Apologies for the continued self promotion, but, well, I’d love for you to read SHOOTER and will take any opportunity to help make that happen. And here’s a good one! The latest StoryBundle brings SHOOTER together with a number of other great books for a very reasonable price. The charity funds raised from sales of this bundle also go to Prisoners Literature Project, which sends books to American prison inmates.

If you’re interested in SHOOTER and the other books included in the current StoryBundle you can (and probably should) buy it here: https://storybundle.com/games

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Reid McCarter is a writer and editor based in Toronto. His work has appeared at Kill Screen, Paste, VICE, Playboy, and The Escapist. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER (a compilation of critical essays on the shooter genre), runs Digital Love Child, and tweets @reidmccarter.

Patrick Lindsey is a game critic and occasional developer whose work can be found on Polygon, Unwinnable, and Paste. He co-founded Pixels or Death and co-hosts the Indie Megacast. Read his tweets @HanFreakinSolo, if you dare.

So, last December I announced SHOOTER, a collection of criticism about games with guns, here on Digital Love Child (and posted an older, slightly different version of its cover). Now, after many further months of work, we have a release date!

SHOOTER will be available to purchase on June 2nd, 2015 at shooterbook.com.

It includes 15 chapters from a diverse group of some of the best videogame critics around, accompanying illustrations by (the nastily talented) Paul Sousa, and a foreword by (professional smart guy) Clint Hocking, Creative Director of Far Cry 2 and Splinter Cell.

It’s an electronic book (or “e-book” if you’re cool) and available in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats.

I hope you’re as excited to read it as we are to finally release it!

Continue reading SHOOTER Release Date and Website →

After months of sorting through (largely excellent) submissions and dreaming up unbelievably exploitative contracts for our lovely contributors to sign, Patrick Lindsey and myself (Reid) are finally ready to announce SHOOTER.

SHOOTER is an ebook that digs into the wide array of meaning we find in first-person shooters, whether through gameplay construction, mechanical subtext, or the larger implications of a game’s setting, characters, and themes. Rather than a history of the genre, SHOOTER is a collection of diverse criticism centred on various games where shooting is the primary gameplay mechanic.

The book’s writers have offered unique viewpoints on the games they’ve chosen to analyze and discuss. Our hope is that, taken as a whole, SHOOTER will provide a broad picture of how different people react to an immensely popular and culturally influential style of play.

In the near future, we’ll be posting a table of contents that provides a full list of the games discussed by SHOOTER‘s writers.

SHOOTER is set for release in early 2015.

UPDATE: SHOOTER will be released on June 2nd, 2015 at shooterbook.com

Continue reading SHOOTER Announcement →