Whaley, Toward a Gameic World

Whaley, Ben. Toward a Gameic World: New Rules of Engagement from Japanese Video Games. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press (2023). Publisher’s site.

Predictably, my one week, one book plan went almost immediately off the rails as life demanded attention. The bad news is that I fell a bit behind my reading schedule, but the good news is that I solidified plans to be in Japan this summer AND I got to read through Ben Whaley’s new book on Japanese video games! As I said in my first post in this series, the idea behind my summer reading project was to try to acquaint myself with the state of game studies as a field, especially with those books related to Japanese games. From my initial forays on the English language side of things, it seems that a lot of those conversations are happening around Japanese video games. This was my impression as I started thinking about my research project, and I have some theories about why there’s such a dearth of Anglophone scholarship on Japanese analog gaming compared to video games, but enough about me! Let’s talk about this book!

I had initially gone into Toward a Gameic World thinking that it would look somewhat like the kind of work I do: a social history of media that investigates the conditions of possibility for what they do. What I soon found, though, was that Whaley takes a much different approach to Japanese video games, one that slowly and methodically builds out a text-centric theoretical schema for approaching the study of video games and the social implications of their gameplay systems. By “slow” and “methodical,” I do NOT mean “boring,” however, and Whaley’s engaging, fun authorial voice made each chapter’s weighty theoretical arguments feel breezy to read. Let’s discuss!

July 1, 2023 by nocturnalnerd

Trammell, The Privilege of Play

Trammell, Aaron. The Privilege of Play: A History of Hobby Games, Race, and Geek Culture. New York: NYU Press (2023). Publisher’s site.

Dusting this old blog off as I head into a summer reading challenge for myself: 1 week, 1 book! Between now and August, I’m trying to read 1 book a week, just like the good ol’ days (read: very bad days) of my qualifying exams. Dumping out my thoughts on this blog really helped me as I tried to wade through all the scholarship I was reading back then, and it’s a habit I’d like to preserve as I continue in my career as a researcher. I’m trying to start up my second research project this summer, which involves a study of Japanese analog games; that means that most of the books I’m trying to cover this summer come from the field of game studies as I try to bootstrap myself into that scholarly conversation and see where my project might fit in. Basically, I’m hoping to take a similar approach to questions of genre as I did in my dissertation, only this time I’m thinking through the western high fantasy genre as it developed in Japan alongside and through analog games in the 1980s.

I’m kicking this challenge off with Aaron Trammell’s hot-off-the-presses monograph The Privilege of Play! Trammell is one of a number of voices I’ve been following on Twitter around the game studies field, and his approach in this book – which blends gender and ethnic studies, media history, and network studies – immediately caught my interest. As I read, I felt like I could see myself using a similar method in my own project, and Trammell’s clear authorial voice made his argument not only easy to follow, but a joy to unpack. Follow me below the cut for more!

June 13, 2023 by nocturnalnerd