All Episodes

Stephanie Farnsworth, "Games That Haunt Us: Gothic Game Space as a Living Nightmare" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Heather Shay, "Identity Building Among Role-Playing Gamers: Slaying Goblins in the Real World" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Michał Mycka, "Games User Research Cookbook: Tools and Techniques for Better Player Experience" (CRC Press, 2026)

Peter D. McDonald, "The Impossible Reversal: A History of How We Play" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)

Carlin Wing, "Bounce: Balls, Walls, and Bodies in Games and Play" (MIT Press, 2026)

Kaitlin Tremblay, "Life is Strange" (Boss Fight Books, 2026)

Victor Navarro-Remesal, "Zen and Slow Games" (MIT Press, 2026)

Miguel Sicart, "Playing Software: Homo Ludens in Computational Culture" (MIT Press, 2023)

Charlotte Reber, "Dragon Age II" (Boss Fight Books, 2026)

Raiford Guins, "King PONG: How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions" (MIT Press, 2026)

Rob Gallagher, "Artgames after GamerGate" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

Federico Alvarez Igarzábal and Emmanuel Guardiola, "Video Games and Mental Health: Perspectives of Psychology and Game Design" (Transcript Publishing, 2024)

Chaim Gingold, "Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine" (MIT Press, 2024)

Adrienne Domasin ed., "The Psychgeist of Pop Culture: The Last of Us" (Playstory Press, 2025)

Jessica Doyle and Jordan Ferguson, "Dance Dance Revolution" (Boss Fight Books, 2025)

Kawika Guillermo, "Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games" (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025)

Alisha Karabinus et al. eds., "Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be" (Punctum Books, 2025)

Julien Mailland on "The Game That Never Ends: How Lawyers Shape the Videogame Industry"

Kenneth Jones, "African American Males and Video Games: How Gaming Technology Can Motivate and Enhance Learning" (Myers Education, 2025)

Nathan Wainstein, "Grant Us Eyes: The Art of Paradox in Bloodborne" (2025)

Dom Ford, "Mytholudics: Games and Myth" (de Gruyter, 2025)

Cameron Kunzelman, "The World is Born from Zero: Understanding Speculation and Video Games" (de Gruyter, 2022)

James O'Connor, "Untitled Goose Game" (Boss Fight Books, 2025)

Elliot Lichtman, "The Computer Always Wins: A Playful Introduction to Algorithms through Puzzles and Strategy Games" (MIT Press, 2025)

Carly A. Kocurek and Matthew Payne, "Ultima and Worldbuilding in the Computer Role-Playing Game" (Amherst College Press, 2024)

Trans Technologies

Dave Cook, "Go Straight: The Ultimate Guide to Side-Scrolling Beat-'Em-Ups" (Bitmap Books, 2022)

Tracy Fullerton and Matthew Farber, "The Well-Read Game: On Playing Thoughtfully" (MIT Press, 2025)

Peter Krapp, "Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation" (MIT Press, 2024)

James Cartlidge, "The Rise of the Roguelite: Inside a Gaming Phenomenon" (CRC Press, 2025)

Jonathan D. Cohen, "Losing Big: America's Dangerous Sports Gambling Boom" (Columbia Global Reports, 2025)

Connor Jackson, "Zombies, Consumption, and Satire in Capcom's Dead Rising" (Routledge, 2024)

Milena Droumeva, "Playthrough Poetics: Gameplay as Research Method" (Amherst College Press, 2024)

Daryl Fairweather, "Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Mia Consalvo et al., "Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming Videogames on Twitch" (MIT Press, 2025)

Sarah Stang, et al., "Monstrosity in Games and Play" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

Blair Farrell, "The Avengers in Video Games" (McFarland, 2021)

Kyle Orland, "Minesweeper" (Boss Fight Books, 2023)

Robert Houghton, "The Middle Ages in Computer Games: Ludic Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)

Sam Srauy, "Race, Culture and the Video Game Industry: A Vicious Circuit" (Routledge, 2024)

Jeff Yoshimi, "Gaming Cancer: How Building and Playing Video Games Can Accelerate Scientific Discovery" (MIT Press, 2025)

Shelly Jones and Matthew Wilhelm Kapell, "Beyond the Deck: Critical Essays on Magic, The Gathering and Its Influence" (McFarland, 2023)

René Reinhold Schallegger, "A New Virtual Ethics: Interconnectedness and Interrelationality in Videogames" (McFarland, 2024)

Réjane Dreifuss et al., "Live Performance and Video Games: Inspirations, Appropriations and Mutual Transfers" (Transcript Publishing, 2024)

