Here are 68 books that Replay fans have personally recommended if you like
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For most of my life, stillness eluded me. I struggled to be present in any moment, to experience joy or comfort, let alone peace. It took me a virtual lifetime to understand that this exterior version of me, with its incessant mental chatter and negative bias, could no longer control me. I reached a breaking point. Divorced after a lifetime partnership, played out of my most recent company, kids all grown up—utterly alone and without meaningful purpose, the hard inner journey began. I spent years focused on my own journey of self and spiritual development. The payoff is I am now not only more present to life but able to help others on their journeys.
I loved Moneyball and most of Michael Lewis’ books as great storytelling.
It's the story of how the Oakland Athletics baseball team, led by general manager Billy Beane, challenged traditional scouting wisdom in the early 2000s by using data and statistical analysis to build a competitive team on a very small budget.
The message is all about challenging conventional wisdom and orthodoxy, and thinking originally. It was inspirational to me at a time in my business life when I was buoyed by the message and theme.
Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only "the single most influential baseball book ever" (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what "may be the best book ever written on business" (Weekly Standard).
I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
I grew up playing video games from a classic Atari onward. And, if I could go back and tell my younger self his job would be to travel around the world talking, writing, and teaching about video games he never would have believed me. But, if he did, he’d be really excited about what was coming for him. I am consistently both shocked and thrilled that I get to do this as a job, and my favorite bit is often the teaching and communicating about games. It’s a blast!
This is one of the foundational books in game studies and will shake up how you think about why and how people play games.
Consalvo introduces a concept called ‘avatar capital,’ which is about the reputation and relative fame players can chase within a game and its community. To acquire that capital, players often remake rules and expectations to excel.
A cultural history of digital gameplay that investigates a wide range of player behavior, including cheating, and its relationship to the game industry.
The widely varying experiences of players of digital games challenge the notions that there is only one correct way to play a game. Some players routinely use cheat codes, consult strategy guides, or buy and sell in-game accounts, while others consider any or all of these practices off limits. Meanwhile, the game industry works to constrain certain readings or activities and promote certain ways of playing. In Cheating, Mia Consalvo investigates how players choose to play games,…
I grew up playing video games from a classic Atari onward. And, if I could go back and tell my younger self his job would be to travel around the world talking, writing, and teaching about video games he never would have believed me. But, if he did, he’d be really excited about what was coming for him. I am consistently both shocked and thrilled that I get to do this as a job, and my favorite bit is often the teaching and communicating about games. It’s a blast!
I always love to read books that do something or cover things that I’ll never be able to do on my own, and Gray crushes that in this book.
Through an awesome set of interviews with players, Gray breaks down how Black users encounter racism in gaming spaces and how they deal with the ongoing structural problems in games. Gray gives voice to perspectives that aren’t heard enough, and I learned a ton from this book.
In Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming, Kishonna L. Gray interrogates blackness in gaming at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. Situating her argument within the context of the concurrent, seemingly unrelated events of Gamergate and the Black Lives Matter movement, Gray highlights the inescapable chains that bind marginalized populations to stereotypical frames and limited narratives in video games. Intersectional Tech explores the ways that the multiple identities of black gamers some obvious within the context of games, some more easily concealed affect their experiences of gaming.
The normalization of whiteness and masculinity in digital culture inevitably…
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
I grew up playing video games from a classic Atari onward. And, if I could go back and tell my younger self his job would be to travel around the world talking, writing, and teaching about video games he never would have believed me. But, if he did, he’d be really excited about what was coming for him. I am consistently both shocked and thrilled that I get to do this as a job, and my favorite bit is often the teaching and communicating about games. It’s a blast!
I always love finding work that challenges how I see things and shifts my perspective in some way. This is one of those books!
Even better, whenever I teach a group about this book and the arguments it makes about games a handful of people have a deep transformation about their understanding of games.
Reading this book will shake up how you think about video games, what they do, and how they work. And you might be in that group of people who can’t stop seeing the world in a different way because of your new perspective!
