Book Reviews

on how social media entertainment (SME)
platforms and the Let’s Play microindustry
facilitate peer pedagogies, showcasing solidand innovative academic contributions.
One of the standout qualities of Peer
Pedagogy on Digital Platforms is its connection to other pertinent literature in thefield. Dezuanni adroitly places his workwithin the broader discourse on educational technology, play studies, media literacy, and digital media. This contextual
framing assists readers in grasping how hisfindings contribute to and expand uponbroader dialogues within these subjects.
His work leaves an indelible mark on thedynamic field of educational technology
by examining Minecraft and YouTube as
facilitators of unique learning opportunities relying on networked connections.
Dezuanni also underscores how peer
pedagogy can be deployed extensively.
This is achieved through unique exchange
and reward relationships that diverge fromthe conventional structures found in formal learning settings or media pedagogies
from the predigital era.
Dezuanni makes a compelling casethat digital platforms like Minecraft andYouTube open new learning possibilities
that challenge conventional wisdom aboutage-appropriate understanding. He suggests that these platforms can foster new
knowledge relationships that blur traditional boundaries between humanities
and sciences and personal and collective
knowledge.
For educators interested in harnessing
digital media, especially SME platforms forlearning, Dezuanni’s work is invaluable.
By outlining the distinct learning possibilities offered by Minecraft and YouTube,he provides a blueprint for educators toincorporate digital media into their pedagogical practices. His findings also affectour understanding of education in digitalcontexts and how educators can leverage
digital platforms to create more engaging
learning experiences.
The book also highlights fan reactions
to Let’s Play videos in which Dezuanni
discusses how fans engage with Let’s Play
culture through comments and creative
reactions, showing how fans actively contribute to the learning process. He suggeststhat fan responses are a crucial element of
the pedagogical process, providing valuable feedback and authenticity to content
creators and helping influence the direction of future content.
Peer Pedagogy on Digital Platforms isa substantial addition to the field of educational technology and peer pedagogies.
The book provides fresh insights into how
digital platforms can craft engaging andeffective learning experiences for children
and young people. It is an essential readfor scholars and classroom educators alikeinterested in digital media, education, andplay studies, as well as educators seeking
inventive ways to spark learning in theirstudents.
—Daniel Singletary, Boise State University,
Boise, ID
Game: Animals, Video Games,and Humanity
Tom Tyler
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2022. Acknowledgments, notes,
bibliography, ludography, publication
history, index. 248 pp $25.00, paperback.
ISBN: 9781517910198

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Opening and closing playfully, Tom
Tyler’s Game: Animals, Video Games, andHumanity is an idiosyncratic but engaging
exploration of games of and with animals.
Contributing to the study of more-thanhuman play, and the pressing need toreflect on the articulation of animals
and human-animal relationships in the
Anthropocene, Game is not an exercise of
mapping typologies or categories of multispecies representation such as Krzysztof
Jański’s 2016 “Towards a Categorisationof Animals in Video Games” but rather
a selective investigation “of some of theways in which players of video games havebeen invited to encounter, understand,and engage animals” (p. 3). While deconstructive, this approach does refreshingly
draw on (and draws us toward) an ethicalpraxis in the form of a conjunction of poststructuralism and veganism.
Bookending his text with invitations
to play with this book, Tyler first asks
the reader to spread themselves among
the many meanings of “game” as both analienated animal body that surfaces inplay and a playful attitude of openness toapproaches and frames of reference, andin closing he implores us to explore both
direct critiques and more subtle means of
smuggling progressive ideas into the mindof the reader. In a sense, the structure isfractal, each chapter recapitulating thisjourney from an etymological defamiliarization and pluralization of a key termthat lays the groundwork for an animal torear its head without warning in a central
game case study drawn from the 1980s
to the 2010s, catching us unawares. Theauthor asks that we engage playfully witha text that migrates among disciplines andcontexts, making hard turns in direction
with little warning and promises that if
we do we might be treated to some surprises. Each chapter is clearly inspired by
the motif discussed in its conclusion, theTrojan horse: a series of ludic images ofan animal that smuggles unruly animal
figurations.
Tyler takes an approach uncommon
in game studies, a free-flowing essayistic
exploration of disparate topics that takes
seriously Levi-Strauss’s 1964 assertion in
Totemism that they are “good to thinkwith.” Themes addressed here center on thereifying abstraction of individual to species in games such as Titan Quest (2006);
the adoption of nonhuman perspectives ingames such as Dog’s Life (2003); the ethics of human-animal relations in games
such as Ridiculous Fishing (2013), and theway animality can disrupt framings of thehuman and categorical distinctions more
broadly in games such as Super Meat Boy(2010). This poststructural, almost Barthesian sequence of human-animal discursive
relations, and the eruption of the animalin cultural myths as expressed and mediated by games, is a stimulating and generative text but one which occupies a strange
space in scholarship on games. It inherits its form from visual studies, medieval
studies, and other fields to produce anallusive structure and sometimes almost
parametric narrative. This can be a powerful means of covering ground and creating
intriguing juxtapositions and insights—ofsmuggling in surprises—but it comes ata cost.
Tyler’s source base is both adventurous and limited: eighteenth-century statesmen and medieval classical texts sit next toDeleuze and Derrida. Critic Espen Aars-Book Reviews

