The ETC Press is proud to announce the release of Well Played Retrospective: The Past, Pandemic and Future of Video Games, Value and Meaning, edited by Drew Davidson, Ira Fay, Clara Fernandez-Vara, Jane Pinckard, & John Sharp.
Well Played is a concept of providing in-depth close readings of video games that parse out the various meanings to be found through the experience of playing a game. Around Halloween in 2020, the Well Played Journal started its 10th volume. Looking back, the first “well played” presentation and article was in 2003, with the first book coming out in 2009, and the first journal issue released in 2011.
Thinking of Well Played during the pandemic underscored how games have been a part of our experiences, and the value and role games have had in people’s lives this past year or so. This Well Played retrospective, along with companion essays on games during the pandemic, capture a critical history of Well Played and highlight how much games can matter in our lives. The retrospective essays and the pandemic essays have resonant themes, so we’ve woven them together to share a written tapestry of Well Played and games, value, and meaning.
About Carnegie Mellon University’s ETC Press
ETC Press is a publishing imprint with a twist. We publish books, but we’re also interested in the participatory future of content creation across multiple media. We are an academic, open source, multimedia, publishing imprint affiliated with the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and in partnership with Lulu.com.
ETC Press publications will focus on issues revolving around entertainment technologies as they are applied across a variety of fields. Authors publishing with ETC Press retain ownership of their intellectual property. ETC Press publishes a version of the text with author permission and ETC Press publications will be released under Creative Commons licenses. Every text is available for free download, and we price our titles as inexpensively as possible because we want people to have access to them. We’re most interested in the sharing and spreading of ideas.