In 2014 games critic Cara Ellison pledged to the internet she'd leave home, become itinerant, and travel around the world to live with and write about some of the most interesting game developers and their cultural outlook.
As your 'cyberpunk hair-dyed Attenborough', originally Cara put up the Embed With Games series monthly on a free blog as she travelled from couch to couch, writing about the people she met and about the way our game creators express the culture around them. The internet generously helped fund her travel costs through a subscription service, egging her on in the only way it could, the pledges going up each month. This is the collected work, called 'Embed With Games', with an exclusive introduction from Kieron Gillen, a cover from comics artist Irene Koh, and a conclusion exclusive to the ebook.
From London to Los Angeles, from the Netherlands to Malaysia to Japan to Australia, the book reveals how people involved in games are taking what they see around them and expressing it in digital playgrounds for other people to experience.
An emotional, weird, sometimes intimate experience, this is open ribcage writing about the side of making video games most people don't see or know about.
Cara Ellison is a Scottish writer, game critic and video game narrative designer. She has written for The Guardian, VICE, Kotaku, PC Gamer, Paste Magazine and the New Statesman, wrote the best-named column in the world, S.EXE, at Rock Paper Shotgun, and had a regular opinion column at Eurogamer. She was also co-writer on Charlie Brooker’s How Videogames Changed The World for Channel Four television in the UK. Her writing and game narrative work has been featured in The New York Times and Wired, and she was one of The Guardian’s Top Ten Young People In Digital Media 2014. Currently she designs the narratives for video games.