Means of Play

About The Means of Play Podcast

Means of Play is a podcast that takes games seriously as texts worth dwelling in. Each week, two co-hosts treat a single game the way a religious community treats a sacred text: with attention, ritual, gratitude, and the assumption that it has something to teach us about being human.

Games are taken seriously by their players and almost no one else. Academia treats them as objects of study; reviewers treat them as products; the broader culture treats them as either children's toys or adult addictions. Almost nobody approaches a game the way a reader approaches a poem, or the way a congregation approaches a passage of scripture: slowly, communally, with the willingness to be changed by it.

Means of Play is built on a wager: that games — at least the good ones — reward that kind of attention. That the act of play itself is a kind of praxis, and that naming it as such opens up something the gaming conversation has been missing.

Co-Hosts

We are Ian Campbell and Nathan Webb, and we are United Methodist pastors and nerds. We love video games and have found beauty in the designs and stories of the games they play. We also lead our own churches and faith communities online that you can follow and learn more about.