The Return of the No Escape Book Club

Hi y’all! Once again, we’re trying to read books about video games in the blog medium. None of this is particularly well-advised, but thanks to friends in academia who have taught me stuff (like… uh, how to cite, and… how to *cough* actually do close readings) over the past year, I figure it would be cool to give this a shot once again.

Before I talk about the book I’ve decided to start things off with, I wanted to talk about the angles I’m approaching this project’s second go-around from.

The first angle: I’m not actively trying to editorialize about the broader text through these posts. I might ask what something means or make connections between points, but I want to treat the text with respect and not just jump to conclusions about anything.

The second angle: I’m approaching this like an undergrad student would approach a group reading, and not like a professional academic. The reason is simple: I’m not an academic.

The third and final angle: I wanna do this in conversation with folks. Me writing a post in isolation about my chapter-by-chapter thoughts on the book doesn’t really strike me as being particularly useful to anybody and kind of goes against the whole first and second angles. I think it would be neat to have a bunch of folks writing to each other and bouncing ideas off each other. To this end I’m gonna start an OPTIONAL Discord server where folks who want in on this can join, have conversations about the book and other stuff with each other, and more-or-less create a reading/writing circle around the book.

One thing I’m thinking about with regard to all of this is that I want it to be asynchronous. People read at their own pace, I’m a pretty slow reader myself, and I don’t want anyone feeling like they’re missing out on the conversation just because I put a post about a chapter up, or conversely, like they have to wait for everyone to catch up to talk about their own thoughts.

Basically you should feel free to come and go as you please.

With all of that being said, let’s talk about the book I wanna start talking about.

The First Book Club Reading: Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture, by Amanda Phillips (NYU Press, 2020)

According to the backmatter, Amanda Phillips (they/he/she) is the Assistant Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University. They have a website with a pretty detailed “about” page if you’re interested in checking that out. In addition to writing Gamer Trouble, they are also the co-editor of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, they edited the special “Queerness and Video Games” issue of Game Studies, and they were a series editor of NYU Press’s Queer/Trans/Digital book series with UCIrvine Asst. Prof Bo Ruberg and UCSC Asst. Prof. Micha Cárdenas.

The book runs a cool 238 pages (including about 55 pages of stuff like acknowledgements, notes, the bibliography and the index) in the paperback version and according to the table of contents there are six main parts (counting the introduction and conclusion sections). The paperback version of the book costs $29 from the NYU Press website and the hardcover version runs $89. The Amazon Kindle ebook version is $27.55. Check out Dr. Phillips’s pinned tweet for a still-active and pretty substantial discount from NYU Press, though.

So what is this book about and why would it be cool to read? Dr. Ruberg calls the book “absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in video games or game studies […] this much-needed, timely, and insightful book troubles the figure of the gamer and boldly shifts how we understand video games and their place in society;” Dr. Radhika Gajjala says Gamer Trouble historicizes “both the racism and sexism in the industry, [and] demands a different kind of engagement from the user: one that does not shy away from this complexity. Rather, Phillips lifts the hood to understand how these histories are made both part and parcel of gameplay.”

”Gamers have been troublemakers as long as games have existed,” the back-cover description starts. “As our popular understanding of ‘gamer’ shifts beyond its historical construction as a white, straight, adolescent, cisgender male, the troubles that emerge both confirm and challenge our understanding of identity politics.” What excites me about this is kind of the promise that through this book, we’ll start to be able to confront long-held ideas about all sorts of identities, but also, who gets to be considered “gamer.”

This paragraph continues, “In Gamer Trouble, Amanda Phillips excavates the turbulent relationships between surface and depth” — ! — “in contemporary gaming culture, taking readers under the hood of the mechanisms of video games in order to demonstrate the ways that difference gets baked into its technological, ludic, ideological, and social systems.” I got this book a hot minute ago, I think wholly based on this chunk of backmatter, because it pushes all my buttons in the best way possible. I’m extremely interested in the idea of taking apart the industry, seeing how it works, and putting it back together again, with new understanding.

The rest of the back-cover description summarizes how Dr. Phillips will go about staking their overall claims – how we will actually do the dismantling, so to speak. It appears like we’ll be looking at a combination of queer and feminist texts, interviews, case studies and a lot more: “From the microcosmic level of electricity and flicks of a thumb to the grand stages of identity politics and global capitalism, wherever gamers find themselves, gamer trouble follows.” If you don’t find that kind of cool as hell, then… well, this is optional! That’s the best part of this book club.

If you’re interested in hanging out, reading this book, talking with each other about it/writing stuff about it, let’s do the thing! Keep your eyes on @noescapevg over at Twitter for more information about the Book Club Discord and “official” start times (it’ll be some time within the next week or so for sure).