Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification

"Few human pastimes absorb as much money and attention as games, and digital games alone engage more than two billion people worldwide. At the same time, the forms of experiment and behavior modification known as "gamification" have imposed unprecedented levels of competition, repetition, and quantification on daily life. Drawing from his own experience as a game designer, Patrick Jagoda shows that games need not be synonymous with gamification and reveals the ways in which experimental games can disrupt the logic of gamification itself. Games can, indeed, help us think beyond existing systems and intervene in neoliberal ideology from the inside out. Addressing game designers and new media artists as well as the growing field of game studies, Jagoda takes up a broad variety of games, including mainstream "AAA" games such "StarCraft,"widespread casual mobile games such as "Candy Crush Saga,"popular independent games such as "Stardew Valley,"formally experimental games such as "Luxuria Superbia,"and more personal auteur games such as "Dys4ia."He ranges over many genres including single-player, multi-player, and networked real-time strategy, platformers, simulators, first-person shooters, role-playing games, and puzzle games. The result is a game-changing book on the sociopolitical potential of this form of mass entertainment"--