Librarian for Media Studies, Gender Studies, & Philosophy
nicholae cline
they/them
Guide Contributors
We wish to acknowledge and thank the following people for their contributions to this guide:
- Jo Otremba, Arts & Humanities Library Assistant (Arts & Humanities)
- Sarah Bull, Part-Time Student Assistant (Media Services)
- Kathryn Edom, Part-Time Student Assistant (Media Services)
- Kate Naughton, Part-Time Student Assistant (Media Services)
- Joshua Peters, Part-Time Student Assistant (Media Services)
- Heather Sloan, Media & Map Services Assistant (Media Services)
- Monique Threatt, Department Head (Media Services)
Welcome & Introduction
Welcome to the Games & Gaming at Indiana University Libraries guide
This resource is meant to help introduce and orient users to all of the collections relevant to games and gaming at IU Libraries. This includes an overview of research resources relevant to game studies, game history, and game design; a summary of our electronic game, game console, and tabletop game collections; information about using our collections and the Media Services unit of the Libraries; and special features relevant to gaming, such as an introduction to gaming "generations," identity and representation in games, and a playlist of video game music from across time.
The subject specialists and collection managers for the gaming collections are nicholae cline & Monique Threatt. If you would like to contact them, please use the profile box located on the left-hand side of this page. If you would like to request a purchase for our collections, you can use this form. We also welcome potential donations of games and gaming-related items for our collections; please reach out to us if you would like to discuss a potential donation.
To navigate through this guide, you can use the links we've provided in this introduction or the navigation menu on the left-hand side of the guide.
Featured | Music in Games
Music has long been an integral part of the experience of games, with sound being just as important a design element as the visual. In many cases, the composers of video game soundtracks have become well-known for their beautiful work, from Koji Kondo's formative contributions to early Nintendo games to the haunting compositions of Akira Yamaoka for the Silent Hill series. Moreover, it was announced in 2022 that video game scores will be celebrated in their own category for the first time at the Grammy's in 2023, joining the BAFTA's in acknowledging and further cementing the significance and legacy of music in games.
In this feature and playlist, we want to highlight some of the most memorable musical moments and soundtracks across video game history, from the bleeps and bloops of Super Mario Bros to the orchestral beauty of games like Journey and Kentucky Route Zero. To learn more, consult some of the resources and lists we used to create this overview below, as well as books from our collection relevant to game music in the second tab of this feature.
- "A History of Video Game Music" (GameSpot)
- "Composing Classics: A History of Video Game Music" (National Museum of Play)
- "A Brief History of Video Game Music" (video, Library of Congress)
- "The Evolution of Video Game Music" (video, Fake Life Lore)
- Pixelated Audio (Podcast)
- "The Evolution of Video Game Music" (All Things Considered, NPR)
- "Video Games Inspire a Generation of Classical Music Fans" (Wired)
- "How Music Shapes the Way We Play Video Games" (Mashable)
- "Video Game Music" (Wikipedia)
- "The 100 Best Video Game Soundtracks of All Time" (FACT)
- "The 25 Best Video Game Soundtracks of All Time" (Happy)
Understanding Video Game Music by ISBN: 9781107116870Publication Date: 2016-09-08Understanding Video Game Music develops a musicology of video game music by providing methods and concepts for understanding music in this medium. From the practicalities of investigating the video game as a musical source to the critical perspectives on game music - using examples including Final Fantasy VII, Monkey Island 2, SSX Tricky and Silent Hill - these explorations not only illuminate aspects of game music, but also provide conceptual ideas valuable for future analysis. Music is not a redundant echo of other textual levels of the game, but central to the experience of interacting with video games. As the author likes to describe it, this book is about music for racing a rally car, music for evading zombies, music for dancing, music for solving puzzles, music for saving the Earth from aliens, music for managing a city, music for being a hero; in short, it is about music for playing.