Argues for the queer potential of video games
While popular discussions about queerness in video games often focus on big-name, mainstream games that feature LGBTQ characters, like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content. Video Games Have Always Been Queer argues that the medium of video games itself can-and should-be read queerly.
In the first book dedicated to bridging game studies and queer theory, Ruberg resists the common, reductive…
I’m lucky to have grown up as all these new genres and kinds of games were being invented and gaining in popularity: euro-boardgames, role-playing games, videogames, collectible card games, gamebooks, ALL the games. What a time to be alive since I’ve always been curious about, interested in, and passionate about them. Again, I was fortunate to learn about the nascent academic study of games just as I was entering my college years. So, I’ve been playing games and studying games for over a quarter century! But you can teach an old dog new tricks (and to play new games), and the books on this list have helped me do just that!
Sometimes you have to know “how the sausage is made” not so you stop eating sausages, but so you can appreciate them all the more.
Jason’s book does an excellent job of explaining the behind-the-scenes of video game development. From this, I really learned how any game that is released is a miracle born out of the blood, sweat, and tears of its creators.
You've got your dream job--making video games. You have a great project, great designs, and clever controls. One morning, you get a call from your producer. Turns out that wall-jumping trick won't work because the artists don't have time to design a separate animation just for the plumber to move that way. Also, your lead designer keeps micromanaging the programmers, which is driving them crazy. Your E3 demo is due in two weeks, and you know there's no way you can get it done in less than four. You'll have to cut out some of the game's biggest features just…
I am a long-time manga teacher and a pop-culture researcher, as well as a comic illustrator and a Youtuber, presenting under the "Mistiqarts" pseudonym. Since manga was something that inspired me early on to dedicate my life to the art style and pop culture, I was constantly looking for new ways to bring this lifestyle and art to other people interested in drawing manga.
Ayami Kojima has held my heart for as long as I was an artist. Her visual style is something anyone can recognize, and the aftershock of knowing that this artist defined an entire video game industry aesthetic made me love her work even more. I managed to find only pieces of this book online until I was able to finally afford this super rare book filled with her hyper-detailed oil paintings.
Chasing Light is a lyrical meditation on grief, memory, and the fragile beauty of everyday life. At its core, it is a story of resilience, forgiveness, and the transformational power of human connection. It sheds light on the overlooked realities of homelessness and addiction, while emphasizing the importance of compassion…
I first realized the power of games when I won the Geography Bee in my elementary school. I had been playing Carmen Sandiego, which encouraged me to study maps and read almanacs. I started to see how games could motivate interest in all different topics. But I didn’t realize I could makegames until I was a graduate student at MIT, and I made an augmented reality game to teach history. Since then I have been designing games to inspire connection, care, and curiosity. I am Associate Professor and Director of Games at Marist College, and I have designed media for organizations like the World Health Organization, Scholastic, and Nickelodeon.
So games just may help solve the world’s problems. Let’s share the news with everyone, including kids! Video Games Save the Worlddoes just that. It uses kid-friendly language, examples, and illustrations of how gaming is helping us make positive change. For instance, it talks about the fantastic organization Games for Change, and all different types of games including indie games and VR games.
To save the world, one must play video games. Sounds ridiculous, right? But in reality many people are looking to video games to tackle many of the world's problems. Take a closer look at the ways in which video games can help save the world.
I’m a lifelong video game obsessive. I think about video game worlds and my relationship with them in the ways most people think about family vacations to the beach or a trip with friends to Las Vegas. Every game I play is an opportunity to experience a new world, and a new culture, and to change myself along the way. Video games are a younger industry than either the music industry or the movie industry, but it’s more than 2.5x bigger than those two industries combined! There are reasons humans are so enamored by video games. The books on my list explore those reasons.
David Sudnow’s Breakout: Pilgrim in the Microworld is perhaps the earliest account of a person’s obsession with a video game.
