Story Mode - Trevor Strunk
VGxA is intended to serve as an onramp for a wide variety of professions and knowledge levels, and Trevor Strunk’s Story Mode: Video Games and the Interplay between Consoles and Culture is an excellent book for an underserved audience; namely people who are interested in why video games might matter as art and culture but don’t necessarily have much background in video games nor related scholarship. Though Strunk is an academic by training, he’s also a podcaster, and this book skews toward meeting a general readership where they are at. With a loose framework of using the evolution of specific genres (namely horror) and long-running game franchises (like Final Fantasy) introducing a variety of ideas about how to critically engage with games, including how they produce meaning and the way their cultural context, including fandom and labor, affects their existence. Frankly, if you’re a serious academic or have a strong game studies foundation, you probably won’t find much value here, as Strunk doesn’t really ever commit to a deep theorization or unique method, and tends to preference ease of following the argument over rigor, often [frustratingly for me] ignoring or smoothing over areas of complexity or contradiction to his broader point. But if you’re new to thinking about games seriously in a cultural context, this a fantastic cafe read.
Author: Trevor Strunk
Connections:
Hiroki Azuma - Otaku: Japan's Database Animals
Shannon Struchi - Why You Should Care About Video Games