Ready Reader One: The Stories We Tell With, About, and Around Videogames

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.

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.