Contributors to this issue examine the role of video games in American culture, approaching games through the lenses of transpacific studies, queer historiography, cultural history, critical race and ethnic studies, and border studies. They explore interactions between the United States and Asia through the genre of visual novels; investigate representations of the AIDS crisis in video game history; consider how games like Papers, Please address concepts of borders and national belonging; and show the aesthetic and political challenges that games like Assassin's Creed III face in telling counterhistories of marginalized peoples. Taken together, these essays show how games can contribute to an expanded understanding of the United States and of the ways that cultural forms circulate nationally and transnationally. Contributors. Patrick Jagoda, Stephen Joyce, Gary Kafer, Jennifer Malkowski, Katrina Marks, Josef Nguyen, Christopher B. Patterson, Bo Ruberg, Arthur Z. Wang

In our unprecedentedly networked world, games have come to occupy an important space in many of our everyday lives. Digital games alone engage an estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide as of 2020, and other forms of gaming, such as board games, role playing, escape rooms, and puzzles, command an ever-expanding audience. At the same time, "gamification"-the application of game mechanics to traditionally nongame spheres, such as personal health and fitness, shopping, habit tracking, and more-has imposed unprecedented levels of competition, repetition, and quantification on daily life. Drawing from his own experience as a game designer, Patrick Jagoda argues that games need not be synonymous with gamification. He studies experimental games that intervene in the neoliberal project from the inside out, examining a broad variety of mainstream and independent games, including StarCraft, Candy Crush Saga, Stardew Valley, Dys4ia, Braid, and Undertale. Beyond a diagnosis of gamification, Jagoda imagines ways that games can be experimental-not only in the sense of problem solving, but also the more nuanced notion of problem making that embraces the complexities of our digital present. The result is a game-changing book on the sociopolitical potential of this form of mass entertainment.

A collection of essays offering a creative look at crises past, present, future, and speculative.   Starting with the shared experience of crisis brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and a planet sieged by disaster, Imaginable Worlds transforms tragedy into a framework for research and art, imagining a shared world beyond a global experience of emergency. Produced by the Smart Museum of Art and the Projects/Processes essay collection series, an initiative launched by the Serendipity Arts Foundation in New Delhi, this volume brings together the voices of artists, authors, and public intellectuals from a range of fields and locations. Suraj Yengde, named one of the “25 Most Influential Young Indians� by GQ Magazine; Siyanda Mohutsiwa, the brain behind the viral hashtag #IfAfricaWasABar; and Ho Tzu Nyen, the acclaimed artist behind the ongoing Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia project, are among the diverse contributors who have come together to critically engage with ideas and practices that engage with a partially known or unknown world. Inviting fresh creative looks at crises past, imminent, immediate, and speculative, Imaginable Worlds considers questions of survival and invites us to imagine new modes of sensing, knowing, and dwelling.  

In our unprecedentedly networked world, games have come to occupy an important space in many of our everyday lives. Digital games alone engage an estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide as of 2020, and other forms of gaming, such as board games, role playing, escape rooms, and puzzles, command an ever-expanding audience. At the same time, "gamification"-the application of game mechanics to traditionally nongame spheres, such as personal health and fitness, shopping, habit tracking, and more-has imposed unprecedented levels of competition, repetition, and quantification on daily life. Drawing from his own experience as a game designer, Patrick Jagoda argues that games need not be synonymous with gamification. He studies experimental games that intervene in the neoliberal project from the inside out, examining a broad variety of mainstream and independent games, including StarCraft, Candy Crush Saga, Stardew Valley, Dys4ia, Braid, and Undertale. Beyond a diagnosis of gamification, Jagoda imagines ways that games can be experimental-not only in the sense of problem solving, but also the more nuanced notion of problem making that embraces the complexities of our digital present. The result is a game-changing book on the sociopolitical potential of this form of mass entertainment.

