This article examines the history of moral panics about media,gleans some lessons from media studies that can help the studyof electronic games, and is critical of both utopic and dystopic,cybertarian and pessimistic accounts of gaming.
Key Words: media studies • gaming • political economy
Researchers are encouraged to study the social uses and effectsof gaming before stereotypes form and guide both their own andthe public's thinking. The rise of online games comes at a particularhistorical moment for social reasons as well as technologicalones and prompts a wide array of questions. The transition ofpublic life from common spaces to private ones is exemplifiedin the move of game play from arcades to homes. As our real-worldcivic and social institutions experience steady decay, whatis the impact of transferring our social networks and communitiesinto virtual spaces? Will games become our new third places,and how will that affect us? These are questions researcherscan answer but ones that need to be addressed before ideologues,defenders, and attackers muddle empiricism.
Key Words: social networks • online games • massively multiplayer • community • social capital
In this article, the author argues against the assertion, originatingwith "canonical" game studies texts such as Homo Ludens andMan, Play, and Games, that inherent in the definition of gamesis that they are "unproductive." Instead, she makes a case forthe notion of productive play, in which creative productionfor its own sake (as opposed to production for hire) is an activeand integral part of play activities, particularly those enabledby networks. Citing from her recent ethnographic research studyingintergame immigration between massively multiplayer online games(MMOGs), the author describes one case in which players ejectedfrom the MMOGUru: Ages Beyond Myst became highly productive,creating artifacts from Uru in other virtual worlds like Thereand Second Life. Over time, the Uru Diaspora expanded the game'sculture, eventually creating their own original Uru-and Myst-inspiredartifacts, including an entirely new game.
Key Words: play • games • MMOG • massively multiplayer games • game studies
This brief article investigates the relationship between legalscholarship and game studies. It attempts to find some commonground between theories of law and theories of games, lookingto lawas a game, the lawof sports, and contemporary claims aboutonline governance.
A Ludicrous Discipline? Ethnography and Game Studies
Tom Boellstorff
University of California, Irvine
The information age has, under our noses, become the gamingage. It appears likely that gaming and its associated notionof play may become a master metaphor for a range of human socialrelations, with the potential for new freedoms and new creativityas well as new oppressions and inequality. Although no methodologicalor theoretical approach can represent a cure-all for any discipline,in this article the author discusses how anthropological approachescan contribute significantly to a game studies nimble enoughto respond to the unanticipated, conjunctural, and above allrapidly changing cyberworlds through which everyone in someway is now in the process of redefining the human project.
Instructionist and Constructionist Perspectives for Game Studies
Yasmin B. Kafai
University of California, Los Angeles
This article presents an overview of what we know about twoperspectives, coined instructionist and constructionist, togames for learning. The instructionists, accustomed to thinkingin terms of making instructional educational materials, turnnaturally to the concept of designing instructional games. Farfewer people have sought to turn the tables: by making gamesfor learning instead of playing games for learning. Rather thanembedding "lessons" directly in games, constructionists havefocused their efforts on providing students with greater opportunitiesto construct their own games—and to construct new relationshipswith knowledge in the process. Research has only begun to builda body of experience that willmake us believe in the value ofplaying and making games for learning.
Key Words: constructionism • learning • educational game • design
This article explores comparative criticism and video game softwaredevelopment through the figure of the bricoleur, the handymanwho assembles units of preexisting meaning to form new structures.An intersection of these two domains—what the author callscomparative video game criticism—suggests a more intimateinterrelation between criticism and production. The author offersa critique of functionalist approaches to video game analysisand argues instead for a comparative analysis of the expressivecapacity of games and how they relate to other forms of humanproduction.
Key Words: video game criticism • comparative criticism • comparative media • ludology
Playful Identities, or the Ludification of Culture
Joost Raessens
Utrecht University
One of the main aims of game studies is to investigate to whatextent and in what ways computer games are currently transformingthe understanding of and the actual construction of personaland cultural identities. Computer games and other digital technologiessuch as mobile phones and the Internet seem to stimulate playfulgoals and to facilitate the construction of playful identities.This transformation advances the ludification of today's culturein the spirit of Johan Huizinga's homo ludens.
Key Words: play • identity • narratology • ludology
Video games are a new art form, and this, the author argues,is one good reason why now is the right time for game studies.As a new art form, one largely immune to traditional tools developedfor the analysis of literature and film, video games will challengeresearchers to develop new analytical tools and will becomea new type of "equipment for living," to use Kenneth Burke'sphrase for the role of literature. This article discusses severalof the features that make video games a unique art form, featuresthat will, the author believes, come to play a role in analysesof games in the emerging field of game studies.
Key Words: video games • learning • psychology • education
On the Analytic Potential of Living With Digital Games
Bart Simon
Concordia University, Montreal
This article seeks to make a case for the cultural analysisof digital games as a critical location for understanding therole of digital technologies in mediating the everyday socialinteraction and organization of subjects in the early 21st century.Digital games are considered as exemplary objects of analysisin terms of shifts in leisure culture, the increasing prevalenceof computer-mediated interaction, the proliferation and intensificationof visual culture, and the form and structure of posthuman informationsocieties. The future of game studies lies in the willingnessto grapple with the specificities of the medium without losingsight of and making a case for its broader cultural significance.
