New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Despite decades of inflammatory rhetoric, the real risk of video games lies not in their violent imagery but in the ethical and political sensibilities they normalize. Video games reward speed, efficiency, control, and meritocratic mastery, training players to align with a technolibertarian worldview - one that celebrates individual will, technological power, and skepticism toward collective forms of governance. Rather than asking whether games produce violent individuals, we might more productively ask how they contribute to a commitment to radical capitalism and a belief in highly individualistic worldviews. In this unsettling work David Waddington traces the philosophical roots of technolibertarianism, founded on faith in technological progress and personal freedom. He identifies a darker turn in this thinking, animated by the ideals of Ayn Rand and her archetype of the "tech hero of capitalism." Many games, Waddington argues, invite players to inhabit this archetype, treating mastery, control, and relentless striving as moral virtues. While educational research often praises games for motivating students and fostering problem-solving, Waddington asks a deeper question: What kinds of people do games help us become? Drawing on Martin Heidegger and other thinkers, he explores whether gameplay expands human possibility or narrows it by habituating players to efficient yet restrictive systems. The Hidden Curriculum of Video Games (McGill-Queen's UP, 2026) critiques mainstream game design and educational technology, offering hopeful alternatives and examining reflective games that resist dominant gameplay logics. Written with clarity, passion, and philosophical depth, this thought-provoking work opens new horizons on technology, education, and the moral imagination of play.

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 and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section, and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist.
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Aviationland: Heathrow and the Making of an Airport Landscape
(Yale University Press, 2026) by Professor Mark Crinson is the first
critical study to examine how a major international airport takes shape
on the ground, and what that means for the landscape around it. Focused
on Heathrow airport, it traces how the area has been formed and reformed
by overlapping systems of architecture, infrastructure and enclosure,
from the common land of Hounslow Heath in the eighteenth century to the
global transport hub of the present day. 

The
book explores the different forces that have shaped the airport’s
environment: the remaking of landforms, the design of terminal
buildings, and the surrounding sprawl of hotels, schools, factories, and
business parks. At the same time, it shows how the Heathrow area has
been moulded by wider shifts in energy, mobility, and the economy, and
how the airport has in turn left a lasting mark on its surroundings,
both materially and ecologically.

Drawing on previously unpublished material, Aviationland
includes close studies of key sites, as well as figures who shaped how
we see the airport today, including Richard Rogers, Patrick Abercrombie,
and J. G. Ballard. Bringing together architectural, landscape, and
infrastructural histories that are seldom read in tandem, this volume
makes the case for Heathrow as a distinctively modern landscape. The
result is a nuanced account of how local places become entangled within
global systems, and what happens when they do.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
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Contemporary digital gameplay is only accessible by navigating an
ecosystem of interfaces that support its computational nature. Account
logins, controllers, and an assortment of menus, settings, and other
peripheral-to-gameplay elements support a range of practical and
necessary functions that result from the transformation of gameplay into
digital gameplay, as well as broader shifts toward an increasingly
networked and data-driven world. The games industry has adopted
usability testing on top of play testing to evaluate how these
interfaces may influence the accessibility and success of their game
software, but how embedding gameplay within webs of software, hardware,
and platform infrastructures impacts the medium, players, and production
has not yet been fully explored.

In Thresholds of Digital Gameplay (MIT Press, 2025), Daniel
Gardner demonstrates how a series of interfaces and other elements on
the periphery of digital gameplay fundamentally alter the phenomena of
gaming. This book examines non-gameplay-centered material or mechanical
attachments that surround and enclose gameplay while directing or
mediating our experience of it—for example, access controls, character
configuration, and microtransactional storefronts.

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 and game studies at the HNU University of
Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, holds the position as lead editor at
the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section, and is
editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist.
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The Commodore 64 is the most significant computer of its era. From 1982 to 1994, a total of 27 million units were sold—more than any other computer from a single manufacturer afterwards. Due to its widespread use as well as its techni­cal features, the C64 has a huge international following—even to this day. The 19 contributions compiled in Commodore 64: Past, Present, and Future of a Home Computer (Projekt Verlag, 2026) illustrate the significance of the platform for the digitalization of society, the general public’s computer science knowledge, as well as digital art and culture—both in the past, present, and also in the future. Volume 5 of the »Computer Archaeology« series is partly based on the confer­ence of the same name held in 2024 at the University of Bonn and has here been supplemented with additional contributions from the fields of artificial intelli­gence, quantum computing, and digital humanities.

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 and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section, and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist.
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We use avatars to play video games. We use pseudonyms on social
media. We use VPNs to mask our identities and activities. In the digital
realm, anonymity is everywhere, a persistent option for those who wish
to hide, experiment, and deceive. But we are anonymous in more contexts
than the digital. In urban settings, we routinely experience the
anonymity of the crowd, and routinely use anonymity to participate in
political life and social protests. Anonymity matters. This book is a
wager that we can learn much about society, humanity, and power by
analyzing the structural tensions and possibilities of anonymity, and by
analyzing how the economy of anonymity is changing in a modernity
defined by computation.

While many have explored the connections between surveillance,
datafication, and privacy, relatively little has been done to theorize
anonymity and its critical role in our lives. The Economy of Anonymity: Power in the Age of Identification (Stanford University Press, 2026) rebalances
our intellectual investments by expanding our understandings of
anonymity. Putting the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Bernhard Siegert into
conversation, Hector Amaya examines the contours of anonymity in
different social domains—in relationship to individuals, institutions,
and contexts; to epistemology and ontology; and to history and society.
As the book shows, anonymity entails paradoxical possibilities—sometimes
anonymity is experienced as freedom and other times as powerlessness,
or subjugation.
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