Career
He has edited three collections of essays on digital games: Digital Gameplay (McFarland, 2005), The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto (McFarland, 2006), and Understanding Minecraft (McFarland, 2014).The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto was the first academic collection to focus on a single game series. He has also contributed essays to the websites Bad Subjects and Berfrois. In 2003, he founded the Video Game Studies area at the Popular Culture Association/ American Culture Association National Conference in New Orleans and continued to coordinate it until 2007.
This area, which has since been renamed Game Studies, is one of the longest continually run game studies events in the United States.
Garrelts received his Doctor of Philosophy in American Studies from Michigan State University (2003). His dissertation was titled The Official Strategy Guide for Video Game Studies: A Grammar and Rhetoric.
