Video games and comedy

Video Games and Comedy is the first edited volume to explore the intersections between comedy and video games.

This pioneering book collects chapters from a diverse group of scholars, covering a wide range of approaches and examining the relationship between video games, humour, and comedy from many different angles.

The first section of the book includes chapters that engage with theories of comedy and humour, adapting them to the specifics of the video game medium.

The second section explores humour in the contexts, cultures, and communities that give rise to and spring up around video games, focusing on phenomena such as in-jokes, player self-reflexivity, and player/fan creativity.

The third section offers case studies of individual games or game series, exploring the use of irony as well as sexual and racial humour in video games. Chapter “Emergence and Ephemerality of Humour During Live Coverage of Large-Scale eSports Events” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.