Playing to Win: Sports, Video Games, and the Culture of Play Thomas P. Oates 9780253015020

In this era of big media franchises, sports branding has crossed platforms, so that the sport, its television broadcast, and its replication in an electronic game are packaged and promoted as part of the same fan experience. Editors Robert Alan Brookey and Thomas P. Oates trace this development back to the unexpected success of Atari's Pong in the 1970s, which provoked a flood of sport simulation games that have had an impact on every sector of the electronic game market. From golf to football, basketball to step aerobics, electronic sports games are as familiar in the American household as the televised sporting events they simulate. This book explores the points of convergence at which gaming and sports culture merge.

Robert Alan Brookey is Professor of Telecommunications at Ball State University where he also serves as the Director of Graduate Studies for the MA program in Digital Storytelling. He is the author of Hollywood Gamers: Digital Convergence in the Film and Video Game Industries (IUP, 2010).

Thomas P. Oates is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa.

[W]hat is particularly unique about Playing to Win: Sports, Video Games, and the Culture of Play . . . is that it offers a critical assessment of sports video games at a time when such an assessment is necessary, given the convergence of gaming and sports culture.

In taking on a number of dfferent kinds of topics, Brookey and Oates have assembled a collection that encourages the reader to think beyond any singular way of examining sports games.

Numerous avenues of inquiry worthy of closer investigation are offered in this book. As such, this work is a useful contribution to this burgeoning field of study.

Essays complement one another and, taken together, provide a comprehensive overview of important considerations in a field that is only beginning to be researched in depth. . . . Recommended.