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P L AYon glorifying unhealthy working conditions. Chess defends their stance on bringing feminists into game spaces despite thetypical toxicity found in these spaces. For
the industry to change, there needs to be
more diverse gamers, and feminist gamers could have a hand in remaking gamespaces into spaces of equality.
Chess’s book is an accessible look into
the importance of play and the usefulnessof video games. While some of the points
seem obvious and terms may seem overexplained to scholars, the book’s reach andaccessibility makes this approach necessary. The book is not just for game scholars, feminist scholars, and gamers. It is foranyone interested in the topic. This broad
target makes Chess’s book a greater contribution to the field than its arguments
alone. Introducing more people to bothfeminism and play can help to strengthenboth. Playing like a Feminist is an engaging
and informative read that will have readers
looking to go play!
—Steffi Shook, Manhattanville College,
Harrison, NY

Making Games for Impact
Kurt Squire
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
2021. Contents, introduction, coda,acknowledgments, references, andindex. 252 pp. $30.00, paper. ISBN:
9780262542173
Beginning with the assumption that games
are effective learning tools and that amarket for games designed for nonentertainment purposes exists, Kurt Squire’s

Making Games for Impact pairs a practical account of the author’s experiences
directing the Games + Learning + Society+ Center (GLS) at the University of Wisconsin—Madison with broader discussion of designing games for social impact
in general. In doing so, Squire situatessocial-impact games at the intersection ofbureaucracies, epistemologies, and industries, taking care to describe the uniqueconstraints that learning objectives andresearch agendas create for productions.
The result is a must read for designers andadministrators interested in integrating
commercial game production into institutional research agendas.
Chapter 1 begins by outlining thecommon problems that designers of social
impact games face, such as a lack of whatcommercial designers refer to as “polish”(p. 8). Chapter 2 describes how the Game+ Learning + Society set out to addressthese problems by forming a uniquedesign team (featuring artists, stem-cellresearchers, and students) for the purposes of creating a competitive strategy
game in which viruses combat the humanimmune system (Virulent). Chapter 3
charts the GLS’s venture into the underexamined subgenre of knowledge games,
which are games designed to teach science.
Chapters 4 and 5 examine the institutional
constraints that emerged when the GLS set
its sights on commercial markets. Chapter
6 explores the GLS’s work on games andmindfulness. Chapters 7 and 8 provide an
in-depth look at the day-to-day operationsof the GLS, and chapter 9 concludes withadvice for setting up GLS-inspired development teams in institutional researchsettings.
For those unfamiliar with the field ofBook Reviewssocial impact games, chapter 4 provides aninteresting discussion of the cultural andinstitutional constraints that a research
environment places on a design team thatfits nicely within current conversations
about the difficulties associated with AAA(big budget) and Indie production. Chapters 7 and 8 get bogged down in the minutia of projects that did not work out but
should still be of interest to readers intent
on pursuing similar research objectives.
More attention to inclusivity anddiversity in the field of social-impact
games would have been a welcomed
addition to the book. And there are times
when Squire slips into a futurist rhetoricthat focuses on where games designed forlearning could be (as opposed to wheregames designed for learning are at). But
these speculations are accompanied by
frank and honest appraisals of the difficulties that his design teams faced—difficulties ranging from engaging students(chapter 3) and targeting commercial markets (chapter 7) to convincing risk-averse
administrators that a game design teamdeserves continuous financial support(chapter 4). Overall, it is the discussionof these difficulties that makes the bookstand out, especially for a broader audience interested in production histories andcultures in general.
—David Murphy, Toronto Metropolitan
University, Toronto, ON, Canada

Free-to-Play: Mobile Video
Games, Bias, and Norms
Christopher A. Paul
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,2020. Introduction, conclusion,acknowledgments, notes, bibliography,
and index. 512 pp. $30.00, paper.
ISBN: 9780262539418
In Free-to-Play: Mobile Video Games,Bias, and Norms, Christopher A Paultakes both academic game studies and lay
gaming culture to task for their endemic
dismissiveness of the increasingly important world of free-to-play (F2P) mobile
games. Unsatisfied with game journalists’and fans’ claims that F2P monetization
leads inevitably to poor game design, Paulsets out to diagnose the deep-seated bias
running through the heavily—but subtly—freighted evaluative norms by whichgamers and reviewers elevate premium,
pay-once experiences and denigrate theconspicuously feminized world of F2P
gaming. Paul reveals these biases by juxtaposing core gaming culture’s ostensibly
rational oppositions to F2P games with its
other, more credulous treatments of morefamiliar pay-once game objects. Whatemerges from the book’s surprisingly
diverse set of case studies is an image ofF2P skepticism informed less by concerns
about exploitative monetization practices
or predatory marketing models as by “abit of snobbery and gate-keeping” by an“old guard … defensive about sharing theirhobby with games they don’t understandand gamers they don’t recognize” (p. xxv).
By “giving context to the norms and values
that underlie perceptions of core gamers,
journalists, developers, and game scholars”(p. xxxvi), Paul’s book provides a muchneeded surface on which game studies
scholars can trace a more nuanced, more
gradational aesthetic map to the increasingly diverse world of F2P games.

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