This book is an introduction to game studies, written in an approachable way that outlines useful perspectives that readers can use to interrogate games as a primary text. It provides the reader with a toolset that can “level up” their own critical perspectives.
This book is organized around several evaluative lenses, each supported with case studies. These lenses approach the analysis of games from different perspectives, outlining some of the important foundational work from game studies and other relevant disciplines, and then relating it widely across a corpus of modern titles. This book covers video games, role‑playing games, and board games, along with digressions into other more obscure areas such as LARPs, Mega‑Games, and Non‑Games. Each of the main areas calls back to how each of the evaluative lenses of this book could be used to illuminate intersections of medium and theoretical perspectives. The provided case studies then offer deeper dives into titles of particular significance.
This book will be suitable for students in games‑related courses at multiple levels of the curriculum, game critics, and those who simply want to develop more interesting and nuanced opinions on games.
1. An Introduction to Game Studies, 2. Critical Perspectives in Game Studies, 3. Secret Hitler: Political Symbolism and Metagaming in Social Deduction, 4. Systemic Perspectives in Game Studies, 5. Box classification and puzzle logic in the video game Wilmot’s Warehouse: its relation to language and semantics, 6. Experiential Perspectives in Game Studies, 7. The melancholy of Hollow Knight: A study of the dichotomy between charm and tragedy in the artistic elements of Hollow Knight, 8. Other Perspectives in Game Studies, 9. Animal Crossing: Turning a space into a place, 10. Domain Knowledge in Tabletop Roleplaying Games, 11. The Tension of Blades in the Dark, 12. Domain Knowledge in Video Games, 13. How Chants of Sennaar Creates Intriguing Gameplay around Learning Culturally Infused Languages, 14. Domain Knowledge in Board Games, Conclusion
Dr Michael Heron is Associate Professor in Games at the School of Computer Science and Engineering in Gothenburg, Sweden, and programme administrator for the Game Design and Technology programme. Michael is also the author of Tabletop Game Accessibility: Meeple Centred Design (CRC Press, 2024) and A Case Study in Computer Ethics in Context: The Scandal in Academia (CRC Press, 2024).