The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music by ISBN: 9781108473026Publication Date: 2021-04-29Video game music has been permeating popular culture for over forty years. Now, reaching billions of listeners, game music encompasses a diverse spectrum of musical materials and practices. This book provides a comprehensive, up-to-date survey of video game music by a diverse group of scholars and industry professionals. The chapters and summaries consolidate existing knowledge and present tools for readers to engage with the music in new ways. Many popular games are analysed, including Super Mario Galaxy, Bastion, The Last of Us, Kentucky Route Zero and the Katamari, Gran Turismo and Tales series. Topics include chiptunes, compositional processes, localization, history and game music concerts. The book also engages with other disciplines such as psychology, music analysis, business strategy and critical theory, and will prove an equally valuable resource for readers active in the industry, composers or designers, and music students and scholars.
Ludomusicology: approaches to video game music by ISBN: 9781781791974Publication Date: 2016-09-01The last half-decade has seen the rapid and expansive development of video game music studies. As with any new area of study, this significant sub-discipline is still tackling fundamental questions concerning how video game music should be approached. In this volume, experts in game music provide their responses to these issues. This book suggests a variety of new approaches to the study of game music. In the course of developing ways of conceptualizing and analyzing game music it explicitly considers other critical issues including the distinction between game play and music play, how notions of diegesis are complicated by video game interactivity, the importance of cinema aesthetics in game music, the technicalities of game music production and the relationships between game music and art music traditions. This collection is accessible, yet theoretically substantial and complex. It draws upon a diverse array of perspectives and presents new research which will have a significant impact upon the way that game music is studied. The volume represents a major development in game musicology and will be indispensable for both academic researchers and students of game music.
Game Sound: an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of video game music and sound design by ISBN: 9780262033787Publication Date: 2008-08-08An examination of the many complex aspects of game audio, from the perspectives of both sound design and music composition. A distinguishing feature of video games is their interactivity, and sound plays an important role in this: a player's actions can trigger dialogue, sound effects, ambient sound, and music. And yet game sound has been neglected in the growing literature on game studies. This book fills that gap, introducing readers to the many complex aspects of game audio, from its development in early games to theoretical discussions of immersion and realism. In Game Sound, Karen Collins draws on a range of sources--including composers, sound designers, voice-over actors and other industry professionals, Internet articles, fan sites, industry conferences, magazines, patent documents, and, of course, the games themselves--to offer a broad overview of the history, theory, and production practice of video game audio. Game Sound has two underlying themes: how and why games are different from or similar to film or other linear audiovisual media; and technology and the constraints it has placed on the production of game audio. Collins focuses first on the historical development of game audio, from penny arcades through the rise of home games and the recent rapid developments in the industry. She then examines the production process for a contemporary game at a large game company, discussing the roles of composers, sound designers, voice talent, and audio programmers; considers the growing presence of licensed intellectual property (particularly popular music and films) in games; and explores the function of audio in games in theoretical terms. Finally, she discusses the difficulties posed by nonlinearity and interactivity for the composer of game music.
Unlimited Replays: video games and classical music by ISBN: 9780190265250Publication Date: 2018-05-01Classical music is everywhere in video games. Works by composers like Bach and Mozart fill the soundtracks of games ranging from arcade classics, to indie titles, to major franchises like BioShock, Civilization, and Fallout. Children can learn about classical works and their histories from interactive iPad games. World-renowned classical orchestras frequently perform concerts of game music to sold-out audiences. But what do such combinations of art and entertainment reveal about the cultural value we place on these media? Can classical music ever be video game music, and can game music ever be classical? Delving into the shifting and often contradictory cultural definitions that emerge when classical music meets video games, Unlimited Replays offers a new perspective on the possibilities and challenges of trying to distinguish between art and pop culture in contemporary society.
