Review: The State of Play

Book: The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture
Edited by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson

The State of Play is an edited collection of short articles from a variety of contemporary videogame critics, whose professions and backgrounds are diverse and varied. Several contributors teach and write to the academic community; others have made some money making games and writing critically about their play experiences. If there is some question about method, this volume serves to exemplify what a diversity of critical lenses looks like for a seemingly complex and sometimes esoteric medium. While the concept of play is a guiding heuristic for the editors of this collection, the book as a whole is perhaps better conceived of as a curiosity cabinet from which readers can examine different—none seemingly better or worse—modes of critical engagement with respect to games. In addition to more traditional forms of textual analysis, the collection also demonstrates how letters, choose your own adventures, and abbreviated historiographies work in the proverbial toolbox for critical writing. If the goal of this volume is to seed conversations about the landscape of contemporary critical game analysis and design, it succeeds. It does so by situating together authors who use personal experience or political ethos to index different relationships people can develop with other people/players or games themselves.