October 17, 2025: Not Just (Video) Games: Video Game Studiers

[Forty years ago this weekend, Nintendo released its first game system, and video gaming and American culture changed significantly. So this week I’ll blog about a handful of other games that likewise changed things, leading up to a weekend post on Nintendo!]

Five of the many books and scholars to read for far more in-depth video game studying:

1)      Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron’s The Video Game Theory Reader (2003): That hyperlink is to the 2009 2^nd edition, which reflects how successful this important early collection, edited by two of the field’s most prominent scholars, was and remains.

2)      Ian Bogost’s Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (2006): I’m not sure any single scholar has been more significant to the field than Ian Bogost. Bogost is also a game designer, which seems to me to be a relatively common (if also somewhat complicated) overlap for many video game studiers.  

3)      Jesper Juul’s Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (2006): As I hope every post in this series has illustrated, I’m very interested in the line between the creative fictions that video games create and the social and cultural realities that they always nonetheless reflect and contribute to. No scholarly work better analyzes that line than does Juul’s book.

4)      Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (2011): I likewise hope this series has reflected my strong belief that video games matter, on a variety of levels, across the spectrum from more potentially negative effects to the most positive contributions to our individual and collective experiences and identities. But don’t take my word for it—read Bissell’s thoughtful and fun book!

5)      Garry Crawford’s Video Gamers (2012): Even before Gamergate (which, I agree completely with that hyperlinked Harmeet Kaur piece, foreshadowed much of the worst of our current moment), I found the majority of video gamers significantly less interesting and often much more frustrating than video games. But that’s precisely why I need to push past those feelings to get more analytical about this community (or collection of communities, more exactly), and Crawford’s book offers a great starting point.

Nintendo post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Video games, past or present, you’d analyze?