After the great Tampere Spring Seminar on Gamebooks back in 2022 I’ve been working on a special issue for the Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds. Together with fellow guest editors Souvik Mukherjee, Hanna-Riikka Roine and Jaakko Stenros we managed to gather a fine collection of articles the relationship between games en books. The special issue is out now!
So, what is it about? To quote from the abstract of our editorial: “Games and books, understood in the broadest possible sense, interrelate in numerous different ways. Books and games can take each other’s form; they inspire and augment, expand and specify, contextualize and transform one another. We can ‘read’ games, and we can ‘play’ books. [The special Issue] discusses game-book hybrids, gamebooks, as complex entities worthy of their own attention. The focus is specifically on the intersections of games and books (instead of, for instance, games and literature, or games and narratives) as these offer a site for a fruitful cross-disciplinary work”.
Within the editorial we discuss games and books as interdisciplinary sites of research and even manage to produce a typology for game books (see below). The special issue contains a range of articles each highlighting different aspects of cultural objects and phenomena which can be located somewhere between book and game, and reading and playing. Have a look in the table of contents. I want to extend my gratitute to all the contributors, as well as the Journal’s editors Sonia Fizek and Melissa Kagen.

Apart from editorial work as well as co-authoring the editorial itself, I also contributed the full article titled “Playing with the gamebook: The Final Hours interactive storybooks as playful paratexts”. In it, I explore a series of interactive storybooks called The Final Hours which present stories and other audiovisual and even interactive elements about the making of various well known games such as Half-Life: Alyx, Tomb Raider, and Mass Effect 3. Here’s the abstract:
This article discusses an interactive storybook series titled The Final Hours which provides behind-the-scenes perspectives on the creation of certain video games. The focus is on how the specific interactive, playful elements which make up the reading – or playing – of these books provide forms of engagement which deviate from more traditional paper-based books on the making-of games. The analysis is situated within ongoing discussions about the role of paratextuality in and around games, in this case focusing on the question how these storybooks give shape to players’ understanding of games and game production through playful interactions with the making-of games. To account for the medium specificity of this type of interactive books, the paratextual analysis also connects to studies on paper-based pop-up or ‘movable’ books, a genre often associated with play, providing not just insights into paratextual functions but also highly ludic form.