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presents a comprehensive and situated start
to understanding online play spaces; andthat makes this work much more approachable than many other academic texts.
—Jes Klass, DePaul University, Chicago, IL

Achievement Relocked: LossAversion and Game Design
Geoffrey EngelsteinCambridge, MA: The MIT Press,2020. On Thinking playfully, preface,introduction, notes, and index. 135 pp.
$30.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780262043533
In Achievement Relocked, Geoffrey Engelstein does a wonderful job presenting thescience behind loss aversion and how touse it as a lens for understanding player
psychology and designing better games.
Engelstein compellingly illustrates theways games present rewards and punishment to influence players. The author
shows that even small changes like starting people toward a goal can encouragethem to complete it, or how—dependingon the size—numbers can carry different
meaning to different people in different
situations and in turn can change how
they make choices. This opens a different way to think about how players will
navigate a game environment and gives
designers another tool to craft an enjoyable experience for their players. ThroughEngelstein’s thought experiments, he demonstrates how game mechanics tuned toelicit specific reactions can lead players todifferent and perhaps more desirable playexperiences.
Throughout Achievement Relocked,

Engelstein illuminates principles that help
inform our understanding of how players navigate game environments. Each ofthese principles presents opportunities
for designers to create better games. The
author presents loss aversion as the different reactions that people have when theygain something as a reward compared towhen they lose something as punishment.
Specifically, even when the amounts are thesame, loss is more impactful than reward,
showing that people are inclined to avoid
loss. Using this insight, game designers canbetter think about how players will react
to mechanics that are designed to give ortake away player resources. Similarly, theauthor presents the endowment effect asdifferent reactions the feeling of ownership
elicits over loss. When individuals gain asense of ownership or closeness to an item,the threat of loss connected to that itemchanges, and game designers can create
more player investment in the environments and characters in their games.
Engelstein points out that the framingof a scenario can change how an individual
reacts to potential loss or gain. If players
focus on loss, he notes, they will be more
likely to avoid it, and game designers whounderstand this can frame game events tocreate more tension or soften losses. Utility theory, which says that the value you
put on something influences your perception of its loss (and increases your sense of
reward in not losing it), offers designers
support for how they control player reactions. This lens helps teach them how tocreate value around currency, resources,or characters to control how players feelreward and loss.
The author also discusses endowment
progress—or the change in reactions toBook Reviews

loss that players can experience as they
invest time and resources. It shows gamedesigners the moves they might wish to
avoid when introducing loss into their
game to avoid an overly strong reaction,
like regret—that is, players will more
likely avoid situations in which they have ahigher chance for regretting their decision.
This gives game designers a way to think
about how they present choices in theirgames, ensuring that players can avoid
such excessive responses where possible.
Competence, as well, plays into such calculations, since the author suggests that theless informed about any situation players
are, the more often they become skepticalwhen making a choice. This should leaddesigners to present choices that players feel
more comfortable making. Taken together,
these principles offer a tool kit that can help
designers better understand the choices
they create when designing a game.
Engelstein’s timely work advances
the discussion on player psychology ingames and further explores the nuancesof how players react when they encounter
failure—a topic upon which MIT Press’s
Playful Thinking series (see Jesper Juul,
The Art of Failure) was launched.
Over the last decade, game researchers and designers have become increasingly interested in player psychology
and exploring the ways in which games
encourage us to think, react, and feel theways designers intended. Achievement
Relocked is a great read for game designers, researchers, or enthusiasts looking tounderstand player experiences around loss
and reward.
—Craig G. Anderson, University of California, Irvine

Open World Empire: Race,Erotics, and the Global Rise ofVideo Games
Christopher B. Patterson
New York: NYU Press, 2020. List offigures, introduction, acknowledgments,
notes, references, index, and about theauthor. 344 pp. $35.00 paperback. ISBN:
9781479802043
If “queer game studies” as a field has grown
substantially in the last decade, OpenWorld Empire in no small measure offersa much-needed queer-of-color intervention that presents exciting new challenges
and avenues for study in the field of gamestudies as a whole. At its core, Open World
Empire is a methodological text, pushing
the boundaries of how to do game studies, one that offers a compellingly welltheorized and well-executed framework.
Christopher B. Patterson provides crucial
insight into a deeper, more compelling
future for analysis and theory in gamestudies, merging thoughts from American
studies, Asian American studies, and postmodern, poststructuralist, and queer theories. Open World Empire’s interventions ingame studies are plentiful and potent.
Patterson invites us to rethink andreimagine the core tenets of game analysis through the language of race, erotics,and globalization. In this two-part text, heencourages us to shift our perspective fromthe rules and mechanics of game design
and from ideological critique of games’
content and cosmetics to the experiencesof play as “intimate” encounters with others—racial, cultural, linguistic, technological. Patterson constructs an analyticalframe that not only acknowledges but
makes central the experiences of pleasure107