Sound Play: video games and the musical imagination by ISBN: 9780199969968Publication Date: 2014-04-03Video games open portals to fantastical worlds where imaginative play and enchantment prevail. These virtual settings afford us considerable freedom to act out with relative impunity. Or do they? Sound Play explores the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical stakes of people's creative engagements with gaming's audio phenomena-from sonorous violence to synthesized operas, from democratic music-making to vocal sexual harassment. William Cheng shows how video games empower their designers, composers, players, critics, and scholars to tinker (often transgressively) with practices and discourses of music, noise, speech, and silence. Faced with collisions between utopian and alarmist stereotypes of video games, Sound Play synthesizes insights across musicology, sociology, anthropology, communications, literary theory, philosophy, and additional disciplines. With case studies spanning Final Fantasy VI, Silent Hill, Fallout 3, The Lord of the Rings Online, and Team Fortress 2, this book insists that what we do in there-in the safe, sound spaces of games-can ultimately teach us a great deal about who we are and what we value (musically, culturally, humanly) out here. Foreword by Richard Leppert Video Games Live cover image printed with permission from Tommy Tallarico
Featured | Transgender Worldmaking in Video Games
Videogames and gaming in general has often created spaces where people can escape, join a new community, and redefine reality - even if only for a couple hours. As such, videogames have become a wonderful resource for gender diverse and transgender people as they can log in and change how they appear in a world that they control. This feature shares the concept of transgender video game worldmaking and character building as well as spotlighting several games that transgender and gender diverse people created in order to process the stresses and pressures of gender norms in everyday life.
Further Readings
- Why do games still struggle with trans inclusion? by Emma Flint - Wired
- The State of Trans Representation in Video Games by Lilly Contino - Game Developer
- How Gamers Use Video Games to Explore Their Gender Identity by Andrew Fishman - Psychology Today
- 'In the game, I knew myself as Hannah': the trans gamers finding freedom on Roblox by Tom Faber - The Guardian
Dys4ia by Publication Date: 2012Dys4ia is an autobiographical Adobe Flash video game about the artist Anna Anthropy’s decision to start hormone replacement therapy. It is a journal of six months of her life told through abstract mini-games. Each mini-game deals with a different emotional stage of her hormone therapy, and conveys her frustrations and accomplishments through innovative game mechanics and lo-fi graphics. Dys4ia is available to play for free, with the download of an adobe flash chrome extension.
Transgalactica: A Tune Your Own Adventure by Publication Date: 2018In this game, you are a trans person hurtling through space and listening to a radio. Follow the trail of broadcasts from T.R.A.N.S -- the Trans Radio Artists' Network in Space to find them and join them. This game is available to play for free - click the link above!
GENDERWRECKED by Publication Date: 2018GENDERWRECKED is a post-apocalyptic genderpunk visual novel about traveling broken lands and kissing/fighting/talking to monsters in an attempt to learn the true meaning of a mysterious force called GENDER. This game is available for downloadable play on Windows, macOS, and Linux for $6.99. A Demo of the game is available for free.
Mainichi by Publication Date: 2012A short, rpg- style game about navigating daily life as a black trans woman. The game can be downloaded and played for free from Brice’s website: http://www.mattie brice.com/mainichi.
Second Puberty by Second Puberty is an album/collection of seven short games, created over the course of two years, about various feelings surrounding medically transitioning and dealing with isolation during a pandemic. Second Puberty is available to play for free on Squinky's website: https://squinky.itch.io/second-puberty
One Night, Hot Springs by Publication Date: 2018Haru is invited by her old friend Manami to spend a night at the hot springs. All Haru wants to do is enjoy the hot springs like everyone else, but she doesn't want to cause any trouble... One Night, Hot Springs is a visual novel. Play as Haru, a young transgender woman, and join her at the hot springs in Japan. This game is available to play for free with a steam account.Celeste by
Publication Date: 2018Help Madeline survive her inner demons on her journey to the top of Celeste Mountain, in this super-tight, hand-crafted platformer from the creators of multiplayer classic TowerFall. Celeste is available for purchase to play through Steam.
