FREEPLAY: A Video Game Guide to Maximum Euphoric Bliss

by Jordan Shapiro, Frankie Tartaglia (Illustrations)

We are the kids who grew up playing Space Invaders, Frogger, Q-bert, and Super Mario Brothers. Now, as adults, we’re respectable contributors to a civilized professionals, parents, leaders, and policy makers.Still, the imagery of the games we played as children remains permanently seared into our personal and collective unconscious. The game world now shapes the way we think. It forms the way we perceive and interact with the world around us. The common view is that video games are an escape from the real world. But in FREEPLAY, author Jordan Shapiro shows us how the video games of our past (and present) function as interactive mythology. They are non-linear stories that help us derive meaning from the complicated paradoxes of everyday life. FREEPLAY is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for a new part philosophy, part psychology, part spirituality, but ALL video games. Shapiro deftly blends Jungian and archetypal psychology in a way that is accessible and applicable to everyone.FREEPLAY is philosophy for the life world accessed through the user interface of the game world. Game on.

172 pages, Paperback

First published October 2, 2012

About the author

Jordan Shapiro, PhD, is father to two children and step-father to two more. He lives in Philadelphia with his partner Amanda Steinberg. He's core faculty in Temple University’s Intellectual Heritage and Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies programs. He’s senior fellow for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, and nonresident fellow in the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. The New Childhood (2018) received wide critical acclaim and has been published in 11 languages. Father Figure: How to be a Feminist Dad (Little, Brown Spark 2021) offers a norm-shattering perspective on fatherhood, family, and gender essentialism. The New York Time's Book Review called it "utterly mind-blowing." It has been published in 6 languages.