Ian Bogost’s How to Do Things with Videogames is a sharp, approachable work of game criticism that treats videogames as a mature cultural form rather than a juvenile distraction or a moral panic vending machine.

Bogost’s argument is simple but useful: games do not just entertain, they inform. Each chapter looks at a different use or function of games, from art, empathy and reverence to electioneering, exercise, work, relaxation and disinterest. The result is less a single grand theory than a compact map of what games are already doing in culture, often in places where critics, parents, politicians and advertisers have been too busy clutching pearls or printing money to notice.

A very good one for readers interested in game studies, media theory, digital culture, design, simulation, platform life and the slow realisation that games are not “the future” so much as one of the stranger operating systems of the present.

University of Minnesota Press paperback, 2011. Part of the Electronic Mediations series. Very good used condition. Light handling and shelf wear to cover; pages clean and binding sound.