The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture

FEATURING: IAN BOGOST - LEIGH ALEXANDER - ZOE QUINN - ANITA SARKEESIAN & KATHERINE CROSS - IAN SHANAHAN - ANNA ANTHROPY - EVAN NARCISSE - HUSSEIN IBRAHIM - CARA ELLISON & BRENDAN KEOGH - DAN GOLDING - DAVID JOHNSTON - WILLIAM KNOBLAUCH - MERRITT KOPAS - OLA WIKANDER

The State of Play is a call to consider the high stakes of video game culture and how our digital and real lives collide. Here, video games are not hobbies or pure recreation; they are vehicles for art, sex, and race and class politics.

The sixteen contributors are entrenched—they are the video game creators themselves, media critics, and Internet celebrities.  They share one thing: they are all players at heart, handpicked to form a superstar roster by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson, the authors of the bestselling Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game that Changed Everything.

The State of Play is essential reading for anyone interested in what may well be the defining form of cultural expression of our time.

"If you want to explain to anyone why videogames are worth caring about, this is a single volume primer on where we are, how we got here and where we're going next. In every way, this is the state of play." —Kieron Gillen, author of The Wicked + the Divine, co-founder of Rock Paper Shotgun

LINUS LARSSON and DANIEL GOLDBERG are two of Sweden's most important writers on new technology and the Internet. They have been published in Wired, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and American Computer World, and quoted by BBC News, The New York Times, and The Sydney Morning Herald. Their first book, Swedish Hackers, was published in 2011 in Sweden. In 2013, Minecraft followed with Seven Stories Press as their bestselling English-language debut.