ROMchip Presents: Peter McDonald on The Impossible Reversal: A History of How We Play

**Tickets serve as calendar reminders for the event; they are not required to attend. Head to https://www.twitch.tv/romchipjournal to join the talk on July 14**

Join us Tuesday July 14, as ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories hosts games scholar Peter McDonald for a talk about his new book The Impossible Reversal: A History of How We Play. The event will be at 7PM ET on the ROMchip Twitch channel, https://www.twitch.tv/romchipjournal. Sign up for our newsletter to never miss an update.

About the Book
Games and gamified activities have become ubiquitous in many adults’ lives, and play is widely valued for fostering creativity, community, growth, and empathy. But how did we come to our current understanding of what it means to play? The Impossible Reversal charts the transformation of notions of playfulness beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, when a legion of artists, academics, and engineers developed new ways of theorizing, structuring, and designing ludic activity.

This talk will be titled "The Birth of Game Design from the Spirit of Management," focusing on one chapter from The Impossible Reversal, about the American Management Association's Top Management Decision Simulation from 1957. 

About the Speaker
Peter McDonald (he/they) is an Associate Professor of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin—Madison who works on the history and interpretation of play. Peter is the author of two monographs, Run and Jump: The Meaning of the 2D Platformer (2024, MIT Press) and The Impossible Reversal: A History of How We Play (2026, Minnesota Press).

About ROMchip
ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories is a free, online scholarly journal for game history. ROMchip develops, edits, and publishes ad-free, open access game history research for a range of audiences. It supports any discipline of work enlivening the history of games in local and global contexts, and embraces diversity in how game history is studied, documented, collected, preserved, and practiced. ROMchip is a donation-based organization fiscally sponsored by The Hack Foundation (d.b.a. Hack Club), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN: 81-2908499).

Stay in Touch
Read the Journal | Discord | Bluesky | YouTube | Twitch | DONATE