Heaven Will Be Mine by Publication Date: 2018Heaven Will Be Mine is a queer science fiction mecha visual novel from the creators of queer cult horror visual novel We Know The Devil, about joyriding mecha, kissing your enemies, and fighting gravity’s pull. Follow three women piloting giant robots in the last days of an alternate 1980s space program fighting for humanity’s future—or ditching their jobs to make out with each other instead. Heaven Will Be Mine is available for purchase to play through Steam.If Found... by
Publication Date: 2020On December 31st 1993 in the crumbling ruins of a mansion on Achill Island, Kasio destroys her diary. It tells the story of her return home to the West of Ireland, her conflict with her family, the friends she makes, and the challenges she goes through. If Found... is available for purchase to play through Steam.
The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games by ISBN: 9781478005919Publication Date: 2020-03-20In The Queer Games Avant-Garde, Bo Ruberg presents twenty interviews with twenty-two queer video game developers whose radical, experimental, vibrant, and deeply queer work is driving a momentous shift in the medium of video games. Speaking with insight and candor about their creative practices as well as their politics and passions, these influential and innovative game makers tell stories about their lives and inspirations, the challenges they face, and the ways they understand their places within the wider terrain of video game culture. Their insights go beyond typical conversations about LGBTQ representation in video games or how to improve "diversity" in digital media. Instead, they explore queer game-making practices, the politics of queer independent video games, how queerness can be expressed as an aesthetic practice, the influence of feminist art on their work, and the future of queer video games and technology. These engaging conversations offer a portrait of an influential community that is subverting and redefining the medium of video games by placing queerness front and center.
Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media by ISBN: 9780253054487Publication Date: 2021-04-06In Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media, Claudia Costa Pederson analyzes modernist avant-garde and contemporary video games to challenge the idea that gaming is an exclusively white, heterosexual, male, corporatized leisure activity and reenvisions it as a catalyst for social change. By looking at over fifty projects that together span a century and the world, Pederson explores the capacity for sociopolitical commentary in virtual and digital realms and highlights contributions to the history of gaming by women, queer, and transnational artists. The result is a critical tool for understanding video games as imaginative forms of living that offer alternatives to our current reality. With an interdisciplinary approach, Gaming Utopia emphasizes how game design, creation, and play can become political forms of social protest and examines the ways that games as art open doors to a more just and peaceful world.
Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games by ISBN: 9780253025739Publication Date: 2017-07-03Recent years have seen an increase in public attention to identity and representation in video games, including journalists and bloggers holding the digital game industry accountable for the discrimination routinely endured by female gamers, queer gamers, and gamers of color. Video game developers are responding to these critiques, but scholarly discussion of representation in games has lagged far behind. Gaming Representation examines portrayals of race, gender, and sexuality in a range of games, from casuals like Diner Dash, to indies like Journey and The Binding of Isaac, to mainstream games from the Grand Theft Auto, BioShock, Spec Ops, The Last of Us, and Max Payne franchises. Arguing that representation and identity function as systems in games that share a stronger connection to code and platforms than it may first appear, the contributors to this volume push gaming scholarship to new levels of inquiry, theorizing, and imagination.
Rated M for Mature: Sex and Sexuality in Video Games by ISBN: 9781628925760Publication Date: 2015-10-22The word sex has many implications when it is used in connection with video games. As game studies scholars have argued, games are player-driven experiences. Players must participate in processes of play to move the game forward. The addition of content that incorporates sex and/or sexuality adds complexity that other media do not share. Rated M for Mature further develops our understanding of the practices and activities of video games, specifically focusing on the intersection of games with sexual content. From the supposed scandal of "Hot Coffee" to the emergence of same-sex romance options in RPGs, the collection explores the concepts of sex and sexuality in the area of video games.
Manifestations of Queerness in Video Games by ISBN: 0367900645Publication Date: 2022-07-29Taking the reader on a journey through queer manifestations in games, this book advocates for video games as a rich, political and cultural medium, which provides us with tools to navigate the future of gaming. Situated at the intersection of New Media, Game, Cultural and Queer Studies, the book navigates diverse interspecies relationships, queer villains from the past, Pokémon memes on border politics, flânerie in post-industrial cities and one-sided erotic fights. It provides new critical engagements with the works of Jose Esteban Muñoz, Bo Ruberg, Guy Debord and Jack Halberstam, examining queer representation, gaming subcultures and dissident play practices. Making the bold claim that video games might be the queerest medium today, this book provides organic, self-reflective and, ultimately, thought-provoking thinking in which both games and gamers are queered. This book will be of interest to scholars researching game studies, sex, gender and sexuality in new media, but also readers interested in literature, digital media, society, participatory culture and queer studies.
