Game streamers and live commentators are producing increasingly comprehensive analyses of gameplay, yet scholarship still tends to flatten the experiential media of video games into text for close reading. By shifting focus toward the immersiveness of video games,
Playthrough Poetics makes the case for gameplay as a necessary, alternate method. Contributors to this volume engage widely with the activity of play through autoethnographies, meta-analyses of self-broadcasting, new procedural methods like gamespace soundwalking, as well as the affective aspects of games research. In doing so, they model new possibilities for academic players and gamers alike.
Rigorous scholarship meets cultural practice in this innovative, multi-modal edited collection that includes video essays and offers transcripts of the playthroughs themselves. Readers (and viewers) will come away with a toolkit of models, case studies, and conceptual frameworks for analyzing video games through gameplay. This volume is a fresh return to the joy of play: the poetics of games as contemporary forms of storytelling and interactivity.
With contributions from Ashlee Bird, Brandon Blackburn, Milena Droumeva, Kishonna Gray, Robyn Hope, Ben Scholl, Maria Sommers, Ashlyn Sparrow, Christine Tran, and Aaron Trammell.
"Playthrough Poetics is a valuable and novel contribution to games research. This work is distinct from the “games as text” approach we’ve often seen, and instead engages with the actual experience of play. The dialogue between game and player is shown in this book to be highly productive, and to have a depth and a detail that the average player – and indeed, I suspect, the average researcher! – might not have fully appreciated."
—Mark R Johnson, University of Sydney
"I can immediately imagine bringing Playthrough Poetics into my classroom. I'm thrilled to see it as part of the Electronic Communities of Making series."
—Anastasia Salter, University of Central Florida
"As someone who has been involved in livestreaming and video games for many years now, this is the book I’ve been waiting for."
—Stuart Moulthrop, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
"In focusing on the affordances of playthrough, Playthrough Poetics is compelling conceptually and practically. There is great variety in the issues addressed in this volume—it isn’t a video game book that assumes that games are all one thing and that players are all one type, which is a great strength. While primarily engaged in game studies, this book could easily be used in both graduate and undergraduate classrooms, and the readability of the book makes it quite accessible to non-academic audiences as well."
—Shira Chess, University of Georgia
Milena Droumeva is associate professor of communication and Glenfraser Endowed Professor in Sound Studies at Simon Fraser University, specializing in mobile technologies and multimodal ethnography with a long-standing interest in game cultures and gender. Droumeva co-edited the volume Sound, Media, Ecology (Palgrave, 2019) and has worked extensively in educational research on game-based learning, as well as in interaction design for responsive environments and sonification.
An auto-narrated audiobook is available via the "Download" button above.
