Wandering Games

Wandering in games can be a theme, a formal mode, an aesthetic metaphor, or a player action. It can mean walking, escaping, traversing, meandering, or returning. In this book, game studies scholar Melissa Kagen introduces the concept of "wandering games," exploring the uses of wandering in a variety of game worlds. She shows how the much-derided Walking Simulator - a term that began as an insult, a denigration of games that are less violent, less task-oriented, or less difficult to complete-semi-accidentally tapped into something brilliant: the vast heritage and intellectual history of the concept of walking in fiction, philosophy, pilgrimage, performance, and protest.

Exploring the connotations of wandering within these different game worlds, she considers how ideologies of work, gender, colonialism, and death inflect the ways we wander through digital spaces.