A guide for reading and gifting for game studies readers
It’s our mission to publish books at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design that challenge and empower our readers. To help you uncover your next big idea, we’ve crafted a guide for reading and gifting that’s bursting with titles that exemplify the MIT Press: intellectual daring content, rigorous scholarly standards, a rich interdisciplinary focus, and beautiful distinctive designs.
Read on to discover new game studies books, and explore even more big ideas in our full guide.
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Playing at the World, 2E: The Invention of Dungeons & Dragons by Jon Peterson
This new edition of Playing at the World is the first of two volumes that update the 720-page original tome of the same name from 2012. This first volume is The Invention of Dungeons & Dragons, which explores the publication of that iconic game. (The second volume is The Three Pillars of Role-Playing Games, a deeper dive into the history of the setting, system, and character creation of D&D.) In this first volume, Jon Peterson distills the story of how the wargaming clubs and fanzines circulating around the upper Midwest in the 1970s culminated in Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s seminal role-playing game, D&D. It augments the research of the original edition with new insights into the crucial period in 1972–1973 when D&D began to take shape.
Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space edited by Chad Randl and D. Medina Lasansky
Board games harness the creation of entirely new worlds. From the medieval warlord to the modern urban planner, players are permitted to inhabit a staggering variety of roles and are prompted to incorporate preexisting notions of placemaking into their decisions. To what extent do board games represent the social context of their production? How might they reinforce or subvert normative ideas of community and fulfillment? In Playing Place, Chad Randl and D. Medina Lasansky have curated a collection of thirty-seven fascinating essays, supplemented by a rich trove of photo illustrations, that unpack these questions with breadth and care.
Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons edited by Premeet Sidhu, Marcus Carter and José P. Zagal
In 2024, the enormously influential tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons—also known as D&D—celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. To mark the occasion, editors Premeet Sidhu, Marcus Carter, and José Zagal have assembled an edited collection that celebrates and reflects on important parts of the game’s past, present, and future. Each chapter in Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons explores why the nondigital game is more popular than ever—with sales increasing 33 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite worldwide lockdowns—and offers readers the opportunity to critically reflect on their own experiences, perceptions, and play of D&D.
Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, Deluxe Edition: A Guide to Tabletop Roleplaying Games from D&D to Mothership by Stu Horvath
When Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson released Dungeons & Dragons in 1974, they created the first roleplaying game of all time. Little did they know that their humble box set of three small digest-sized booklets would spawn an entire industry practically overnight. In Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, Stu Horvath explores how the hobby of roleplaying games, commonly known as RPGs, blossomed out of an unlikely pop culture phenomenon and became a dominant gaming form by the 2010s. Going far beyond D&D, this heavily illustrated tome covers more than three hundred different RPGs that have been published in the last five decades.