René Glas – författare

In the last decade, digital media technologies and developments have given rise to exciting new forms of ludic, or playful, engagements of citizens in cultural and societal issues. From the Occupy movement to playful city-making to the gameful designs of the Obama 2008 and Trump 2016 presidential campaigns, and the rise of citizen science and ecological games, this book shows how play is a key theoretical, methodological, and practical principle for comprehending such new forms of civic engagement in a mediatized culture. The Playful Citizen explores how and through what media we are becoming more playful as citizens and how this manifests itself in our ways of doing, living, and thinking. We offer a pluralistic answer to such questions by bringing together scholars from different fields such as game and play studies, social sciences, and media and culture studies.

The Paratexts of Video Game Production: Playing Behind the Scenes critically examines how the making-of media - from documentaries to concept art - shapes our understanding of videogame development and history, revealing their powerful role in constructing meaning beyond the games themselves.This book engages with the notion of paratextual play to show how making-of material has increasingly manifested within and even as games themselves, directly affecting the gaming experiences. Through the in-depth analysis of historical and contemporary making-of paratexts of games, the author analyses and demonstrates how the game industry shapes and reshapes itself by remaking and commodifying its own history, inviting players to play with and within it. The chapters discuss multiple types of paratexts such as game magazine, previews and reviews, ‘making-of’ books, special editions and remakes and remasters with a wide array of examples ranging from the earliest days of videogames to current times. Readers will gain critical insights into the meaning-making capacity of these often-overlooked materials and learn to recognize how they shape interpretations of what and why we play.An essential contribution to the study of paratextuality as one of the key frameworks for studying computer games, this book will appeal to game studies scholars, media and cultural studies researchers, and advanced students exploring videogame production, industry practices, and paratextual theory.