Description: This edited volume theorizes and explicates "epistemic genres" of digital games, which are defined by the social uses and meanings attributed to different constellations of games by communities of players.
Brief description: Josh Call is Professor of English at Grand View University, USA. He is a former area chair of the Game Studies Area of the National Popular Culture Association and Managing Editor of the Approaches to Digital Game Studies series for Bloomsbury Press.
Review Quotes:
"Epistemic Genres: New Formations of Games offers wonderfully fresh perspectives on how videogame genres investigate, perform, and reshape the epistemes out of which contemporary games and their players emerge." --Ashleigh Cassemere-Stanfield, Assistant Professor, Colgate University, USA
"Epistemic Genres is more than a game studies update. This compilation is a hard reset to disrupt the norm of what game studies has been and can be. Epistemic Genres opens up the possibility that the medium, its users, gamers, audiences, and fans have contributed significantly beyond an entertainment outlet. This text offers a corrective to undo the exclusionary past of game studies." --Kishonna L Gray, Professor, School of Information, University of Michigan, USA, and author of Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming (2020) "This book calls for us to take a deeper look at some of the most familiar and beloved game genres of all time (strategy games, first-person shooters, Japanese roleplaying games, massively multiplayer online games). The authors argue that genres in games are not best understood by their forms, mechanics, or aesthetics. Rather, game genres have always been fluid sites of learning that require players to become co-collaborators in dynamic processes of knowledge creation. If genres are "epistemic," as technologies of learning, then games can also be vital tools of critique, coalition-building, and resistance-especially during turbulent and dangerous times." --TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Professor of Interactive Media and Games, University of Southern California, USA