of Twine as a game-making platform, and her experience writing love-themed games.
  - Evan Narcisse - male writing about the absence of minority video game creators and representation in video games.
  - Hussein Ibrahim - Detroit-born male writing about fighting Middle Eastern enemies while being Middle Eastern and now living in the Middle East.
  - Zoe Quinn - female writing about her video game that simulates depression for the game-player and how popular reception of the game sparked the GamerGate discussion.
  - Anita Sarkeesian & Katherine Cross - females writing about the way women are both depicted in games and treated as gamers in gaming communities, with a focus on the GamerGate explosion.
  - Dan Golding - a white male gamer writing about how the end of the white, privileged male "gamer" label is ending as the world evolves.
  - Cara Ellison & Brendan Keogh - A series of letters between these two writers, exploring why we enjoy violence in video games so much.
  - Ian Bogost - a writer exploring what about Flappy Bird (and other simple games) that makes it popular.
  - David Johnston - a male writing about how architecture both influences level creation and is the exact opposite of the process of a level creator.
  - William Knoblauch - a male writing about the way the apocalyptic video games of the last three decades have changed base on what is happening in the world at large.
  - Merritt Kopas - a trans-female exploring the way the video games and sex are similar, are depicted, and are explored.
  - Ola Wikander - a male writing about how ancient civilizations and religions, especially those related to the supernatural or the occult, are depicted in video games in both subtle and overt ways.