Key Words: digital games • flaneur • cyberspace • digital media • sociology
How Video Games Blur the Boundaries of Work and Play
Nick Yee
Stanford University
Video games are often framed as sites of play and entertainment.Their transformation into work platforms and the staggeringamount of work that is being done in these games often go unnoticed.Users spend on average 20 hours a week in online games, andmany of them describe their game play as obligation, tedium,and more like a second job than entertainment. Using well-knownbehavior conditioning principles, video games are inherentlyworkplatforms that train us to become better gameworkers. And theworkthat is being performed in video games is increasingly similarto the work performed in business corporations. The microcosmof these online games may reveal larger social trends in theblurring boundaries between work and play.
Key Words: labor • online gaming • massively multiplayer online games • MMORPGs • MMOs • work
A short, speculative account of the state of play in the formationof a discipline or field of computer games studies. The processesof academic teaching, research, and institutional positioningin regard to computer games are viewed from the perspectiveof wider currents and crises influencing knowledge formationtoday. It is argued that the different approaches to computergames cannot ignore the differences in their conceptions ofthe object of study in a naive pluralism. These different conceptionsof games as parts of the technocultural milieu must encountereach other in the name of the struggle against the avoidanceof critical thought concerning the nature and forms of technoculturethat often prevails in the production of specialist "knowledge"today.
Key Words: computer games • disciplinarity • reason • technoculture
This article compares the growth of history of science as adiscipline to the situation faced by game studies today. Whatcan researchers learn from the elevation of the history of scienceto an established discipline and profession that might helpscholars understand the situation of game studies? And why aregame studies today being talked about in ways similar to therhetoric that accompanied the history of science in the 1960sand 1970s? The author suggests that the growth of history ofscience then and game studies now has been fueled by similarmotivations and strategies. These reflections on the historyof science suggest there is nothing about such divisions thatdooms or even threatens the growth and eventual success of thisnew discipline.
The Importance of Race- and Gender-Based Game Studies
David J. Leonard
Washington State University
Notwithstanding the presence of extreme racialized tropes withinthe world of video games, public discourses continue to focuson questions of violence, denying the importance of games inmaintaining the hegemonic racial order. Efforts to exclude race(and intersections with gender, nation, and sexuality) frompublic discussions through its erasure and the acceptance oflarger discourses of colorblindness contribute to a problematicunderstanding of video games and their significant role in contemporarysocial, political, economic, and cultural organization. Howcan one truly understand fantasy, violence, gender roles, plot,narrative, game playability, virtual realities, and the likewithout examining race, racism, and/or racial stratification—onecannot. This article challenges game studies scholars to movebeyond simply studying games to begin to offer insight and analysisinto the importance of race and racialized tropes within virtualreality and the larger implications of racist pedagogies ofvideo games in the advancement of White supremacy.
Key Words: video games • game studies • race • colorblind discourse • commodification
Playing God, God Mode Mods, and the Rhetorical Task of Ludology
Cynthia Haynes
University of Texas at Dallas
Scholars are witnessing a dramatic confluence of faith, politics,and gaming. On the stage of this war theater, the players areindistinguishable, the simulations just one mission removedfrom real war. One is immersed in war as game, the other inwar as eternal battle. The military has invested millions indeveloping games as strategic communications tools, hiring realsoldiers and officers as consultants to ensure optimal realismin game play. Nowthat the harmonic convergence of faith, politics,and computer games has been graphically (and brutally) realized,specifically, made real in the dueling holy wars— oursand theirs (jihad)—what now? This article proposes a gamemodification of the god mode of the game, America’s Army,as a critical response to the reality ofwar and the use of computergames as military recruitment tools.
Games are an extremely valuable context for the study of cognitionas inter(action) in the social and material world. They providea representational trace of both individual and collective activityand how it changes over time, enabling the researcher to unpackthe bidirectional influence of self and society. As both designedobject and emergent culture, g/Games (a) consist of overlappingwell-defined problems enveloped in ill-defined problems thatrender their solutions meaningful; (b) function as naturallyoccurring, selfsustaining, indigenous versions of online learningcommunities; and (c) simultaneously function as both cultureand cultural object—as microcosms for studying the emergence,maintenance, transformation, and even collapse of online affinitygroups and as talkaboutable objects that function as tokensin public conversations of broader societal issues within contemporaryoffline society. In this article, the author unpacks each ofthese claims in the context of the massively multiplayer onlinegames.
Key Words: massively multiplayer online games • cognition • learning • literacy • problem solving
A Moment in the Life of a Generation (Why Game Studies Now?)
Frans Mäyrä
Hypermedia Laboratory, The University of Tampere
Game studies entering academia means that games are finallypositioned at the heart of a dedicated field of learning. Thereis a tension however as the need and demand for game studieshas faced the opposing, structural forces that slowdown thedevelopment. It is hard to ignore the cultural significanceof digital games and play, particularly as numerous game playexperiences underlie personal relations and histories withinan ICT-Penetrated society. Rather than a single "game culture,"there are several of them, as visible and invisible sense-makingstructures that surface not only in games themselves, but inthe language, practices, and sensibilities adopted and developedby groups and individuals. As the academia is loaded with expectationsof providing games industry with workforce or opportunitiesfor more innovative and experimental game culture, it is goodto remember that the fundamental task of universities is tocreate knowledge and promote learning.
Key Words: game culture • game studies • history of discipline • science and technology studies
This article recalls the New Games Tournament of 1966 and withit, twoways to imagine play in the period: one, military wargaming and the other, the protest-oriented play of the counterculture.It then analyzes the legacy of these cultural styles for contemporaryforms of gaming.
Key Words: New Games Tournament • Earthball • counterculture • war games • cultural genre
As games continue to displace television as a mainstream leisureactivity, there has never been a better time to study gamesand to create solid connections between game developers andacademic researchers. