 In his second book on games, Computer Games and the Social Imaginary, Kirkpatrick presents a history of digital games that links their rise to the spread of neo-liberalism, a version of capitalism that fosters and relies upon a playful disposition on the part of its subjects.In his most recent contributions to game studies, The Formation of Gaming Culture, Kirkpatrick has focused on the history of gameplay, looking at when the idea became the central term of game criticism in the 1980s.He argues that this corresponds to the period when games played on computers and arcade machines became ‘video (or computer) games’ in the sense we give that phrase today.