This text is a thoroughly accomplished contribution to scholarly
considerations of video games. Dan and David’s arguments can be used to
consider and reconsider scholarship on games and gaming, and they can
also be used as models for future work. This book has exceptional
relevance, for example, for what at this writing looks like an approaching
stormfront on the discipline’s horizon: namely, the question of how the
history of gaming might be aligned with productive considerations of
identity and its significance to the player’s acts of play. This question is
poised to shape the discipline for the foreseeable future, and Dan and
David’s arguments indicate how scholars might move into and navigate this
new and uncertain space.
The authors’ affection for and expertise with role-playing games is
evident throughout this book. If you are familiar with such games, you
already know how relevant so-called Dungeon Masters are for players. In
the hands of an expert Dungeon Master, new players as well as experienced
veterans can find equal enjoyment in a quest. Your authors have written a
book that is as inviting for those who are new to the field of Game Studies
as it is for students and scholars who have been working in this area for
quite some time. This fact should be noted, underlined, and maybe circled
twice. This is because, at the time of this writing, Game Studies is a field
that has been pushing relentlessly against its own horizons for several
decades. The work has been significant, and often illuminating, but it has
also been designed primarily for experts by experts. Dan and David are part
of a larger movement of experts speaking to everyone. This alone is
noteworthy; but the fact that they are doing so while participating in a larger
project of historicizing video games makes this book all the more relevant
to our time and, one assumes, the future.