EA Sports Fifa: Feeling the Game

If there is anything close to a universal game, it is association football, also known as soccer, football, fussball, fútbol, fitba, and futebol. The game has now moved from the physical to the digital - EA’s football simulation series FIFA - with profound impacts on the multibillion sports and digital game industries, their cultures and players. Throughout its development history, EA’s FIFA has managed to adapt to and adopt almost all video game industry trends, becoming an assemblage of game types and technologies that is in itself a multi-faceted probe of the medium’s culture, history, and technology. EA SportsFIFA: Feeling the Game is the first scholarly book to address the importance of EA’s FIFA. From looking at the cultures of fandom to analyzing the technical elements of the sports simulation, and covering the complicated relations that EA’s FIFA has with gender, embodiment, and masculinity, this collection provides a comprehensive understanding of a video game series that is changing the way the most popular sport in the world is experienced. In doing so, the book serves as a reference text for scholars in many disciplines, including game studies, sociology of sports, history of games, and sports research.

Carlin Wing is an Assistant Professor in the Intercollegiate Department of Media Studies at Scripps College, USA. Her
work speaks to questions of media and communication; science and technology; material culture; globalization; performance; disability; and play, games, and sport. She is currently working on a book project called Bounce: A History of Balls, Walls, and Gaming Bodies. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and has published writing in Games and Culture, Public Books, Cabinet, Art Lies, and The Bulletin of the Serving Library.

Raiford Guins is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in The Media School at Indiana University, USA. He is the author of Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game Afterlife (2014), co-editor of Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon (2016), and is currently researching his next book: Atari Design: Impressions on a Cultural Form (Bloomsbury).

Henry Lowood is Harold C. Hohbach Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections Curator for Film & Media Collections at Stanford University Libraries, USA. His most recent books are The Machinima Reader (co-edited with Michael Nitsche, 2011), and Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon (co-edited with Raiford Guins, 2016).