Nicholas Taylor - Masculinities in Play

Games are pervasive in contemporary life, intersecting with leisure, work, health, culture, history, technology, politics, industry, and beyond. These contexts span topics, cross disciplines, and bridge professions.

Palgrave Games in Context situates games and play within such interdisciplinary and interprofessional contexts, resulting in accessible, applicable, and practical scholarship for students, researchers, game designers, and industry professionals. What does it mean to study, critique, and create games in context? This series eschews conventional classificationssuch as academic discipline or game genreand instead looks to practical, real-world situations to shape analysis and ground discussion. A single text might bring together professionals working in the field, critics, scholars, researchers, and designers. The result is a broad range of voices from a variety of disciplinary and professional backgrounds contributing to an accessible, practical series on the various and varied roles of games and play.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/16027

Cover credit: Target Practice (2008) by Team Macho

Cover design by Fatima Jamadar

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This volume would not have been possible without the generosity and insight of our team of reviewers. We are incredibly grateful to Jessica Elam-Handloff, Cameron Kunzelman, Charles Ecenbarger, Milena Droumeva, Christopher Kampe, Jen Whitson, Chris Paul, Sarah Evans, and Joel Schneier.

We also thank our fellow editors on the other volumes in this trilogy: Kishonna L. Gray, Emma Vossen, Meghan Blythe-Adams, and Todd Harper. While we believe these volumes stand on their own as separate and valuable contributions to the field of games and gender, it is important to acknowledge that this volumemuch like masculinity studies itselfowes much of its dynamism and vibrancy to parallel work in feminism and queer studies.

We would be remiss to overlook the editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan, notably Shaun Vigil, whose support made this ambitious project possible, and Glenn Ramirez for laying out clearly how to make it actual.

Nick thanks Danielle and Ben, for constantly challenging me to be a better (more feminist) partner and parent. I also thank Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell, for their tremendous guidance over the years.

Gerald also thanks colleagues who provided advice, encouragement, criticism, and even resources to help make this project happen, including Vershawn Young, Jennifer Simpson, Jennifer Roberts-Smith, Kim Nguyen, Neil Randall, Jennifer Jenson, and Suzanne de Castell. I reserve my most special gratitude for Kim and Quinn for their patience during this project, but more importantly for their sustained encouragement to better practice feminism in my everyday life.