A review by tyberius
The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture by Katherine Cross, Cara Ellison, William Knoblauch, Linus Larsson, Ian Bogost, Zoë Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, Ian Shanahan, Dan Golding, Evan Narcisse, Leigh Alexander, Hussein Ibrahim, Anna Anthropy, David Johnston, Merritt Kopas, Ola Wikander, Daniel Goldberg, Brendan Keogh

This is a great primer for those interested in what video games can mean to us culturally. The anthology is well curated, with essays covering violence, religion, and sexuality. What does it feel like to be a black man whose favorite video game can't take the time to make character creation tools that accurately depict your hairstyle, or feature protagonists that aren't either thugs or goofballs? How is the mindset of a large shooter-loving Arab game-playing population affected when their favorite Western franchises constantly feature bad guys that look like them? Is the way our representations of apocalypse in video games changed from the 80s to the 90s indicative of a larger shift in national mood or cultural zeitgeist?

My only quibble is that the collection can radically shift in tone and structure from essay to essay. The transition back and forth between raw emotional personal essay to dryer academic analysis can be jarring, and I would have preferred to read everything in one style or the other. Perhaps because games criticism as a field is still relatively young, at least in the realm of published, printed content, there is simply a lack of material out there to keep the style consistent throughout the collection.