2025

Play Story Press is excited to release two Psychgeist of Pop Culture books. The Psychgeist of Pop Culture: The Witcher, edited by Rachel Kowert, PhD In a world where mean are monsters and monsters are men - who is the real monster? The Psychgeist of Pop Culture: The Witcher delves into the psychology of the characters and stories of this popular franchise. From the original book collection to best-selling video game series, to the hugely popular Netflix show, The Witcher is a transmedia experience that has captivated hearts and minds across the globe. In this series of edited essays, we...

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Play Story Press Play is excited to release the Meaningful 2024 Proceedings. Meaningful Play is a conference about theory, research, and game design innovations, principles and practices. Meaningful Play brings scholars, industry professionals and games practitioners together to understand and improve upon games to entertain, inform, educate, and persuade in meaningful ways. Meaningful Play Proceedings

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Play Story Press is excited to release What Happens When We Play, edited by Rebecca Rouse, Björn Berg Marklund, and Anna-Sofia Alklind Taylor What Happens When We Play: A Critical Approach to Games User Experience Design & Education brings together research and reflection from both faculty and graduate students involved in University of Skövde’s Games User Experience (GUX) Master’s program, launched in 2020. The collection shares insights from the new GUX curriculum, which takes a critical-making approach, combining practical projects done in collaboration with game studios, critical cultural theory and history, and design theory and hands-on work in the practice...

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Well Played and Play Story Press have released Well Played V14 N1: For the Love of Games. This issue of the Well Played Journal is a companion to the book, Well Played: For the Love of Games. The book curates authors and their submissions, and this issue provided an open call for participation. Together, they share a fun range of perspectives on our love of games. Well Played V14 N1: For the Love of Games  

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Play Story Press is excited to release Meet Me at the Fair, edited by Laura Hollengreen, Celia Pearce, Rebecca Rouse, and Bobby Schweizer. Together with the Olympics, world’s fairs are one of the few regular international events of sufficient scale to showcase a spectrum of sights, wonders, learning opportunities, technological advances, and new (or renewed) urban districts, and to present them all to a mass audience. Meet Me at the Fair: A World’s Fair Reader breaks new ground in scholarship on world’s fairs by incorporating a number of short new texts that investigate world’s fairs in their multiple aspects: political,...

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Play Story Press is excited to release the Interactive Storytelling Art book series, which has presented innovative interactive digital narrative artworks shown at the ARDIN (Association for Research in Digital Interactive Narrative) main conference, ICIDS (International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling. Interactive Storytelling Art

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Professors at Play & Play Story Press are excited to release Professors at Play ONLINE Playbook, edited by Lisa Forbes and David Thomas. The Professors at Play ONLINE PlayBook collects over 50 techniques and strategies designed to make the online classroom more fun. Rooted in the concept of playful pedagogy, this anthology shares proven approaches to increasing student engagement and learning in higher education. The approaches range from simple ice breakers to get students involved in an online class to more complex approaches to teaching complex subjects and concepts. The Online PlayBook complements the original Professors at Play PlayBook, expanding...

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We're excited to share that Games for Change, a non-profit organization working with video games that can have positive change in the world, has joined the Play Story Press™ Society as a founding member. Their generous philanthropic contribution supports the open design and dissemination of knowledge that has a positive impact. We're powered by input and involvement from our consortium, our contributors, and the community at large. We invite people to participate so that we can explore and create a better future together. Thanks to Games for Change for their support!

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Play Story Press is excited to release Game Design Snacks: Easily Digestible Game Design Wisdom, by José P. Zagal. This is an edited collection of nuggets of game design wisdom. It covers various areas in game design with examples from commercially released videogames. Its goal is to share and raise awareness of excellent game design. The contributing authors are B. Barker, M. Caldwell, J. Grahmann, K. Kotter, L. Neuschwander, T. S. Richard, and J. Zagal. Game Design Snacks: Easily Digestible Game Design Wisdom

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Play Story Press is excited to release Ludoliteracy: Defining, Understanding, and Supporting Games Education, by José P. Zagal. It seems like teaching about games should be easy. After all, students enjoy engaging with course content and have extensive experience with videogames. However, games education can be surprisingly complex. This book explores ludoliteracy, or the question of what it means to understand games, by looking at the challenges and problems faced by students taking games-related classes. In response to these challenges, this book then describes how online learning environments can be used to support learning about games by helping students get...

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