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Podcast: New Books in Popular Culture
Episode: Melissa Kagen, "Wandering Games" (MIT Press, 2022)
Description: In Wandering Games (MIT Press, 2022), Melissa Kagen analyzes wandering within different game worlds, viewed through the lenses of work, colonialism, gender, and death. Wandering in games can be a theme, a formal mode, an aesthetic metaphor, or a player action. It can mean walking, escaping, traversing, meandering, or returning. Kagen introduces the concept of âwandering games,â exploring the uses of wandering in a variety of game worlds. She shows how the much-derided Walking Simulatorâa term that began as an insult, a denigration of games that are less violent, less task-oriented, or less difficult to completeâsemi-accidentally tapped into something b...