Game Studies Study Buddies is a podcast that makes academic games studies available for audiences outside of academia, text by text. Rather than focusing on following or forging a “canon” of the discipline, media scholar Cameron and literature scholar Michael instead aim to cover an eclectic body of material. And while we are centrally focused on contemporary videogames, you can expect our discussions (and the work we cover) to account for everything from Dungeons & Dragons to tic-tac-toe.
Texts are chosen in pairs, juxtaposing the old and new or the popular and obscure. Each episode is a discussion of a single text, walking through its arguments, posing clarifying or complicating questions, relating it to anything else we’ve read, and situating it within the larger study of games and the critical study of media and culture.
Here’s another way of putting it: we’re two friends who make and write about games, think way too much, and read a lot. We want to have a productive, friendly discussion about the diverse body of work that constitutes academic game studies, and we want that discussion to be available and informative whether you’re a researcher, a teacher, a student, a game designer, a game player, or just someone who likes podcasts. If you’re interested at all in games, their history, their cultural impact, and the massive amounts of great critical work produced about them over the decades, then we invite you to become our games studies study buddy.