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...
