[Commlist] New book: Ludopolitics: Videogames against Control

A new book, /Ludopolitics: Videogames against Control 
<https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zero-books/our-books/ludopolitics>/, 
has just been published by Zero Books.  It’s part game studies, part 
political theory, and part media studies, but it’s also an attempt to 
step back from strictly academic discourse and deliver something 
valuable to anyone interested in games and culture.  To that end, the 
book focuses on design and play practices that contravene control – 
games like /Braid/ and /Undertale/, and play practices like data mining 
and myth-making. /Bastion/ and tool-assisted speedrunning get extended 
treatment.

The formal pitch gets at the politics of control more directly:

What can videogames tell us about the politics of contemporary 
technoculture, and how are designers and players responding to its 
impositions?  To what extent do the technical features of videogames 
index our assumptions about what exists and what is denied that status? 
 And how can we use games to identify and shift those assumptions 
without ever putting down the controller? /Ludopolitics/ responds to 
these questions with a critique of one of the defining features of 
modern technology: the fantasy of control.  Videogames promise players 
the opportunity to map and master worlds, offering closed systems that 
are perfect in principle if not in practice.  In their numerical, 
rule-bound, and goal-oriented form, they express assumptions about both 
the technological world and the world as such.  More importantly, they 
can help us identify these assumptions and challenge them.  Games like 
/Spec Ops: The Line/, /Braid/, /Undertale/, and /Bastion/, as well as 
play practices like speedrunning, theorycrafting, and myth-making 
provide an aesthetic means of mounting a political critique of the 
pursuit and valorization of technological control.


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