Both Douglas A. Guerra’s Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America and Colin Milburn’s Respawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life offer historically situated readings of the influence of games on culture at large. Focusing, obviously, on very different historical contexts, both are nonetheless engaging, fastidiously researched works on the overlap of gaming and culture, and the ways that ludic logics have, oftentimes unnoticed, pervaded social structures and practices.Slantwise Moves is, in many respects, a work of experimental scholarship. In the introduction, Guerra writes that “the ‘slantwise’ of this book’s title advocates interpretive ‘alongsides,’” suggesting a heuristic that at times can seem more impressionistic than strictly logical (19). In the closing pages, Guerra suggests that “the challenge” of the work is “to think in a similar way about the work of literary texts, to use specific nineteenth-century games as a way to reorient readings of nineteenth-century books in a manner sensitive to the often metalinguistic notions of form and interaction” (197). The aim of such a reading, he continues, is to crack the door “for finding meaning in fragmentary readings, operative readings, and slant readings tracking with the ‘material’ vectors of understanding that existed alongside the semantic vectors of a text” (197). A lofty goal, and one that yields interesting and surprising insights.Perhaps the best example of this logic in action comes in Guerra’s comparative reading of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1855) and the young Milton Bradley’s career-making board game, The Checkered Game of Life (1860), which “consisted in accumulating points by moving around a freeform sixty-four-square checkerboard, ‘a frequent choice of moves involving the exercise of judgment’” (29). These choice-making mechanics meant the game was more interactive and personally involving than prior board games, asking the players to inhabit “not a representation of others under the control of the user but a representation closer to that of the user controlling him or herself” (39). Guerra submits this mechanical innovation as an early example of the avatar, the ludic concept of the assumed identity that game players often adopt to role-play within fictional game settings, and uses the concept to draw parallels to Whitman’s innovative and expansive narrative voice. He concludes the chapter with a clear and compelling comparison: Both Bradley and Whitman’s representative interventions . . . leverage the agential, using legibility to imagine a parallel and tactically unpredictable ability. In Bradley’s game, players were encouraged to see matrices of traditional values as opportunities for crafting an accountable and publicly materialized individual agency. . . . Similarly, Whitman’s “Song of Myself” used ambivalent pronouns, repetitive syntax, and complex lists of “American” character traits to visualize a poetic speaker as a model for a self, an avatar that could legibly incarnate . . . and fully interact with the world around it without an assumed divide between thought and feeling. (60)Beyond insightful readings like this, the book shines in its recovery of forgotten games and gaming practices of the nineteenth century. It is fastidiously researched, with beautiful archival photos of gaming artifacts from a wide swathe of museums and archives. Beyond simply unearthing these games, Guerra does well to reproduce for readers the experience of playing these games and the reactions that contemporary players had to them. This practice helps readers to situate “games and books in a shared ecosystem of mass-circulating leisure media in the U.S. nineteenth century” and to think about the different ways “people may have read or used books in the past” (3). While this work is inherently, I think, conjectural to some extent, Guerra does an admirable job of sketching out what a more experiential mode of reading games and gaming reading might look like.Milburn’s Respawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life shares Guerra’s commitment to historically examining both gaming culture itself and its broader impacts on society. For nonspecialists, Guerra’s work might offer more chances for historical edification, focusing on what seem to be relatively obscure examples of early board and card games. Milburn’s work, on the other hand, focuses on major instances in the past half-century when gaming and hacking culture have spilled over into the mainstream. While the games and events discussed likely won’t be new to anyone with an interest in tech, Milburn’s focus on folk history, citing reactions and analyses from anonymous forum users as often as from the “great men” involved in these pivotal moments, is quite refreshing. Even as some may turn their noses up at the painful grammar and less-than-polished rhetoric of these amateur theorists, it is nonetheless fascinating to encounter less-rarified insights at points and to see academic and lay interpretations aligning, even if in a single board post.In the opening chapter, Milburn explains, This book is about gamers, hackers, and emergent forms of life in digital culture. It explains how practices of high-tech play generate new modes of existence, as well as new parasites. . . . The point is to show not only how gaming, hacking, and other forms of high-tech play contribute to the feature set of the present, but also how they can enkindle desires and aspirations for something different, a world transfigured through technical virtuosity—the future respawned. (21)While to some extent a trite observation—that technologists and gamers, often the same people, imagine change in the world through both their technological conquests and narrative media—Milburn does an admirable job of highlighting several of the most prominent instances of this trend and in tracing the dominant flows of influences among these overlapping cultures. For instance, in chapter 3, he discusses the effect of the Valve game Portal (2007), in which the player uses a dimensional portal gun to escape a corporate science lab and the controlling clutches of a masqueradingly friendly AI, on the hacktivist collective Anonymous’ rhetoric, and he explains the ways they used the game to inspire and shape their interventions: From inside the plot twists, the counterintuitive mazes, the warps of diegetic space, [Portal opens] up unthinkable, even impossible passageways to otherwheres and elsewhens: fabulating the potential for technopolitical change, even while foregrounding the real, formidable restraints on our ability to make effective change. And this is why, for hackers and hacktivists, video games tell the truth even when they lie. They pose a provocation to treat the world itself as a game, learning its rules and protocols in order to master them, or tweak them differently, while at the same time foregrounding the technical infrastructures, the material conditions, the platforms and systems that make the game possible in the first place. (101)Respawn, then, joins Slantwise Moves in highlighting the ways that games and game-playing have informed literature and culture and shaped the underlying structures of modern life.Both are strong examples of interdisciplinary research pulling together an admixture of cultural studies, games studies, digital media, and literary studies, and both shine in their commitment to uncovering the hidden histories of gamers and hackers and presenting them in thoughtful detail.