Sudnow’s diary-like approach to his relationship with the 1976 arcade game Breakout is captivating. It reads like improv jazz (which isn’t surprising considering Sudnow himself was an accomplished jazz pianist).
For example, here’s Sudnow describing the moments before starting the final phase of his longest game so far: “I feel the attempted seduction of the long lobbing interim, a calm before the storm, the action so laid back that I’m consciously elaborating a rhythm to be ready, set, go for a slam.”
Sudnow shows us that what might seem like simple bleeps and bloops to most people can instead be a life-affirming awakening to others. And how can something so powerful not warrant respect?
Tell your non-gaming friends: video games are poetry!
Just as the video game console market was about to crash into the New Mexico desert in 1983, musician and sociologist David Sudnow was unearthing the secrets of “eye, mind, and the essence of video skill” through an exploration of Atari's Breakout, one of the earliest hits of the arcade world.
Originally released under the title Pilgrim in the Microworld, Sudnow's groundbreaking longform criticism of a single game predates the rise of serious game studies by decades. While its earliest critics often scorned the idea of a serious book about an object of play, the book's modern readers remain fascinated…
I am a middle grade teacher who loves to read. Many of my students prefer to play video games. In fact, some of them have a real aversion to reading. Since I know reading ability is a huge factor in a student’s academic success, I’m always looking for great books to get students to put down their controllers and read. When I couldn’t find many, I was inspired to write the CROSS UPS TRILOGY. I’m confident that the books on this list will lure young gamers into their covers with gaming themes, humor, and relatable characters.
This zany story about a gamer is packed full of laughs. Pete is looking forward to the release of a new game, but when he sells his dad’s old gaming console to afford the new game, things go really wrong, really fast. Let’s just say that was no gaming console he sold and now his dad is trapped in a video game. Pete has to save his dad, (and the world) by entering the game and winning!
While I usually don’t like the whole getting-sucked-into-the-game trope, it totally works for this silly style of humor. Illustrations along the way don’t just break up the text, they add to the laughs.
Stormbreaker meets Diary of a Wimpy Kid in this hysterically funny, fast-paced novel that follows video game obsessed Pete Watson as he discovers the only thing scarier than espionage is the girl of his dreams. Mega-gamer Pete Watson needs just twenty dollars more to buy the all-new Brawl-A-Thon 3000 XL. So he sells a beat-up CommandRoid 85 arcade game containing top-secret government intel! owned by his boring old dad super-spy trapped inside the CommandRoid!, to an exterminator evil mastermind bent on global destruction!!! Pete's gaming skills are put to the test as he fights evil villains, giant mechanical bugs, and…
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
by
Alexis Krasilovsky,
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
I teach writing for children and I’ve analyzed the elements that make a winning story. One of these elements is the magic of three. My idea for Finley Finds his Fortune, was sparked by a desire to write a folk tale with the magic of three and also by my visit to Whitechurch, the last working watermill in England. I was awed by the power and beauty of its water wheel so I wove a water mill into my story. To do this, I had to first study how a mill works. That’s what I love about writing children’s books―that I can explore my own personal interests and passions.
Often, the magic of three is not so obvious. In the newly-published picture book, Treasure Hunt by Stephanie Wildman, three children play a new game. Older brother Luis turns his two younger siblings away from video games by creating a scavenger hunt in which they must use riddles as clues to gather ordinary household objects. And yes, they get threeclues and so threechances to gather all the objects, which then become the materials to create a puppet show using a discarded cardboard box the new stove came in as the stage. The use of three here, as in all stories, produces a feeling of a satisfying completion. This is a mystery story for children 3-8 with a surprise ending and guidance for kids on how to make simple puppets.
In this light-hearted story, twins Flor and Roberto scamper through their house, hunting for treasure hidden by big brother, Luis. Can these everyday objects really be treasures that offer more fun than video games or TV? Join Flor and Roberto on their search and discover why Luis saved a gigantic cardboard box. Bonus content provides direction for creating your own at-home fun!
