Posts tagged Book review
Manifestations of Queerness in Video Games, Gaspard Pelurson (Review)

Manifestations of Queerness in Video Games positions video games alongside queer fixtures, such as drag, cyborgs, sissies, flânerie, monsters, and the latent homoeroticism of wrestling. Together with Bonnie Ruberg’s (2019) Video Games Have Always Been Queer, Gaspard Pelurson’s monograph serves to become a foundational text in the now flourishing discourse of queer game studies. Video games are typically understood through mastery, competition, capital, and production; however, through queer thinking, they become sites of hope, failure, fragility, and erotics. Where Ruberg proves there is queerness in every game and every game can be queered, Pelurson presents queer manifestations, how you might find them, and how subversive, disruptive, and arousing they can be should you catch a glimpse.

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Unboxed: Board Game Experience and Design

As its title suggests, Gordon Calleja’s Unboxed: Board Game Experience and Design, published by MIT Press in 2022, offers an exploration of player experience and the ways in which game designers work to create those experiences. Calleja draws on interviews with thirty-two leading board game designers and critics, and the inclusion of the insights of these well-known designers (alongside a wide range of scholarly material) results in a book that is extremely readable, while offering in-depth discussions of games and game design, and practical in turning these discussions towards game making and game playing.

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