This book is an introduction to game studies, written in an approachable way that outlines useful perspectives that readers can use to interrogate games as a primary text. It provides the reader with a toolset that can “level up” their own critical perspectives.

This book is organized around several evaluative lenses, each supported with case studies. These lenses approach the analysis of games from different perspectives, outlining some of the important foundational work from game studies and other relevant disciplines, and then relating it widely across a corpus of modern titles. This book covers video games, role‑playing games, and board games, along with digressions into other more obscure areas such as LARPs, Mega‑Games, and Non‑Games. Each of the main areas calls back to how each of the evaluative lenses of this book could be used to illuminate intersections of medium and theoretical perspectives. The provided case studies then offer deeper dives into titles of particular significance.

This book will be suitable for students in games‑related courses at multiple levels of the curriculum, game critics, and those who simply want to develop more interesting and nuanced opinions on games.