A new publication just dropped hot off the digital presses! My short “Close Playing” essay is part of the most recent Journal of Cinema and Media Studies’s (JCMS) Teaching Media Dossier (Vol. 10, No. 4, Fall 2025). The dossier was organized around “Teaching Game Studies,” edited by Ryan Banfi, and features a range of topics and authors:
- “One Quarter, One Game: Approaches to Teaching a Single-Game Seminar” by Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux
- “Establishing a Game Lab” by Ryan Banfi
- “We Need to Play Together” by Carly A. Kocurek
- “Close Playing” by Edmond Y. Chang
- “What I Learned About Video Games, Representation and Pedagogy” by Soraya Murray
- “History in the Making: The Encyclopedia of the Game Industry” by Laine Nooney
- “Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the History Classroom” by Phillip Guerty
- “Playful Heritage: Video Game Creation as Interdisciplinary Historical Engagement” by Esther Wright and Daniel J. Finnegan
- “Analyzing an Opera Made Out of Bridges” by Chaim Gingold
My “Close Playing” essay formalizes some of the pedagogical ideas and practices of my 2011 blog post “Close Playing, a Meditation on Teaching (with) Video Games,” which to this day is still one of my most cited pieces of writing. Now folks can cite this more formal, more “academic” essay. It also references my newer writing on the subject, my brand new book Timothy Welsh and I just published: Video Games, Literature, and Close Playing: A Practical Guide (Routledge, 2025). There are a few new twists, of course, including an updated close playing play log (or plog) assignment:
Thank you to Ryan Banfi for his editorship and to JCMS for the opportunity to share my work! I look forward to reading (and teaching) my fellow dossier writers’ essays.