Bücher der Reihe Video Games and the Humanities

While the formal speculative qualities of written material and films are well known and understood, the techniques of speculation that are unique to games are undertheorised. By looking to two short games (VA-11 HALL-A and The Hard Way) whose primary mode of interaction is the click, the book elucidates the moment when video games generate speculation.

Video game environments constitute a vast expansion of the built environment, offering new worlds to explore and new spaces for engaging in a range of activities. Like buildings and cities before them, these interactive environments are deeply meaningful for how they communicate values and shape behaviour. This book unpacks how they do this, drawing on theories of embodied cognition to analyze virtual environments designed as rich worlds.

How do games represent history, and how do we make sense of the history of games? The industry regularly uses history to sell products, while processes of creation and of promotion leave behind markers of a game¿s history. Exploring this fully, case studies in this work move the focus of debate from the games themselves to wider, ancillary materials and ask how history is used in, and how we can use history to study games.

Delicious Pixels: Food in Video Games introduces critical food studies to game scholarship, showing the unique ways in which food is utilized in both video game gameplay and narrative to show that food is never just food but rather a complex means of communication and meaning-making. It aims at bringing the academic attention to digital food and to show how significant it became in the recent decades as, on the one hand, a world-building device, and, on the other, a crucial link between the in-game and out-of-game identities and experiences. This is done by examining specifically the examples of games in which food serves as the means of creating an intimate, cozy, and safe world and a close relationship between the players and the characters.

While video games have blossomed into the foremost expression of contemporary popular culture over the past decades, their critical study occupies a fringe position in American Studies. In its engagement with video games, this book contributes to their study but with a thematic focus on a particularly important subject matter in American Studies: spatiality. The volume explores the production, representation, and experience of places in video games from the perspective of American Studies. Contributions critically interrogate the use of spatial myths ("wilderness," "frontier," or "city upon a hill"), explore games as digital borderlands and contact zones, and offer novel approaches to geographical literacy. Eventually, Playing the Field II brings the rich theoretical repertoire of the study of space in American Studies into conversation with questions about the production, representation, and experience of space in video games.