Marijam Did, "Everything to Play For: An Insider's Guide to How Videogames are Changing Our World" (Verso, 2024)

Marco Arnaudo, "The Tabletop Revolution: Gaming Reimagined in the 21st Century" (McFarland, 2023)

Jesper Juul, "Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer" (MIT Press, 2024)

James Malazita, "Enacting Platforms: Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine" (MIT Press, 2024)

Andrew S. Latham, "Hey! Listen!: Hypertext Rhetoric and The Legend of Zelda" (McFarland, 2024)

John Eglin, "The Gambling Century: Commercial Gaming in Britain from Restoration to Regency" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Julien Mailland, "The Game That Never Ends: How Lawyers Shape the Videogame Industry" (MIT Press, 2024)

Matthew S. Smith, "EverQuest" (Boss Fight Books, 2024)

Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman, "Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie®" (MIT Press, 2024)

Gabe Durham, "Bible Adventures" (Boss Fight Books, 2015)

Seth E. Jenny et al., "Routledge Handbook of Esports" (Routledge, 2024)

Yaraslau Kot, "Central and Eastern European Histories and Heritages in Video Games" (Routledge, 2024)

Richard Moss, "Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games" (Bitmap Books, 2024)

Tom Smith, "Anatomy of Game Design" (CRC Press, 2024)

Maurice Suckling, "Paper Time Machines: Critical Game Design and Historical Board Games" (Routledge, 2024)

Jordan Minor, "Video Game of the Year: A Year-By-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977" (Abrams, 2023)

Marta Fijak and Artur Ganszyniec, "How and Why We Make Games" (CRC Press, 2024)

Hey, Robot!

Jordan Magnuson, "Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice" (Amherst College Press, 2023)

Sarah Malanowski and Nicholas R. Baima, "Why It's Ok to Be a Gamer" (Routledge, 2024)

Christopher B. Patterson and Tara Fickle, "Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) about Us" (Duke UP, 2024)

Tore C. Olsson, "Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

Sören Schoppmeier, "Playing American: Open-World Videogames and the Reproduction of American Culture" (De Gruyter, 2023)

Souvik Mukherjee, "Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: Development, Culture(s) and Representations" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Edwin McRae, "Narrative Worldbuilding: A Player Centric Approach to Designing Story Rich Game Worlds" (Narrative, 2024)

En Li, "Betting on the Civil Service Examinations: The Lottery in Late Qing China" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Regina Seiwald and Ed Vollans, "(Not) In the Game: History, Paratexts, and Games" (de Gruyter, 2023)

Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, "The Rule Book: The Building Blocks of Games" (MIT Press, 2024)

Nick Jones, "Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

Peter D. McDonald, "Run and Jump: The Meaning of the 2D Platformer" (MIT Press, 2024)

Poppy Wilde, "Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities" (Routledge, 2023)

Stefano Gualeni, "The Clouds: An Experiment in Theory-Fiction" (Routledge, 2023)

Cross-Cultural Research on Gaming and “Gaming Disorder”

Hartmut Koenitz, "Understanding Interactive Digital Narrative: Immersive Expressions for a Complex Time" (Routledge, 2023)

David B. Nieborg and Maxwell Foxman, "Mainstreaming and Game Journalism" (MIT Press, 2023)

Emma Reay, "The Child in Videogames: From the Meek, to the Mighty, to the Monstrous" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

Robert Houghton, "Playing the Middle Ages: Pitfalls and Potential in Modern Games" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Chad Randl and D. Medina Lasansky, "Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space" (MIT Press, 2023)

Peter Nelson, "Computer Games As Landscape Art" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

Gabe Durham, "The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask" (Boss Fight Books, 2020)

Ben Whaley, "Toward a Gameic World: New Rules of Engagement from Japanese Video Games" (U Michigan Press, 2023)

Federico Alvarez Igarzábal, "Time and Space in Video Games: A Cognitive-Formalist Approach" (Transcript, 2020)

Marc Bonner, "Open World Structures: Architecture, Urban and Natural Landscape in the Computer Game" (Büchner-Verlag, 2023)

Stefan Heinrich Simond, "Pixelated Madness: The Construction of Mental Illnesses and Psychiatric Institutions in Video Games" (Hülsbusch, 2023)

Betty Adamou, "Games and Gamification in Market Research: Increasing Consumer Engagement in Research for Business Success" (Kogan Page, 2018)

Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform

Aaron A. Reed, "50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon" (2023)

The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games

Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics

The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University

Academic Chat: "Detention" and Other Horror Videogames: Avatars, Memory and Trauma

