Ready Reader One - by Megan Amber Condis & Mike Sell

About the Book

"Videogames are a powerful storytelling medium-but what are the stories we tell about videogames, with videogames, around videogames? What can we learn from novels that describe the struggles of young people trapped in virtual reality, from fanfiction that explores the private life of a popular Nintendo character, or from a poem that compares Pac-Man to Saint Augustine? An extensive body of scholarship explores the ways videogames create worlds, construct characters, and tell emotionally compelling narratives. But very little research has focused on representation of videogames, videogame players, and videogame culture in literary texts, whether traditional genres like novels, short stories, memoirs, and poems, or non-traditional and emergent forms like fanfiction, how-to-guides, hip-hop lyrics, or young-adult fiction. Ready Reader One is designed to fill that gap. The texts that this book's contributors engage are interesting in their own right. Thomas Pynchon's deployment of the tropes of retrogaming in Bleeding Edge evinces a fascinating inflection of his "paranoid style." Hanna Faith Notess's integration of videogame mechanics into her poetry enables a fascinating and poignant relationship of melancholy, memory objects, and the lyric form. The exploration of videogame addiction in memoirs challenges stereotypes and suggests different ways to understand the entanglement of desire and pleasure in the twenty-first century. The stories of virtual reality in the novels of Ernest Cline, Lauren Beuke, and Liu Cixin map the ways videogames are transforming our bodies, families, and friendships. Beyond their intrinsic value as works of literature, videogame literature provides meaningful perspectives on what videogames are and what they might be. Contributors to this collection demonstrate that videogame literature sheds light on how space, time, and identity are being reshaped by videogames; helps us detect emergent forms of play, media, algorithmic systems, surveillance culture, and social media; and increases our understanding of the larger stories that surround videogames and those who play them"--

Book Synopsis

Ready Reader One explores the many ways literature depicts, engages with, and imagines videogames and gamers. The diverse group of authors included in this collection take an expansive view of "videogame literature," with essays that consider written works ranging from life writing to speculative fiction to videogame guides created for the internet. In an age of ever-increasing gamification, in which gaming literacy is important to understanding popular culture and technological power, Ready Reader One examines the role of videogame literature in explaining not only how we play videogames, but how we read and write about them.

Review Quotes

"Ready Reader One curates a lively and playful collection of essays, perspectives, and stories that redefine gaming, gaming as literature, and alternative (and often underrepresented) definitions of what it means to be a gamer. Ready Reader One is earnest, accessible, colorful, and definitely teachable: Press Start to Begin!"--Edmond Chang, associate professor of English, Ohio University

"Focused on 'videogame literature, ' this collection not only addresses a significant void in the study of videogames and culture but also compellingly argues for the political urgency of critical engagements with gaming literacies."--Timothy J. Welsh, managing editor, Journal of Games Criticism

"From close readings of novels and life writing that represent the experience of gameplay, to detailed studies of game walkthroughs as a genre, these brilliant essays will sharpen our sensitivity to the many, and sometimes unexpected, places we might read games around us."--Alistair Brown, assistant professor of digital humanities and modern literature, Durham University, UK

About the Author

Megan Amber Condis is assistant professor of communication studies at Texas Tech University and the author of Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture. She serves on the editorial boards of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities and Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds.

Mike Sell is professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Avant-Garde: Race, Religion, War and Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1960s, and coauthor of Systemic Dramaturgy: A Handbook for the Digital Age.