Analog Game Studies is a bi-monthy journal for the research and critique of analog games. We define analog games broadly and include work on tabletop and live-action role-playing games, board games, card games, pervasive games, game-like performances, carnival games, experimental games, and more. Analog Game Studies was founded to reserve a space for scholarship on analog games in the wider field of game studies.

Analog Game Studiesis a bi-monthy journal for the research and critique of analog games. We define analog games broadly and include work on tabletop and live-action role-playing games, board games, card games, pervasive games, game-like performances, carnival games, experimental games, and more.Analog Game Studieswas founded to reserve a space for scholarship on analog games in the wider field of game studies."

Analog Game Studies is a bi-monthy journal for the research and critique of analog games. We define analog games broadly and include work on tabletop and live-action role-playing games, board games, card games, pervasive games, game-like performances, carnival games, experimental games, and more. Analog Game Studies was founded to reserve a space for scholarship on analog games in the wider field of game studies.

In this volume, people of diverse backgrounds talk about tabletop games, game culture, and the intersection of games with learning, theater, and other forms. Some have chosen to write about their design process, others about games they admire, others about the culture of tabletop games and their fans. The results are various and individual, but all cast some light on what is a multivarious and fascinating set of game styles.

Leading expert Paul Booth explores the growth in popularity of board games today, and unpacks what it means to read a board game. What does a game communicate? How do games play us? And how do we decide which games to play and which are just wastes of cardboard? With little scholarly research in this still-emerging field, Board Games as Media underscores the importance of board games in the ever-evolving world of media.

This handbook collects, for the first time, the state of research on role-playing games (RPGs) across disciplines, cultures, and media in a single, accessible volume. Collaboratively authored by more than 50 key scholars, it traces the history of RPGs, from wargaming precursors to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons to the rise of live action role-play and contemporary computer RPG and massively multiplayer online RPG franchises, like Fallout and World of Warcraft. Individual chapters survey the perspectives, concepts, and findings on RPGs from key disciplines, like performance studies, sociology, psychology, education, economics, game design, literary studies, and more. Other chapters integrate insights from RPG studies around broadly significant topics, like transmedia worldbuilding, immersion, transgressive play, or player–character relations. Each chapter includes definitions of key terms and recommended readings to help fans, students, and scholars new to RPG studies find their way into this new interdisciplinary field.

Pausing, slowing, rewinding, replaying, reactivating, reanimating . . . Has manipulating video game timelines altered our experience of time? “Compelling.” —Choice Video game scholar Christopher Hanson argues that the mechanics of time in digital games have presented a new model for understanding time in contemporary culture, a concept he calls “game time.” Multivalent in nature, game time is characterized by apparent malleability, navigability, and possibility while simultaneously being highly restrictive and requiring replay and repetition. When compared to analog tabletop games, sports, film, television, and other forms of media, Hanson demonstrates, the temporal structures of digital games provide unique opportunities to engage players with liveness, causality, potentiality, and lived experience that create new ways of experiencing time. Features comparative analysis of key video games titles—including Braid, Quantum Break, Battle of the Bulge, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Passage, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, Lifeline, and A Dark Room. “The text is well-researched, and the introduction is an excellent, focused overview of video game studies.” —Choice

Black Game Studies introduces the work of game makers from the African diaspora through academic scholarship, personal narratives and a catalog of works.It aims to provide a foundation from which researchers, designers, developers, game historians and others can draw an understanding of patterns, present practice, and a potential afro-future. Its works tomake more visible, through aggregation and showcase, the creative contributions of Black game makers. It is an effort to meet the need todiversify the game-making communityby not only highlighting the work of Black people, but in creatingan enduring archiveof such work.

How did games rise to become the central audiovisual form of expression and storytelling in digital culture? How did the practices of their artistic production come into being? How did the academic analysis of the new medium's social effects and cultural meaning develop? Addressing these fundamental questions and aspects of digital game culture in a holistic way for the first time, Gundolf S. Freyermuth's introduction outlines the media-historical development phases of analog and digital games, the history and artistic practices of game design, as well as the history, academic approaches, and most important research topics of game studies. With contributions by André Czauderna, Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman.

Actual play is a movement within role-playing gaming in which players livestream their gameplay for others to watch and enjoy. This new medium has allowed the playing of games to become a digestible, consumable text for individuals to watch, enjoy, learn from, and analyze. Bridging the gap between the analog and the digital, actual play is changing and challenging our expectations of tabletop role-playing and providing a space for new scholarship. This edited collection of essays focuses on Dungeons and Dragons actual play and examines this phenomenon from a variety of different disciplinary approaches. Authors explore how to define actual play, how fans interact with and affect the narrative and gameplay of actual play, the diversity of gamers (or lack thereof) within actual play media, and how audiences can use actual play media for more than mere entertainment.