The State of Play

Sixteen Voices of Video Games

By: Linus Larsson, Daniel Goldberg

Narrated by: Zachary Webber, Alex Hyde-White, Tonya Cornilesse, Liane Curtis, Steve Marvel

Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins

Publisher's Summary

Featuring: Ian Bogost, Leigh Alexander, Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian and Katherine Cross, Ian Shanahan, Anna Anthropy, Evan Narcisse, Hussein Ibrahim, Cara Ellison and Brendan Keogh, Dan Golding, David Johnston, William Knoblauch, Merritt Kopas, and Ola Wikander

The State of Play is a call to consider the high stakes of video-game culture and how our digital and real lives collide. Here, video games are not hobbies or pure recreation; they are vehicles for art, sex, and race and class politics.

The 16 contributors are entrenched - they are the video game creators themselves, media critics, and Internet celebrities. They share one thing: They are all players at heart, handpicked to form a superstar roster by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson, the authors of the best-selling Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game That Changed Everything.

The State of Play is essential listening for anyone interested in what may well be the defining form of cultural expression of our time.

©2015 Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson (P)2015 Audible, Inc.

Critic Reviews

"If you want to explain to anyone why videogames are worth caring about, this is a single volume primer on where we are, how we got here and where we're going next. In every way, this is the state of play." (Kieron Gillen, author of The Wicked + the Divine, cofounder of Rock Paper Shotgun)

A mixed bag

As someone who has been playing video games since the early 90's and has considered myself right there at the traditional core of the gaming community this book opened my eyes to many of the atypical views of video games.

Its a compilation of different articles read by different narrators and some of these are much better than others. A handful of the truly eye opening ones were undermined by the narrators reading, particularly the ones detailing transgender roles and sex in video games. While I found the content of the piece fairly good the reading of it made it sound almost like an erotic novel rather than social commentary and that was the low point of the book for me.

The book definitely is worth a listen despite its flaws because the gaming community at large does need to have an elevated awareness of these issues and can only benefit from a broader definition of what constitutes a game and why people play them.

Eye-opening insights

Great and diverse content, but some of the narrators have terrible, terrible accents. As a foreign speaker I can't identify the way of speaking when the reader slows the air flow to the point the cords start to rattle. Is that a local or cultural thing? I don't know, but it ruins the experience for me.

Brilliant

A wonderful collection of essays that encompass a wide range of topics. Simply brilliant writing.

I feel so sorry for some of the authors

Though interesting topics overall, the atrocious and exaggerated performance of Tonya Cornilesse, distracted me so much, that I wasn't able to take any of the topics she narrated remotely seriously.

I never thought I'd much care about a bad performance, when the topic is good, but I will actively be avoiding audiobooks where she's involved.