The term "network" is now applied to everything from the Internet to terrorist-cell systems. But the word's ubiquity has also made it a cliche, a concept at once recognizable yet hard to explain. Network Aesthetics, in exploring how popular culture mediates our experience with interconnected life, reveals the network's role as a way for people to construct and manage their world-and their view of themselves. Each chapter considers how popular media and artistic forms make sense of decentralized network metaphors and infrastructures. Patrick Jagoda first examines narratives from the 1990s and 2000s, including the novel Underworld, the film Syriana, and the television series The Wire, all of which play with network forms to promote reflection on domestic crisis and imperial decline in contemporary America. Jagoda then looks at digital media that are interactive, nonlinear, and dependent on connected audiences to show how recent approaches, such as those in the videogame Journey, open up space for participatory and improvisational thought. Contributing to fields as diverse as literary criticism, digital studies, media theory, and American studies, Network Aesthetics brilliantly demonstrates that, in today's world, networks are something that can not only be known, but also felt, inhabited, and, crucially, transformed.

This handbook illustrates the evolution of literature and science, in collaboration and contestation, across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The essays it gathers question the charged rhetoric that pits science against the humanities while also demonstrating the ways in which the convergence of literary and scientific approaches strengthens cultural analyses of colonialism, race, sex, labor, state formation, and environmental destruction. The broad scope of this collection explores the shifting relations between literature and science that have shaped our own cultural moment, sometimes in ways that create a problematic hierarchy of knowledge and other times in ways that encourage fruitful interdisciplinary investigations, innovative modes of knowledge production, and politically charged calls for social justice. Across units focused on epistemologies, techniques and methods, ethics and politics, and forms and genres, the chapters address problems ranging across epidemiology and global health, genomics and biotechnology, environmental and energy sciences, behaviorism and psychology, physics, and computational and surveillance technologies. Chapter 19 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This handbook illustrates the evolution of literature and science, in collaboration and contestation, across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The essays it gathers question the charged rhetoric that pits science against the humanities while also demonstrating the ways in which the convergence of literary and scientific approaches strengthens cultural analyses of colonialism, race, sex, labor, state formation, and environmental destruction. The broad scope of this collection explores the shifting relations between literature and science that have shaped our own cultural moment, sometimes in ways that create a problematic hierarchy of knowledge and other times in ways that encourage fruitful interdisciplinary investigations, innovative modes of knowledge production, and politically charged calls for social justice. Across units focused on epistemologies, techniques and methods, ethics and politics, and forms and genres, the chapters address problems ranging across epidemiology and global health, genomics and biotechnology, environmental and energy sciences, behaviorism and psychology, physics, and computational and surveillance technologies. Chapter 19 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

A generously illustrated volume that documents the career of Jason Rohrer, one of the most heralded art game designers working today. A maker of visually elegant and conceptually intricate games, Jason Rohrer is among the most widely heralded art game designers in the short but vibrant history of the field. His games range from the elegantly simple to others of almost Byzantine complexity. Passage (2007)-acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York-uses game rules and procedurals to create a contemporary memento mori that captures an entire lifetime in five minutes. In Chain World (2011), each subsequent player of the game's single copy modifies the rules of the universe. A Game for Someone (2013) is a board game sealed in a box and buried in the Mojave Desert, with a list of one million potential sites distributed to Rohrer's fan base. (Rohrer estimated that it would take two millennia of constant searching to find the game.) With Chain World and A Game for Someone, Rohrer became the first designer to win the prestigious Game Challenge Design award twice. This book, and the exhibition it accompanies, offers a comprehensive account of the artist's oeuvre. The book documents all seventeen of Rohrer's finished games, as well as sketches, ephemera, and related material, with color images throughout. It includes entries on individual games (with code in footnotes), artist interviews, artist writings, commentary by high scorers, and interpretive texts. Two introductory essays view Rohrer's work in the contexts of game studies and art history. Exhibition The Davis Museum at Wellesley College February-June 2016