https://noalibis.com/event/book-launch-ctrl-essays-on-video-games/

Join us in the bookshop to celebrate the launch of CTRL, a collection of essays on video games edited by Dean Fee and published by Lilliput Press. Dean and Stephen Sexton, a contributor to the collection, will be in conversation with local writer Dara McWade.

In CTRL, writers turn their focus to one of the most influential – and persistently misunderstood – art forms of the modern era. Through memoir, criticism, and narrative exploration, these essays chart the ways video games intersect with memory, identity, imagination, and the complicated business of being human.
Here, games become ciphers for joy and escape, but also for pain, addiction, burnout and longing. They emerge as places where we grow up, fall apart, find solace, test our limits, and rewrite ourselves. The essays in this collection explore how virtual landscapes imprint on real ones, how play becomes a way of thinking and how game worlds both mirror and distort the worlds we inhabit.
Ranging from pixelated nostalgia to sprawling open worlds, CTRL interrogates gaming’s contradictions – its artistry and excesses, its transformative potential and its shadows. Alongside these personal narratives lie broader questions: Where does this medium go next? Can it retain its creative integrity amid rapid technological shifts and the pressures of capital? What does it mean to call games art when they so often outgrow the boundaries we try to place around them?
Insightful, intimate, and alive with curiosity, CTRL captures the emotional and cultural force of video games, and the stories we carry with us when we put the controller down.

Featuring Essays By:
Sheila Armstrong
Rob Doyle
Joe Dunthorne
Donal Fullam
Úna-Minh Kavanagh
Róisín Kiberd
Anna Loughran
Darragh McCausland
Lisa McInerney
John Patrick McHugh
Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan
Brenda Romero
Stephen Sexton
Paul Whyte

Games featured include:
Final Fantasy IX
Fallout: New Vegas
Pokémon
Doom
Tomb Raider
Disco Elysium
The Stanley Parable
Wanderstop
Urban Chaos
The Elder Scrolls
The Witcher
Lemmings
Star Wars
Grim Fandango
Monkey Island 2
Discworld
Bioshock
Hotline Miami
Red Dead Redemption