Draft:Carly Kocurek

• Comment: Please add multiple book reviews to prove her notability (see WP:NAUTHOR) Gheus (talk) 14:49, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

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Carly A. Kocurek is an American historian and game designer. She writes about the history of video games, particularly in the United States. She graduated from Rice University in 2004 before receiving an MA and PhD in American studies from the University of Texas, Austin. She currently teaches at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where she is a professor in digital humanities and media studies.

Research

Kocurek is frequently cited in the press as a “video game historian.” Her first book, Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (Minnesota, 2015) focused on the role of arcade games and the coin-op industry in shaping early video gaming culture in the United States. She subsequently wrote a biography of game designer Brenda Laurel (Bloomsbury, 2017) as part of a book series she co-edits on influential video game designers.She also co-authored Ultima and World-Building in the Computer Role-Playing Game (Amherst, 2024) with Matthew Thomas Payne.

In journal and newspaper articles, she regularly writes about topics including video game violence and moral panics, women’s history as it pertains to video games, and experience design.

She appeared as an on-screen expert in the documentary Insert Coin (2020) and on four episodes of the History Channel series, The Toys That Built America (2022-2023). She is currently producer and lead researcher for Halcyon Daze, a documentary about the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser.

Game Design

Her games include Choice: Texas, an interactive fiction game about abortion access; and Golden Mart, a table-top role-playing game about customer service during an apocalypse, which was funded on Kickstarter and exhibited at WordPlay 2020. She has received awards including the Kate Folk’s Choice Honorable Mention award for Are You Like Ok? in the 2022 Golden Cobra Challenge; Most Brilliant Commentary or Critique for At the Doll Café in the 2023 Golden Cobra Challenge; and the Positive Impact Award for Happy Ecosystems in the 2020 Indiecade Climate Jam.

Selected Publications

• Kocurek, Carly A., and Matthew Payne. Ultima and Worldbuilding in the Computer Role-Playing Game. Amherst College Press, 2024.
• Kocurek, Carly A. "The man with the gun is a boy who plays games: Video games, white innocence, and mass shootings in the US." Journal of Games Criticism 5, no. A (2022): https://gamescriticism.org/2023/07/26/the-man-with-the-gun-is-a-boy-who-plays-games-video-games-white-innocence-and-mass-shootings-in-the-u-s/
• Kocurek, Carly A. "Sparklier Worlds: Understanding Games for Girls as Style Intervention." In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, pp. 1-8. 2022.
• Kocurek, Carly A. "Walter Benjamin on the video screen: Storytelling and game narratives." In Arts, vol. 7, no. 4, p. 69. MDPI, 2018.
• Kocurek, Carly A. "Play, things: Games, materialism, and the production of culture." The Velvet Light Trap 81, no. 1 (2018): 66-70.
• Kocurek, Carly. "Ronnie, Millie, Lila--Women's History for Games: A Manifesto and a Way Forward." American Journal of Play 10, no. 1 (2017): 52-70.
• Kocurek, Carly A. Brenda Laurel: Pioneering games for girls. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2017.
• Kocurek, Carly A. Coin-operated Americans: Rebooting boyhood at the video game arcade. U of Minnesota Press, 2015.
• Kocurek, Carly A. "Who hearkens to the monster’s scream? Death, violence and the veil of the monstrous in video games." Visual Studies 30, no. 1 (2015): 79-89.
• Kocurek, Carly A. "The agony and the Exidy: a history of video game violence and the legacy of Death Race." Game Studies 12, no. 1 (2012).

External

• https://www.imdb.com/name/nm14542154