Lars de Wildt, "The Pop Theology of Videogames: Producing and Playing with Religion" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)

Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art

Zhouxiang Lu, "A History of Competitive Gaming" (Routledge, 2022)

Ida Yoshinaga et al., "Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction" (MIT Press, 2022)

Brendan Keogh, "The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist: Why We Should Think Beyond Commercial Game Production" (MIT Press, 2023)

Karen Schrier, "We the Gamers: How Games Teach Ethics and Civics" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Jason C. Cash and Craig T. Olsen, "The World of Final Fantasy VII: Essays on the Game and Its Legacy" (McFarland, 2023)

Justin L. Bergner, "Solving the Price Is Right: How Mathematics Can Improve Your Decisions On and Off the Set of America's Celebrated Game Show" (Prometheus Books, 2023)

Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, "The Avatar Faculty: Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Video Games" (U California Press, 2023)

Larisa Grollemond and Bryan C. Keene, "The Fantasy of the Middle Ages: An Epic Journey through Imaginary Medieval Worlds" (Getty, 2022)

Felix Zimmermann, "Virtual Realities: Atmospheric Experience of the Past in Digital Games (Büchner-Verlag, 2023)

Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson, "Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games" (MIT Press, 2023)

Stefano Gualeni and Riccardo Fassone, "Fictional Games: A Philosophy of Worldbuilding and Imaginary Play" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Jacob Birken, "Video Games: Digital Image Cultures" (Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2022)

Jeremiah McCall, "Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History" (Routledge, 2022)

Christopher Bartel, "Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy: Killing Time" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Jeffrey Carpenter and Andrea Robbett, "Game Theory and Behavior" (MIT Press, 2022)

Harald Koberg, "Free Play: Digital Gaming and the Longing for Effectiveness" (Büchner-Verlag, 2021)

Kelly I. Aliano, "The Performance of Video Games: Enacting Identity, History and Culture Through Play" (McFarland, 2022)

Melissa Kagen, "Wandering Games" (MIT Press, 2022)

Robert Houghton, "Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games: Using, Modding and Creating Games for Education and Impact" (de Gruyter, 2022)

Adam Crowley, "Representations of Poverty in Videogames" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)

Andrei Nae, "Immersion, Narrative, and Gender Crisis in Survival Horror Video Games" (Routledge, 2021)

Adrian Hon, "You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All" (Basic Books, 2022)

Christopher Lukman, "Control Machines: Toward a Dispositive Theory of Computer Games" (Lit Verlag, 2022)

How to Play Poker Like the Pros: A Conversation with Jonathan Little

C. Thi Nguyen, "Games: Agency as Art" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Esther Wright, "Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity" (de Gruyter, 2022)

Don’t Hate the Player: The World of E-Sports

Peter Winkler, "Mathematical Puzzles" (A K Peters, 2020)

Save the Whales: The Addictive Psychology Behind Video Games

Moral Kombat: How Mortal Kombat Caused Moral Outrage

The Revolution Will Not Be Streamed: The Intellectual Culture of Twitch Streamers

Felix Schniz, "Genre and Video Game: Introducing an Impossible Taxonomy" (Springer, 2021)

Samuel Ulbricht, "Ethics of Computer Gaming: A Groundwork" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)

Rachael Hutchinson and Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon, "Japanese Role-Playing Games: Genre, Representation, and Liminality in the JRPG" (Lexington Books, 2022)

John Wills, "Gamer Nation: Video Games and American Culture" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)

Mindy Capaldi, "Teaching Mathematics Through Games" (American Mathematical Society, 2021)

Thomas Haigh and Paul E. Ceruzzi, "A New History of Modern Computing" (MIT Press, 2021)

Grant Tavinor, "The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality" (Routledge, 2021)

Kurt Squire, "Making Games for Impact" (MIT Press, 2021)

Joseph P. Laycock, "Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds" (U California Press, 2015)

Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, "Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)

Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs, "The Digital Black Atlantic" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

Annelise Heinz, "Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Mary Pilon, "The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game" (Bloomsbury, 2015)

Jonas Peters and Nicolai Meinshausen, "The Raven's Hat: Fallen Pictures, Rising Sequences, and Other Mathematical Games" (MIT Press, 2021)

J. Rosenhouse, "Games for Your Mind: The History and Future of Logic Puzzles" (Princeton UP, 2020)

C. Thi Nguyen, "Games: Agency as Art" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Cailin O’Connor, "Games in the Philosophy of Biology" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

William Gibbons, "Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music" (Oxford UP, 2018)