Venture with Chuck and Beth on the Ohio 1444-mile Buckeye Trail that is still young and undiscovered by the masses. The trail is perhaps the longest loop trail in the world. There are rock ledges, waterfalls, lazy rivers, rushing streams, lakes, state parks, Native American ceremonial mounds, covered bridges, canal towpaths, canal boat rides, pioneer homesteads, military campaigns, and museums of bicycles, airplanes, early forts, and U.S. presidents. Add to that, people to meet, with stories of their own to share. Backpacking along the trails and roads that make up the loop they tent camp, stay at state lodges, motels and fascinating bed and breakfasts. Come along on their 76-day adventure; perhaps you will find a section that entices you to take a walk.

An analysis of wandering within different game worlds, viewed through the lenses of work, colonialism, gender, and death. Wandering in games can be a theme, a formal mode, an aesthetic metaphor, or a player action. It can mean walking, escaping, traversing, meandering, or returning. In this book, game studies scholar Melissa Kagen introduces the concept of “wandering games,” exploring the uses of wandering in a variety of game worlds. She shows how the much-derided Walking Simulator—a term that began as an insult, a denigration of games that are less violent, less task-oriented, or less difficult to complete—semi-accidentally tapped into something brilliant: the vast heritage and intellectual history of the concept of walking in fiction, philosophy, pilgrimage, performance, and protest. Kagen examines wandering in a series of games that vary widely in terms of genre, mechanics, themes, player base, studio size, and funding, giving close readings to Return of the Obra Dinn, Eastshade, Ritual of the Moon, 80 Days, Heaven’s Vault, Death Stranding, and The Last of Us Part II. Exploring the connotations of wandering within these different game worlds, she considers how ideologies of work, gender, colonialism, and death inflect the ways we wander through digital spaces. Overlapping and intersecting, each provides a multifaceted lens through which to understand what wandering does, lacks, implies, and offers. Kagen’s account will attune game designers, players, and scholars to the myriad possibilities of the wandering ludic body.

"I believe in possibility. Of magic, of omens, of compasses, of love. Some of it's a little bit true." Sixteen-year-old Tal is a Wanderer—a grifter whose life is built around the sound of wheels on the road, the customs of her camp, and the artful scams that keep her fed. With her brother, Wen, by her side, it's the only life she's ever known. It's the only one she's ever needed. Then, in a sleepy Southern town, the queen of cons picks the wrong mark when she meets Spencer Sway—the clean-cut Socially Secured boy who ends up hustling her instead of the other way around. For the first time, she sees a reason to stay. As her obligations to the camp begin to feel like a prison sentence, the pull to leave tradition behind has never been so strong. But the Wanderers live by signs, and all the signs all say that Tal and Spencer will end disaster and grief. Is a chance at freedom worth almost certain destruction? Wandering Wild is an achingly romantic journey of tradition and self-discovery—a magical debut.