eth and game designer Chris Crawford get
obligatory citations, but key game studies
scholars working on animal representation in games are strangely absent here,
such as Alenda Chang, Krzysztof Jański,and Eleonora Imbierowicz, to say nothing of broader green game studies work.
Even Donna Haraway haunts this text withher relative absence, though intellectuallyrelated animal studies contemporaries
such as Giorgio Agamben and Carol J.
Adams are deployed here. Yet it is worth
stressing that this departure also rewards
the reader with intriguing primary sourcesin the form of games little discussed in theliterature, such as the work of Jeff Minteror mobile games like Into the Dead (2012).
This loose collection of short essay
chapters introduces an ambitious andengaging range of topics only to dropthem, lacking the space for unpacking
implications and applications. Chapters
open with long meditations on etymology that are made to bear a large burdenof argumentation, before digressions into
philosophy without signposting. The relevance of these detours only becomes clear
after the long-deferred return of the gameand animal as objects of study in brief andtantalizing conclusions. Ultimately theutility of the text depends on whether thereader wishes for a more granular analysis
and unpacking of games and concepts oris interested in running with the openings provided here. Although I would
have liked to see these fascinating casestudy analyses fleshed out to reckon withthe viscosity of Meat Boy, the physicalityof consoles dedicated to single games, orthe zaniness of Plague Inc. (2012), I wasdisappointed. But I reflect after reading
Game that we are no more than meat andpotential prey. In the face of this, perhapsthe reader’s time might be weighed against
scholarly diligence or restraint, and perhaps stimulation is as important as explication when we are enlivened by the sheer
number of topics here.
For all the ways Game is sometimes afrustrating read that can ignore the trails
left by scholarship on the medium, on balance I find that it is capable of delivering
fresh observations and points forfuture
departure. This is a species of creativeand critical writing more native to animalstudies and an intriguingly alien organism
to game studies, but I wonder how well itwill thrive when it lacks well-establishedroots in eco game literature.
—Merlin Seller, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland
EA Sports FIFA:Feeling the Game
Raiford Guins, Henry Lowood, andCarlin Wing, eds.
New York: Bloomsbury, 2022.
Contents, list of figures, list oftables, acknowledgments, afterword,bibliography, list of contributors, index.
304 pp. $120 hardcover.
ISBN: 9781501375347
Guins, Lowood, and Wing’s anthology on
the most prominent digital sports gamein the world, EA Sports FIFA: Feeling theGame, provides a much-needed contribution to scholarship in an understudied area. Two previous books in this area
have focused on sports video games writlarge—Consalvo, Stein, and Mitgutch’sSports Videogames (2013) and Brookey233