In our unprecedentedly networked world, games have come to occupy an important space in many of our everyday lives. Digital games alone engage an estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide as of 2020, and other forms of gaming, such as board games, role playing, escape rooms, and puzzles, command an ever-expanding audience. At the same time, “gamification”—the application of game mechanics to traditionally nongame spheres, such as personal health and fitness, shopping, habit tracking, and more—has imposed unprecedented levels of competition, repetition, and quantification on daily life.
 
Drawing from his own experience as a game designer, Patrick Jagoda argues that games need not be synonymous with gamification. He studies experimental games that intervene in the neoliberal project from the inside out, examining a broad variety of mainstream and independent games, including StarCraft, Candy Crush Saga, Stardew Valley, Dys4ia, Braid, and Undertale. Beyond a diagnosis of gamification, Jagoda imagines ways that games can be experimental—not only in the sense of problem solving, but also the more nuanced concept of problem making that embraces the complexities of our digital present. The result is a game-changing book on the sociopolitical potential of this form of mass entertainment.

• More info at the University of Chicago Press Books.
• Available for purchase on Amazon.

Review Quotes

“Experimental art is obsessed with unfamiliarity of form and execution. For the most part, that’s also how game designers have envisioned ‘experimental games.’ Jagoda offers an ingenious new interpretation: What if games could become native hosts for experimentation the way scientific experiment does—posing questions about the world through games—rather than using them as aesthetic objects or instruments alone?”

— Ian Bogost, Georgia Institute of Technology

“Experimental Games brings together three primary areas of thinking: economics, affect theory, and game studies. Jagoda successfully argues that games ought to be considered as experimental objects and processes in their own right, relevant but not beholden to the usual discourses on the value of trial and error. This is original, nuanced, and well-researched work, noteworthy in its ability to join social science, art, and the humanities in an equally weighted conversation.”

— Alenda Y. Chang, University of California, Santa Barbara

“Do we have a right to play? A right to fail? In this extensive meditation on the art of games, Jagoda shows how games are intricately intertwined with the logic of neoliberalism and the gamification of everyday life. From Starcraft to Dys4ia by way of Dwarf Fortress, Jagoda toys with a rich spectrum of games, paying particular attention to indie games and art games. What if the point of a game is not so much problem solving, but problem making?”

— Alexander R. Galloway, author of Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture

"Jagoda’s lengthy history of game theory, neoliberalism, and the evolution of the video game form results in a kind of conundrum: if video games arise out of an alienating neoliberal logic, how can they also serve as a method of critique and experimentation? It’s here that Jagoda produces some of his most dazzling and thoughtful analyses of the ways in which games can work on us, and in which we can reciprocally work on games."

—  Andrew Fleshman, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Jagoda's Experimental Games is a thorough, insightful elaboration of an art-critical practice that he describes as a 'joyful study' of digital games in the twenty-first century. . . . Jagoda convincingly makes the case for games as inside agents in our historical present, offering alternative pathways to the stifling control and abject precarity of contemporary life.”

—  Eric Stein, Ancillary Review of Books

“Experimental Games is a complex book that interweaves sociology, philosophy, media studies, critical theory, and more into a powerful — and, for this reviewer, convincing — argument about the unique position of games in general, and video games in particular, for shaping the social, cognitive, and affective processes that collectively describe cultural norms and perspectives.... Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification is an accessible, potent, humanistic analysis of games and gamification processes as sociopolitical phenomena rooted in the character-building project of daily life. As games, gamification mechanics, and neoliberalism continue to see contemporary growth, Jagoda’s exploration of their foundations and connections will be an important touchstone for further philosophical analysis.”

—  A.G. Holdier, Metascience

"Over the past decade, the work of media theorist, literary scholar, and game designer Patrick Jagoda has addressed digital games in this fashion: as media entangled with the aesthetic, epistemic, and socioeconomic structures of our historical present. . . . Jagoda’s oeuvre explores the game’s multivalent manifestations and connotations. In doing so, he furnishes a language for engaging games as means of both intensifying and intervening in power relations. Experimental Games marks an accomplished synthesis of his interdisciplinary practice that marries the critical and creative."

— Doug Stark, Qui Parle

"Jagoda offers powerful analyses of video games within our historical moment. Each chapter offers a treasure box of such impressive scholarship. To support the book’s conceptual trajectory, Jagoda provides exemplary close readings of specific game forms, focusing extensively on twenty-first-century games, which I found to be one of the most significant contributions of the book to game studies. Providing critical analyses of contemporary video games, both mainstream and obscure, gives the reader a wonderful inventory of objects to explore further. But Jagoda also demonstrates a capacious knowledge of games broadly, so his close readings are surrounded by delightful discussion of familiar video games.... Experimental Games is an impressive book, essential for any scholar of game studies, technoculture, digital humanities, and media studies."

— Matthew N. Hannah, American Literary History

"Experiment Games offers an enthralling analysis of gamification and neoliberalism. The book succeeds in showing how digital games intersect with the social, political, and economic context in which they’re played. As platform companies like Upwork encourage users to score points to win clients and mega-corporations like Meta seek to transform our entire life into a fully gamified VR experience, Jagoda offers some intriguing avenues for thinking about how workers are being reconfigured as “players” in the broader game of business — a development that organizational scholars would do well to consider."

— Nick Butler and Sverre Spoelstra, Organization Studies

"Patrick Jagoda’s tome Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (2020)... is a volume that uses deep readings of various games to present cultural critique and to discuss games and gamification with their implications.... The book's opening delineations of topic and the way the volume deals with the hype of gamification are elegant, outlining the author’s perspective and permitting what follows to be a clearly political, yet nevertheless obviously scientific, exploration of the main themes."

— J. Tuomas Harviainen, Game Studies

Reviews

Los Angeles Review of Books

Ancillary Review of Books

A Seminary Co-op Notable Book for 2020

Alexander Galloway's List of Most Meaningful Theory Books of 2020

Qui Parle Review

Metascience Review