Video Games, Literature, and Close Playing

Edmond Y. Chang is Associate Professor of English at Ohio University. He has published on queer games, digital humanities, popular culture, and speculative literature of color including “Queergaming” in Queer Game Studies (2017), “Why Are the Digital Humanities So Straight?” in Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities (2021), and “Gaming While Asian” in Made in Asia/America (2024). He is an editor for Analog Game Studies and a contributing editor for Gamers with Glasses. Timothy J. Welsh is Associate Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. He is the author of Mixed Realism: Videogames and the Violence of Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) as well as articles on video games, interactive narrative, and digital society such as “(Re)Mastering Dark Souls” (Game Studies, 2021) and “Doing Nothing in San Andreas: Contesting the Value of Play in Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V” (Configurations, 2024). He is managing editor of the Journal of Games Criticism.