The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture [Hardcover]

FEATURING:IAN BOGOST - LEIGH ALEXANDER - ZOE QUINN - ANITA SARKEESIAN & KATHERINE CROSS - IAN SHANAHAN - ANNA ANTHROPY - EVAN NARCISSE - HUSSEIN IBRAHIM - CARA ELLISON & BRENDAN KEOGH - DAN GOLDING - DAVID JOHNSTON - WILLIAM KNOBLAUCH - MERRITT KOPAS - OLA WIKANDER

The State of Play is a call to consider the high stakes of video game culture and how our digital and real lives collide. Here, video games are not hobbies or pure recreation; they are vehicles for art, sex, and race and class politics.

The sixteen contributors are entrenched—they are the video game creators themselves, media critics, and Internet celebrities.  They share one thing: they are all players at heart, handpicked to form a superstar roster by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson, the authors of the bestselling Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus Notch Persson and the Game that Changed Everything.

The State of Play is essential reading for anyone interested in what may well be the defining form of cultural expression of our time.

If you want to explain to anyone why videogames are worth caring about, this is a single volume primer on where we are, how we got here and where we're going next. In every way, this is the state of play. —Kieron Gillen, author of The Wicked + the Divine, co-founder of Rock Paper Shotgun

Editors Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson are interested in the way in which writing about the video game medium has grown from product criticism to social and political commentary. This broadening of scope is due not only to maturation, they argue. It is also the result of the democratization of game-making, which has allowed independent creators to release games on personal and seemingly noncommercial topics, in that way stimulating critical ­conversation.  --The New York Times Book Review

“A ground­breaking anthologylC-