Book Reviews

showcases the manifestation of playfulness under different guises within scientific, business, and education workplacesettings. This leads to the final and mostambitious section, “Being in the World,”
which focuses on transformational potential by arguing that basing the world on collectively imagined constructs and systems
provides us all with the power to reimagine
such systems if we so wish. The section provides examples of how ecological and moral
issues may be addressed through collective
reimagining. As a result, a transferable playful framework for collective reimagining
can be formed by the reader with a littleimagination. The book closes with “a lackof conclusion,” a poignant reflection on alife dedicated to play.
The Infinite Playground is fundamentally about playing in the world together
and how playfulness can shed light on oursocial selves and communities, the systems
we collectively coproduce to govern andshape our society, and how these can bereimagined through play. The core ideas
complement James P. Carse’s Finite andInfinite Games (2013) and Miguel Sicart’sPlay Matters (2014) and make a valuable
contribution by promoting ambition in theuse of play and imagination within a rangeof contexts while providing guidelines forenlivening this ambition. The text willinterest students, academics, and practitioners in play, games studies and gamedesign, performing arts, business, andsocial sciences, and it is an ideal introduction to the work of De Koven and otherleading practitioners in play and gamedesign.
The book is part game studies text,
part game design manual, part “somethingto play,” and part love letter to the work of

its author. It reaches out its hand, whispers Prui, and invites you to join the playcommunity.
—Lynn Love, Abertay University, Dundee,
United KingdomMaking Games: The Politics andPoetics of Game Creation Tools
Stefan Werning
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021.
Introduction, notes, references, andindex. 158 pp. $25 hardcover.
ISBN: 9780262044837
The assumption behind The MIT Press
Playful Thinking series is “video games
are such a flourishing medium that any
new perspective on them is likely to show
us something unseen or forgotten” (p. vii).
As a part of the series, Making Games: ThePolitics and Poetics of Game Creation Tools
by Stefan Werning provides such a newperspective.
The goal of the book is to “make senseof the increasing abundance of game-making tools and to conceptualize their influence on both the politics and aesthetics ofdigital games” (p. 6). Werning goes on to
explain that game creation is a dialogue
among the game designer, the development tools she uses, and the broader social
context in which she designs. This “sociotechnical system” (p. 5) view of game creation provides much of the fodder for the
new perspective found in the book. From
this view, tool use is not just a creative
practice but also “a cultural and communicative practice” (p. ix).
The first chapter, “Making Sense ofTools,” highlights a major theme: making

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P L AYgames and playing games are two sidesof the same coin, similar to the way thatreading and writing are two sides of literacy. The chapter articulates the start of an
extended definition of tools by listing thecommon characteristics: Tools are important in every aspect of game creation, notjust production; Tools are objects that canbe shared and manipulated; Tools exist in
the boundaries between stakeholders andprovide the structure for the relationships between them; And tools frame thepurpose for which they are intended byproviding particular affordances for thetool user (which follows along with theold adage “If the only tool you have is ahammer, you treat everything as a nail”).
The chapter continues with a discussion of the importance of bricolage, or“using only the tools at hand,” as a mechanism for creating games. The chapter next
presents a variety of ways to understandand categorize tools, with sections on
tool ontologies, tools as platforms, andtool communities. The chapter ends witha discussion of operational aesthetics ofgames through which players focus on
how a game is implemented rather thanwhat happens in the game. This focus leads
players to understand the tools that wereused to create the game. Werning argues
that operational aesthetics bridge the gap
between game creators and game players,thus once again showing that making andplaying are two sides of the same coin.
The second chapter contains a seriesof short “tool essays” in which Werning“expounds on how tools, much like games
themselves, should be interpreted as
designed objects with a ‘procedural rhetoric’” (p. 42). Procedural rhetoric views
using game creation tools not unlike theway we use the Socratic method, in which
the tool presents a decision that the user
must make (asking a kind of question), theuser inputs a response, and the tool replies
with a response to that input. Each tool
essay examines a different way of thinking about the procedural rhetoric of gamecreation tools. The topics of these essays
include control in planning tools, the waysthat tools bridge the gap between amateurand professional game creators, tool fandoms, playful appropriation of tools forpurposes other than those intended, howtools shape ontologies of game worlds,
the role of defaults and templates in character customization tools, game creation
workflows as feedback loops, developing
tools that work more like humans do, andacknowledging the evolution of tool features as part of our understanding of thetool.
The final chapter calls for to developing tools that focus on “distinctly humanaspects of tools-as-objects” (p. 85). Werning asks that we think about gamecreation from five different human perspectives and consider what our tools will
look like if we prioritize each perspective.
First, he suggests that we think of gamecreation as a playful process, as game-likein itself. Werning points to self-imposedconstraints (bricolage, for example) andmimicry as playful characteristics that areoften part of the game creation process.
Second, he suggests that we think of gamecreation as a performative process andpoints to game devlogs and other methods for recording the development process (screencasts, for example) as tools thatgame creators use to perform their gamecreator identities. Third, Werning suggeststhat we think of game creation as a narra-Book Reviews

tive process. Using the notion of the auteur
in filmmaking, he points to the role thatthe mythologies built up around certain
game creators have played in the cultural
imaginary surrounding game creation.
Fourth, he suggests that we think of gamecreation as an analytical process in which
the game creator conceives of and tests
hypotheses about how a tool’s affordances
will implement game ideas. Werning calls
for tools that incentivize experimentation
with the affordances of the tool to inspire
the imagination. Finally, Werning suggests that we think of game creation as
a communicative process in which gamecreators are in dialogue with their development tools and through which gamecreators can communicate novel ideas togame players. The last section of the chapter identifies game distribution methods as
an area for future cultural studies research.
If you are looking for a book withpractical instruction, tips, and advice
about game creation, this probably is not
the book for you (although there are many
useful game creation tools described,
which had me constantly looking thingsup). On the other hand, as a cultural studies text, Making Games is thought provoking, and the focus on tool use will get you
thinking about game creation in new ways.
—Cathie LeBlanc, Plymouth State University, Plymouth, NH
How Pac-Man Eats, Software
Studies
Noah Wardrip-FruinCambridge, MA: The MIT Press,2020. Series foreword, preface,acknowledgments, introduction, notes,

bibliography and index. 384 pp. $35,paper. ISBN 9780262044653
Exploring the connections between thedevelopment and design of video games
and their cultural capital within a worldthat often considers them merely as entertainment is a growing area of game studies research. This is the focus of Noah
Wardrip-Fruin’s How Pac-Man Eats. The
overall argument in How Pac-Man Eats
is to name and explore the foundational
elements of video games as meaningproducing structures on which otheraspects of video games are built. WardripFruin argues that to have a richer understanding of how video games produce
meaning for players, we must focus on
how video games are designed at a basiclevel, which he defines as operational logics. These operational logics enable theact of play to commence by providing theground on which playable models, aesthetics, and potential narratives are built.
Operational logics are the elements of agame space in which both the system of
the game and the communication function of the game work together. It is therelationship and negotiation between thetwo that form the foundations of the playexperience.
The book is laid out into two parts,
each part focusing on differing but complementary aspects. Part 1 focuses on
defining operational logics and associatedplayable models. Wardrip-Fruin explores
these logics and models via a number ofexamples ranging from larger AAA games
to small indie and art game examples. Part
2 focuses on using operational logics as
the framework thinking about play andmaking meaning from a game experi-335