Required texts:

Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination

Susan Brownell, Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People’s Republic

Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games

David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900

Marc L. Moskowitz, Go Nation: Chinese Masculinities and the Game of Weiqi in China

Bonnie Nardi, My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft

T.L. Taylor, Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming

Marilyn Yalom, Birth of the Chess Queen: A History

Sources for other assigned readings:

Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature

Ian Bogost, How to Do Things with Videogames

Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism

Nick Dyer-Witheford & Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games

Margaret Hofer, The Games We Played: The Golden Age of Board & Table Games

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

Jesper Juul, The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games

Colin Mackenzie and Irving Finkel, eds., Asian Games: The Art of Contest

Andrew Morris, Morrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China

Miguel Sicart, Play Matters

Joseph Tobin, ed., Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon

Other readings:

Chris Berry, Fran Martin & Audrey Yue, eds., Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia

Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames

Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media

Hilde G. Corneliussen & Jill Walker Rettberg, Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader

Tristan Donovan, Replay: The History of Video Games

Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, New Media, 1740-1915

Pat Harrigan & Noah Wardrip-Fruin, eds., First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game

Pat Harrigan & Noah Wardrip-Fruin, eds., Second Person: Role-Playings and Story in Games and Playable Media

Pat Harrigan & Noah Wardrip-Fruin, eds., Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives

Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression

Jesper Juul, A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players

Jesper Juul, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds

Nick Montfort & Ian Bogost, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

Celia Pearce, Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds

Zoya Street, Dreamcast Worlds: A Design History

T.L. Taylor, Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture

Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies

Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, eds., The New Media Reader