February 2025

Professors at Play Playbook

Professors at Play and Play Story Press are excited to release Professors at Play Playbook, edited by Lisa Forbes and David Thomas. When you do a Google search with keywords “play in learning,” overwhelmingly you find play being utilized in childhood education. This lack of attention to play in higher education reflects the societal narrative that says, “play is for kids, not adults.” When play is associated with childhood or seen as trivial or a waste of time, utilizing play in “serious” adult learning can seem radical, scary, or reckless at most. The Professors at Play PlayBook challenges the idea...

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Black Game Studies

Play Story Press is excited to release Black Game Studies: An Introduction to the Games, Game Makers and Scholarship of the African Diaspora, by Lindsay Grace. Black Game Studies introduces the work of game makers from the African diaspora through academic scholarship, personal narratives and a catalog of works. It aims to provide a foundation from which researchers, designers, developers, game historians and others can draw an understanding of patterns, present practice, and a potential afro-future. Its works to make more visible, through aggregation and showcase, the creative contributions of Black game makers. It is an effort to meet the...

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Broke: How I Made Poverty a Game & Broke: the Game

Play Story Press is excited to announce the release of Broke: How I Made Poverty a Game along with Broke: the Game, by Dana Gold. POVERTY IS NOT A GAME! After growing up poor and working for decades in shelters and halfway houses, Dana Gold created a board game to help people of goodwill understand how families get ensnared in poverty and how difficult the struggle is to overcome structured inequity. The first version of the game was a sheet of paper, circles traced from a toilet paper roll, and movers Dana swiped from her kid’s Chutes and Ladders game....

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