Gamer's Guide to International Relations - by Michael A Allen (Hardcover)

About the Book

Ready Player One meets Foreign Affairs-everything your students need to know about international relations, like why states go to war, how people manage the global economy, and how we deal with environmental devastation, is explained in this innovative text through the lens of video games.

Book Synopsis

Ready Player One meets Foreign Affairs-everything your students need to know about international relations, like why states go to war, how people manage the global economy, and how we deal with environmental devastation, is explained in this innovative text through the lens of video games.

Review Quotes

In The Gamer's Guide to International Relations, Michael Allen provides an incredibly comprehensive and highly accessible overview of international relations topics. Seamlessly blending insights from gaming and historical examples, this book will help readers to better understand some of the most important issues and concepts in international relations. It's incredibly informative, but also incredibly fun to read.

Michael A. Allen's The Gamer's Guide to International Relations is a terrific option for the IR classroom. The book brings to light the important, and often complex theories, models, and controversies of the field in a way that is certain to resonate with college students. Students already play the games that Allen examines, and this book will open their eyes to a much richer tapestry for which to play and learn.

Michael Allen's new book takes us from Starcraft to statecraft. Combining an introduction to international relations theory, a survey of video games and international relations, and a guide to conducting research on world politics, Allen offers an indispensable approach to understanding how video games can teach us about the world.

One of the ways that international relations instructors can help students learn about concepts and theories is to make them more tangible to students. This can be challenging as many students, especially many in the Global North, have not "experienced" these concepts and theories in practice. Allen's The Gamer's Guide to International Relations combines international relations concepts, theories, and methods with video games, including popular titles with which many students are already familiar or can play for an international relations class (such as WoW, Civ, Minecraft, and others). In doing so, this book offers an approach to teaching international relations that is tangible and engaging to students, which is when they learn best.

Should you cooperate with allies, or confront your adversaries? From World of Warcraft and League of Legends to Minecraft and Fortnite, The Gamer's Guide shows how some of the most popular games are great teachers of international relations and represent real-world political dynamics and strategy. It's sure to be an exciting read for political scientists and gamers alike!

This book offers a valuable contribution to the literature on popular culture and International Relations by showing how video games can help make sense of theories, methods, and ongoing research programs in International Relations. The Gamer's Guide to International Relations thereby charts a course toward further engagement between International Relations and Game Studies.

About the Author

Michael A. Allen is a professor of political science in the School of Public Service at Boise State University. His books include Beyond the Wire: US Military Deployments and Host Country Public Opinion and Poli Sci Fi: An Introduction to Political Science through Science Fiction. His work focuses on conflict, asymmetry, and foreign policy with a particular interest in the positive and negative externalities of US troop deployments overseas. His research has been published in the American Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Foreign Policy Analysis. The games he played the most while writing this book were Balatro, Helldivers 2, and Fallout 76.