A guide to the fascinating legal history of the videogame industry, written for nonlawyers. 

Why did a judge recall FIFA 15, a nonviolent soccer game, from French shelves in 2014? Why was Vodka Drunkenski, a character in Nintendo-Japan’s Punch-Out!, renamed Soda Popinski in the US and then in Western Europe, where the pun made no sense? Why was a Dutch-American company barred by US courts from distributing a clone of Pac-Man? 

Julien Mailland answers all these questions and more in The Game That Never Ends: How Lawyers Shape the Videogame Industry (MIT Press, 2024), an inside look at the legal history that undergirds our favorite videogames. Drawing on a series of case studies as vignettes of the human comedy, Mailland sheds light on why and how the role of lawyers is key for understanding the videogame industry. Each chapter in The Game That Never Ends is a mini-puzzle that pieces together how an important legal issue arose, was resolved, and impacted the industry and the experience of gamers in real time. These chapters are interspersed with shorter chapters called “The Lawyer’s Corner,” opportunities to dive deeper into individual cases. Lightly footnoted, these interludes connect the previous chapters together by providing a conceptual meta-analysis. Offering a comprehensive overview of the global legal history of videogames, The Game That Never Ends will leave readers with a nuanced, in-depth, and more global understanding of the videogame industry.

Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design at the IU International University for Applied Science, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist.

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“You’re in our world now.” This bold tagline led Sony’s 1999 ad blitz for EverQuest (Boss Fight Books, 2024), the year’s most anticipated massively multiplayer game. Though just five words long, it challenged players to live in a virtual world beyond anything they’d experienced before—and delivered. The game that proved the MMORPG’s potential, EverQuest outsold all prior entries in the genre and was the most popular subscription game in North America for five years until Blizzard’s World of Warcraft overthrew it. Yet EverQuest lives on, with tens of thousands of players logging in every day.

Based on new interviews with EverQuest developers and veteran MMORPG developers, journalist Matthew S. Smith explores EverQuest's unlikely creation at a studio built to develop sports games, a rocky release which overwhelmed the game’s ill-prepared datacenter, the enticing game loops that placed EverQuest in a media firestorm around gaming addiction, and the real-money black market for EverQuest items that foretold the future of digital goods.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Titel kulturmagazin, radio host of “Replay Value”, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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The engaging story of Intellivision, an overlooked videogame system from the late 1970s and early 1980s whose fate was shaped by Mattel, Atari, and countless others who invented the gaming industry. Astrosmash, Snafu, Star Strike, Utopia—do these names sound familiar to you? No? Maybe? They were all videogames created for the Intellivision videogame system, sold by Mattel Electronics between 1979 and 1984. This system was Atari’s main rival during a key period when videogames were moving from the arcades into the home. In Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie® (MIT Press, 2024), Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman tell the fascinating inside story of this overlooked gaming system. Along the way, they also analyze Intellivision’s chips and code, games, marketing and business strategies, organizational and social history, and the cultural and economic context of the early US games industry from the mid-1970s to the great videogame industry crash of 1983. While many remember Atari, Intellivision has largely been forgotten. As such, Intellivision fills a crucial gap in videogame scholarship, telling the story of a console that sold millions and competed aggressively against Atari. Drawing on a wealth of data from both institutional and personal archives and over 150 interviews with programmers, engineers, executives, marketers, and designers, Boellstorff and Soderman examine the relationship between videogames and toys—an under-analyzed aspect of videogame history—and discuss the impact of home computing on the rise of videogames, the gendered implications of play and videogame design at Mattel, and the blurring of work and play in the early games industry.

Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design at the IU International University for Applied Science, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist.

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A. L. McClanan's Griffinology: The Griffin's Place in Myth, History and Art (Reaktion, 2024) is a fascinating exploration of the mythical creature's many depictions in human culture. Drawing on a wealth of historical and literary sources, this book shows how the griffin has captured the imagination of people for over 5,000 years, representing power, transcendence and even divinity. It explores the history and symbolism of griffins in art, from their appearances in ancient Egyptian magic wands to medieval bestiaries, and from medieval coats of arms to corporate logos today. The use of the griffin as a symbol of power and protection is surveyed throughout history and into modern times. Beautifully illustrated, this book should appeal to all those interested in monsters, magic and the mystical, as well as art and history.

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By the 1970s, World War II had all but disappeared from US popular culture. But beginning in the mid-eighties it reemerged with a vengeance, and for nearly fifteen years World War II was ubiquitous across US popular and political culture. In Reinventing World War II: Popular Memory in the Rise of the Ethnonationalist State (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Barbara A. Biesecker explores the prestige and rhetorical power of the “Good War,” revealing how it was retooled to restore a new kind of social equilibrium to the United States.

Biesecker analyzes prominent cases of World War II remembrance, including the canceled exhibit of the Enola Gay at the National Air and Space Museum in 1995 and its replacement, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Situating these popular memory texts within the culture and history wars of the day and the broader framework of US political and economic life, Dr. Biesecker argues that, with the notable exception of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, these reinventions of the Good War worked rhetorically to restore a strong sense of national identity and belonging fitted to the neoliberal nationalist agenda.

By tracing the links between the popular retooling of World War II and the national state fantasy, and by putting the lessons of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and their successors to work for a rhetorical-political analysis of the present, Dr. Biesecker not only explains the emergence and strength of the MAGA movement but also calls attention to the power of public memory to shape and contest ethnonational identity today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Hounds Of Love invites you to not only listen, but to cross the boundaries of sensory experience into realms of imagination and possibility. Side A spawned four Top 40 hit singles in the UK, 'Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)', 'Cloudbusting', 'Hounds of Love' and 'The Big Sky', some of the best-loved and most enduring compositions in Bush's catalogue. On side B, a hallucinatory seven-part song cycle called The Ninth Wave broke away from the pop conventions of the era by using strange and vivid production techniques that plunge the listener into the psychological centre of a near-death experience. Poised and accessible, yet still experimental and complex, with Hounds Of Love Bush mastered the art of her studio-based songcraft, finally achieving full control of her creative process. When it came out in 1985, she was only 27 years old.

Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love (Bloomsbury, 2024) charts the emergence of Kate Bush in the early-to-mid-1980s as a courageous experimentalist, a singularly expressive recording artist and a visionary music producer. Track-by-track commentaries focus on the experience of the album from the listener's point of view, drawing attention to the art and craft of Bush's songwriting, production and sound design. It considers the vast impact and influence that Hounds Of Love has had on music cultures and creative practices through the years, underlining the artist's importance as a barrier-smashing, template-defying, business-smart, record-breaking, never-compromising role model for artists everywhere.

Leah Kardos is a senior lecturer in music at Kingston University London, UK. She is the author of Blackstar Theory: The Last Works of David Bowie (Bloomsbury, 2022), which was included as one of The Wire's 'Best Books of 2022'.

Leah on Twitter.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (Louisiana State University Press, June 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Palazzo Editions, Fall 2025).

Bradley on Twitter.

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Victoria Sturtevant's It’s All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy (University of Texas Press, 2024) is about how changing depictions of pregnancy in comedy from the start of the twentieth century to the present show an evolution in attitudes toward women’s reproductive roles and rights.

Some of the most groundbreaking moments in American film and TV comedy have centered on pregnancy, from Lucille Ball’s real-life pregnancy on I Love Lucy, to the abortion plot on Maude; Murphy Brown’s controversial single motherhood; Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pregnancy in Junior; or the third-trimester stand-up special Ali Wong: Baby Cobra.

In the first book-length study of pregnancy in popular comedy, Victoria Sturtevant examines the slow evolution of pregnancy tropes during the years of the Production Code; the sexual revolution and changing norms around nonmarital pregnancy in the 1960s and ‘70s; and the emphasis on biological clocks, infertility, adoption, and abortion from the 1980s to now.

Across this history, popular media have offered polite evasions and sentimentality instead of real candor about the physical and social complexities of pregnancy. But comedy has often led the way in puncturing these clichés, pointing an irreverent and satiric lens at the messy and sometimes absurd work of gestation. Ultimately, Sturtevant argues that comedy can reveal the distortions and lies that treat pregnancy as simple and natural “women’s work,” misrepresentations that rest at the heart of contemporary attacks on reproductive rights in the US.

Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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How does the music industry actually work? In Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry: Remaking the Major Record Label from the Inside Out Toby Bennett, a Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture & Organisation in the School of Media and Communications at the University of Westminster offers a deep ethnography of everyday life in a contemporary record company. The book examines the challenges facing music, both businesses and artists, as digital transforms every element of the industry. Offering a detailed theoretical framework for understanding these changes, as well as rich details on the ordinary organisational practices that keep the music industry running, the book will be essential reading across humanities, social sciences, and for anyone interested in music and culture industries.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester.

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What happened to culture in 2020? In Like Lockdown Never Happened: Music and Culture During Covid (Repeater, 2024), Joy White, a Lecturer in Applied Social Studies at the University of Bedfordshire, explores the impact of Covid, along with social, community and artistic responses. The book ranges widely, including comparative analysis of the UK and Jamaica, deep dives into contemporary Black music and Black culture on TV, digital modes of making and distributing music, and emerging cultural practices on platforms such as TikTok. Theoretically rich as well as offering detailed media and cultural analysis, the book is essential reading of humanities, social science and public health scholars, as well as for anyone interested in reflecting on the era when Covid first hut society.

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It’s no secret that superhero comics and their related media perpetuate a model of a straight, white, male hero at the expense of representing women and other minorities, but other narratives exist. Searching for Feminist Superheroes: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Marvel Comics (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Sam Langsdale recognizes that female-led superhero comics, with diverse casts of characters and inclusive storytelling, exist on the margins of the mainstream superhero genre. But rather than focusing on these stories as marginalized, Dr. Langsdale’s work on heroes such as Spider-Woman, America Chavez, and Ironheart locates the margins as a site of innovation and productivity, which have enabled the creation of feminist superhero texts.

Employing feminist and intersectional philosophies in an analysis of these comics, Dr. Langsdale suggests that feminist superheroes have the potential to contribute to a social imagination that is crucial in working toward a more just world. At a time when US popular culture continues to manifest as a battleground between oppressive and progressive social norms, Searching for Feminist Superheroes demonstrates that a fight for a better world is worthwhile.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Seth Rogovoy's latest book for Oxford University Press is called Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison (Oxford University Press, 2024). Often, biographies of musicians put the story of the subject’s life front and center, letting the music recede into the background. For a musician like George Harrison, this would be a mistake. George, the lead guitarist of the Beatles, sometimes referred to as the “quiet one,” was one of his generation’s greatest guitarists. He quietly steered the Fab Four in directions that made them legendary, through his innovative use of sitar or his thoughtful, self-reflective song-writing that contrasted with John’s ironic poetics and Paul’s cheery symphonies. A late-bloomer of sorts, George truly came into his own as a solo artist pursuing a rock and roll that centered spirituality and existential yearning.

For a chapter-by-chapter playlist, check out Seth's guided listen.

Subscribe to Seth's Substack: Everything is Broken.

Seth Rogovoy is the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet and The Essential Klezmer: A Music Lover's Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul Music and contributing editor for The Forward.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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