It seems that the book that my friend and colleague Timothy Welsh and I wrote late last summer has a publication date! This entry appeared on the Routledge website this week pinning the release of the book in September 2025. We are really proud of Video Games, Literature, and Close Playing: A Practical Guide, and I think it will be a very useful–dare I say, gamechanger–text for teachers, students, developers, scholars, and gamers.
The abstract of the book reads:
Video Games, Literature, and Close Playing: A Practical Guide offers twenty-four case studies of mainstream and independent video games from Tetris to The Sims, Undertale to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Assassin’s Creed to Gone Home in order to introduce key video game and literary studies concepts, ideas, definitions, and possibilities. The book also includes a brief history of video games and literature, critical questions and suggested readings for each chapter, and a collection of prompts, activities, and assignments for students and instructors to engage, adapt, and explore. The book is designed to be useful, modular, and playful, to provoke questions and conversation, to encourage connections and collaboration, and to inspire critical thinking.
And here is the Table of Contents:
Introduction: Close Playing Our Classrooms
LORE I: Literary Gaming
01 ImmorTall
02 Tetris
03 Beginner’s Guide
04 Oblivion
05 BioShock
06 Assassin’s Creed
07 Undertale
SIDE QUESTS I: Activities and Assignments
LORE II: Literature and Video Games
08 The Sims
09 The Walking Dead
10 Portal
11 Red Dead Redemption
12 Super Columbine Massacre RPG
13 Dark Souls
14 NBA2K18
15 Pokèmon Go
16 Minecraft
SIDE QUESTS II: Activities and Assignments
LORE III: Gamifying Literature
17 Loved
18 Animal Crossing: New Horizons
19 Dragon Age
20 Barbie Dreamtopia: Adventure Games
21 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
22 Queers in Love at the End of the World
23 When Rivers Were Trails
24 Gone Home
SIDE QUESTS III: Activities and Assignments
LORE IV: Getting Messy