Hello, friends of Filament, and happy Pride Month!
Last time we featured game-based learning books on the blog, we covered some recent releases as well as some up-and-coming titles. There are so many resources available to educate yourself on game-based learning and communities of gamers, from blog posts to videos to news articles – but what’s more satisfying than diving into a good book? Not to mention the sense of accomplishment you get after finishing it.
We want to celebrate the contributions of LGBTQ+ video game enthusiasts, creatives, scholars, and authors to the educational gaming space all year long – and you can too with the following collection of game-based learning resources!
via University of Minnesota Press
Edited by Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw
Queer Game Studies is an anthology that was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2017 and written by Bonnie “Bo” Ruberg, an assistant professor of digital games and interactive media in the Department of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, and Adrienne Shaw, an American game studies scholar and Associate Professor at Temple University. Featuring contributors from all over the U.S. and beyond, Queer Games Studies is an American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow List award winner. The anthology covers popular games such as Bayonetta, Mass Effect, and Metal Gear Solid while centering LGBTQ+ perspectives and analyses. As well as analyzing individual games, the book focuses on the gaming industry as a whole and the communities that surround it, examining issues of representation, discrimination, sexism, and more therein. By examining games and gaming culture through a queer theory framework, Queer Game Studies offers both casual readers and students views on making, playing, and studying games that are too often overlooked.
via Penguin Random House
By Legacy Russell
Glitch Feminism is a 2020 manifesto published by Verso and written by Legacy Russell, an American curator, writer, and author. In this book, Russell draws from cyberfeminism, contemporary art, and other critical theory to construct a new term that investigates the socio-techno construct of gender and sexuality: “Glitch Feminism.” To define this term, Russell writes (originally for The Society Pages), “In a society that conditions the public to find discomfort or outright fear in the errors and malfunctions of our socio-cultural mechanics—illicitly and implicitly encouraging an ethos of ‘Don’t rock the boat!’—a ‘glitch’ becomes an apt metonym. Glitch Feminism, however, embraces the causality of ‘error’, and turns the gloomy implication of glitch on its ear by acknowledging that an error in a social system that has already been disturbed by economic, racial, social, sexual, and cultural stratification and the imperialist wrecking-ball of globalization—processes that continue to enact violence on all bodies—may not, in fact, be an error at all, but rather a much-needed erratum. This glitch is a correction to the ‘machine’, and, in turn, a positive departure.” In Glitch Feminism, Russell writes about how liberation and revolution can be found in spaces of error, and how the lack of separation between the digital and real-world provides a unique opportunity for people to redefine and transform gender, technology, the body, and more.
via University of Minnesota Press
By Aubrey Anable
Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect is the second title on this list from the University of Minnesota Press. This 2018 book was written by Aubrey Anable, an assistant professor of film studies at Carleton University, Canada. In this book, Anable utilizes affect theory, asserting that games do not separate players from their real lives or emotions. Rather, Anable writes, games allow players opportunities to “rehearse” their feelings, states, and emotions. Anable investigates why games often mean so much to players, and how the digital world and real-life emotional landscapes come together. Through revisiting topics in academic game studies and analyzing a wide variety of video games, from mobile games to indie games to art games and beyond, Playing with Feelings demonstrates how digital devices affect our real-life interactions and emotions.
via Penguin Random House
By Anna Anthropy
Rise of the Videogame Zinesters is a 2012 title from Seven Stories Press, written by Anna Anthropy, an American video game designer, role-playing game designer, and interactive fiction author. Described as “part critical essay, part manifesto, part DIY guide, and altogether unprecedented,” this book calls for change in the game industry. Anthropy writes about how issues in the industry, such as corporate systems of production and misogyny, cause the exclusion of a wide range of perspectives and human experiences. This book encourages aspiring and up-and-coming game designers to pursue their creative endeavors, as the best version of the gaming world is one that represents all types of people, experiences, and perspectives. In Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, Anthropy explains why it is important to expand who games are for, who gets to create them, and more.
via Amazon
By Kishonna L. Gray
Published in 2020 by Louisiana State University Press, Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming is a book by Kishonna L. Gray, an associate professor in Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. Featuring a foreword by Anita Sarkeesian, this book centers Black gamers alongside issues of race, gender, sexuality, and disability. Through an intersectional lens, and looking at American history past and present, Gray unravels the stereotypes and the limited narratives of marginalized people in games, and how this affects real-life players. Made up of interviews of Black gamers, and an investigation of events both individual and highly publicized, Intersectional Tech explores how and if the gaming industry can enact social change. Of the book, American sociologist and MIT professor T.L. Taylor writes, “Intersectional Tech is a groundbreaking contribution to the growing body of work on race and technology. Gray weaves together incisive structural critique with a nuanced handling of the daily life and experiences of Black gamers.” If this title interests you and you’re looking for further reading, Gray is also the author of Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live, and the co-editor of Feminism in Play and Woke Gaming: Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice, an anthology.
via University of Minnesota Press
By Adrienne Shaw
Rounding out this list of game-based learning books for Pride Month is another title from scholar and Associate Professor Adrienne Shaw. Gaming at the Edge is a 2014 offering from the University of Minnesota Press, focused on the stakes of representation in gaming. Highlighting the experiences and influences of marginalized groups of gaming culture, Shaw utilizes feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories to discuss identity, video game characters, and how media affects people in their day-to-day lives. According to the book’s description, Shaw asks readers the following: “How do players identify with characters? How do they separate identification and interactivity? What is the role of fantasy in representation? What is the importance of understanding market logic?” In asking these questions, Shaw aims to show a reader why representation is a multifaceted issue, specifically for women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals. If you’re looking for further reading, Shaw is also a co-editor of the Queer Technologies: Affordances, affects, ambivalence anthology.
That concludes our list of game-based learning books for Pride Month, but this is by no means an exhaustive list! There are plenty of other resources on game theory and LGBTQ+ topics. Get out there, pick up a book (or two), and learn something new!
More game-based learning resources: