Games studies is now firmly established as a popular, important and significant area of study in the academic world. Bringing together theories and thought from a wide range of disciplines, this series features cutting-edge research addressing the major issues in game studies today.
To submit a proposal for this series, please contact:
Suzanne Richardson, Commissioning Editor for Media, Cultural and Communication Studies
[email protected]
Edited
By Yowei Kang, Kenneth C. C. Yang, Michał Mochocki, Jakub Majewski, Paweł Schreiber
September 06, 2024
This book explores the representations of national Asian histories in digital games. Situated at the intersection of regional game studies and historical game studies, this book offers chapters on histories and heritages of Japan, China, Iran, Iraq, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, Turkey...
By Agata Waszkiewicz
March 04, 2024
Metagames: Games about Games scrutinizes how various meta devices, such as breaking the fourth wall and unreliable narrator, change and adapt when translated into the uniquely interactive medium of digital games. Through its theoretical analyses and case studies, the book shows how metafictional ...
By Marco Caracciolo
February 26, 2024
The first book-length study devoted to FromSoftware games, On Soulsring Worlds explores how the Dark Souls series and Elden Ring are able to reconcile extreme difficulty in both gameplay and narrative with broad appeal. Arguing that the games are strategically positioned in relation to contemporary...
By Andrei Nae
January 29, 2024
This book investigates the narrativity of some of the most popular survival horror video games and the gender politics implicit in their storyworlds. In a thorough analysis of the genre that draws upon detailed comparisons with the mainstream action genre, Andrei Nae places his analysis firmly ...
By Amy M. Green
January 29, 2024
This volume provides an in-depth examination of the video game Death Stranding, focusing on the game’s exploration of ruin, nostalgia, and atonement as its primary symbolic, narrative, and mechanical language. Offering the first close examination of Death Stranding’s narrative, the book also ...
By Ewan Kirkland
January 29, 2024
This book explores the many ways Gothic literature and media have informed videogame design. Through a series of detailed case studies, Videogames and the Gothic illustrates the extent to which particular tropes of Gothic culture –neo-medieval aesthetics, secret-filled labyrinthine spaces, the...
By Tom van Nuenen
October 19, 2023
This book unlocks an understanding of video games as virtual travel. It explains how video game design increasingly takes cues from the promotional language of tourism, and how this connection raises issues of power and commodification. Bridging the disciplinary gap between game and tourism ...
By Poppy Wilde
September 21, 2023
Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities explores the relationship between avatar and gamer in the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game World of Warcraft, to examine notions of entangled subjectivity, affects, and embodiments – what it means and how it feels to be ...
Edited
By Björn Sjöblom, Jonas Linderoth, Anders Frank
December 30, 2022
This book offers an overview of how conflicts are represented and enacted in games, in a variety of genres and game systems. Games are a cultural form apt at representing real world conflicts, and this edited volume highlights the intrinsic connection between games and conflict through a set of ...
By Bettina Bódi
December 30, 2022
Videogames and Agency explores the trend in videogames and their marketing to offer a player higher volumes, or even more distinct kinds, of player freedom. The book offers a new conceptual framework that helps us understand how this freedom to act is discussed by designers, and how that in turn ...
Edited
By Andreas Rauscher, Daniel Stein, Jan-Noël Thon
August 01, 2022
This book offers the first comprehensive study of the many interfaces shaping the relationship between comics and videogames. It combines in-depth conceptual reflection with a rich selection of paradigmatic case studies from contemporary media culture. The editors have gathered a ...
By Michelle Herte
August 01, 2022
This book looks closely at the endings of narrative digital games, examining their ways of concluding the processes of both storytelling and play in order to gain insight into what endings are and how we identify them in different media. While narrative digital games share many representational ...