Book Spotlight - The State of Play
Picking up from the current pile of video game literature I've been working through, I'd like to spotlight the next book I recently finished from it!
The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture (2015), edited by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson, is a collection of essays by video game creators, media critics, and contributors generally situated within the public sphere of video game culture. Hot off the heels of engaging with relatively more contemporary writing about video games, I found it interesting to read something that's now a decade behind us, and therefore to read it with the retrospective benefit of knowing how things actually have and haven't changed since then. It was strange knowing that this book released at a time when the shockwaves of Gamergate harassment campaigns were still reverberating, exposing the raw and insidious misogyny still embedded in video game spaces and culture in what was probably the most high-profile way at the time. Contributed essays by Anita Sarkeesian and Katherine Cross as well as Zoë Quinn, which includes discussion of directly experiencing these targeted harassment campaigns as women connected to the games industry in various ways (whether as media culture critics or as video game developers), are certainly reflective of the necessary conversations and overall push towards more expansive and especially feminist video game cultures. I think these conversations have certainly advanced in exciting ways even if the root issues haven't totally disappeared since then, knowing that spaces in gaming have expanded greatly for anyone who doesn't fit the falsely entrenched mould of video game players solely being cishet white men. This is especially true in indie game spaces today (which are, unsurprisingly, being censored in horrifically sweeping measures precisely because they dare to make room for diverse, particularly queer, lived experiences). Overall, I appreciated being able to trace a bit more of the lineage of video game culture's growth, discourse, and impact by reading this book.
On a bonus note of appreciation, reading anna anthropy’s essay “Love, Twine, and the End of the World”, was especially fun for its uniquely "choose-your-own-adventure" format, reminiscent of the Twine games that anthropy develops and discusses. Looking up some of anthropy's other works, I'm also pretty interested in reading her book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters. It'll be on the list for my next visits to the library!