Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity. By Tom Tyler

Abstract

Tom Tyler’s accessible essay collection, Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity, offers scholars from various fields plenty to chew on while eschewing the conventions of a traditional academic monograph. In a ludic yet lucid fashion, Tyler engages readers in “some of the complex and often contradictory ways in which players of video games have been invited to encounter, understand, and engage animals” (3). Tyler does not aim to be comprehensive across his thirteen pieces, but rather offers a sampler of playful possibilities through a multidisciplinary and often multisensory approach (see, notably, the nose-driven “How Does a Dog Smell?”). The keyword Tyler builds his work upon is, of course, “game”—first defined through its meanings as “amusement … jests and jokes” and “an activity played for entertainment …”—then through its association with “hunting … [and] the wild beasts who were the hunter’s quarry” (2–3). Throughout Game, Tyler attends to semantics and etymological curiosities, and lets the paths of different words guide him to numerous ruminations (see, naturally, “Enumerating Ruminants”).