Queerness in Play by ISBN: 9783319905419Publication Date: 2018-11-06Queerness in Play examines the many ways queerness of all kinds--from queer as 'LGBT' to other, less well-covered aspects of the queer spectrum--intersects with games and the social contexts of play. The current unprecedented visibility of queer creators and content comes at a high tide of resistance to the inclusion of those outside a long-imagined cisgender, heterosexual, white male norm. By critically engaging the ways games--as a culture, an industry, and a medium--help reproduce limiting binary formations of gender and sexuality, Queerness in Play contributes to the growing body of scholarship promoting more inclusive understandings of identity, sexuality, and games.
Video Games Have Always Been Queer by ISBN: 9781479843749Publication Date: 2019-03-19Argues for the queer potential of video games While popular discussions about queerness in video games often focus on big-name, mainstream games that feature LGBTQ characters, like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, Bo Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content. Video Games Have Always Been Queer argues that the medium of video games itself can--and should--be read queerly. In the first book dedicated to bridging game studies and queer theory, Ruberg resists the common, reductive narrative that games are only now becoming more diverse. Revealing what reading D. A. Miller can bring to the popular 2007 video game Portal, or what Eve Sedgwick offers Pong, Ruberg models the ways game worlds offer players the opportunity to explore queer experience, affect, and desire. As players attempt to 'pass' in Octodad or explore the pleasure of failure in Burnout: Revenge, Ruberg asserts that, even within a dominant gaming culture that has proved to be openly hostile to those perceived as different, queer people have always belonged in video games--because video games have, in fact, always been queer.
Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture by ISBN: 9780816693153Publication Date: 2015-01-01Video games have long been seen as the exclusive territory of young, heterosexual white males. In a media landscape dominated by such gamers, players who do not fit this mold, including women, people of color, and LGBT people, are often brutalized in forums and in public channels in online play. Discussion of representation of such groups in games has frequently been limited and cursory. In contrast, Gaming at the Edge builds on feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity and draws on qualitative audience research methods to make sense of how representation comes to matter. In Gaming at the Edge, Adrienne Shaw argues that video game players experience race, gender, and sexuality concurrently. She asks: How do players identify with characters? How do they separate identification and interactivity? What is the role of fantasy in representation? What is the importance of understanding market logic? In addressing these questions Shaw reveals how representation comes to matter to participants and offers a perceptive consideration of the high stakes in politics of representation debates. Putting forth a framework for talking about representation, difference, and diversity in an era in which user-generated content, individualized media consumption, and the blurring of producer/consumer roles has lessened the utility of traditional models of media representation analysis, Shaw finds new insight on the edge of media consumption with the invisible, marginalized gamers who are surprising in both their numbers and their influence in mainstream gamer culture.
Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures: Passionate Play by ISBN: 9780415897662Publication Date: 2011-12-21How do gender and sexuality come to matter in online game cultures? Why is it important to explore "straight" versus "queer" contexts of play? And what does it mean to play together with others over time, as co-players and researchers? Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures is a book about female players and their passionate encounters with the online game World of Warcraft and its player cultures. It takes seriously women's passions in games, and as such draws attention to questions of pleasure in and desire for technology. The authors use a unique approach of what they term a "twin ethnography" that develops two parallel stories. Sveningsson studies "straight" game culture, and makes explicit that which is of the norm by exploring the experiences of female gamers in a male-dominated gaming context. Sundén investigates "queer" game culture through the queer potentials of mainstream World of Warcraft culture, as well as through the case of a guild explicitly defined as LGBT. Academic research on game culture is flourishing, yet feminist accounts of gender and sexuality in games are still in the making. Drawing on feminist notions of performance, performativity and positionality, as well as the recent turn to affect and phenomenology within cultural theory, the authors develop queer, feminist studies of online player cultures in ways that are situated and embodied.
Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form by ISBN: 9781609803728Publication Date: 2012-03-20Part critical essay, part manifesto, part DIY guide and altogether unprecedented, Anna Anthropy's Rise of the Videogame Zinesters shows why the multi-billion dollar videogame industry needs to change - and how a new generation of artists can change it. In this first intergalactic offensive against corporate systems of production, condescending media coverage and pervasive 'gamer' culture, Anthropy takes a look at the new artists who are beginning to build an alternative body of work. A unique guide for anyone who wants to join the coming revolution of videogames.
#Trans: An Anthology about Transgender and Nonbinary Identity Online by ISBN: 9781543175882Publication Date: 2017-02-16#Trans is an essay collection featuring the works of twenty transgender and nonbinary writers as they share their experiences with online communities, video games, and dating apps--among other technologies. Each author's experience of their identity breaks away from the typical transgender narrative that is predominantly hung up on surgery and medical intervention. While that aspect is still a part of the story for some of these writers, surgery has never been the sole inspiration which pushes these writers forward. Whether it was the love of a particular movie, the desire to share a feeling on social media, or a song they couldn't get out of their heads, these twenty writers' experiences of their identity have been shaped by media, technology, and the internet. And now, #Trans is ready to share with all of you.Authors include YouTuber Skylar Kergil, academic Evelyn Deshane, Latinx writer Ariel Estrella, micro-memoirist Erika D. Price, anthropologist Harlow Figa, poet mud howard, LGBTQ romance author J.K. Pendragon, and many more.
- Rivera, Sien. 2022. “From Battleground to Playground: The Video Game Avatar as Transitional Phenomenon for a Transgender Patient.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 70 (3): 485–510. doi:10.1177/00030651221104487
- Kosciesza, A.J. 2023. “The Moral Service of Trans NPCs: Examining the Roles of Transgender Non-Player Characters in Role-Playing Video Games.” Games and Culture 18 (2): 189-208–208. doi:10.1177/15554120221088118.
- McKenna, J.L., C.R. Williams, K. McGregor, E.R. Boskey, and Y.-C. Wang. 2022. ““You Can’t Be Deadnamed in a Video Game”: Transgender and Gender Diverse Adolescents’ Use of Video Game Avatar Creation for Gender-Affirmation and Exploration.” Journal of LGBT Youth, January. doi:10.1080/19361653.2022.2144583.
- Thach, Hibby. 2021. “A Cross-Game Look at Transgender Representation in Video Games.” Press Start 7 (1): 19–44. http://press-start.gla.ac.uk/index.php/press-start/article/view/187
- Shaw, A. 2009. “Putting the Gay in Games: Cultural Production and GLBT Content in Video Games.” Games and Culture 4 (3): 228-253–253. doi:10.1177/1555412009339729.
- Heritage, Frazer. 2022. “Politics, Pronouns and the Players: Examining How Videogame Players React to the Inclusion of a Transgender Character in World of Warcraft.” Gender & Language 16 (1): 26–51. doi:10.1558/genl.20250.
- Tarik Sabry. 2017. “Talking to Gaymers: Questioning Identity, Community and Media Representation.” Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 9 (1). doi:10.16997/wpcc.150.
- Ruberg, Bo, Chris J. Young, and Greig de Peuter. 2019. “The Precarious Labor of Queer Indie Game-Making: Who Benefits from Making Video Games ‘Better’?” Television & New Media 20 (8): 778–88. doi:10.1177/1527476419851090.
- Hester, Jennessa. 2023. “Nintendo Switch-Ing Genders: Bowsette and the Potentiality of Transgender Video Game Mechanics.” Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, March, 1–15. doi:10.1080/01973762.2023.2184234.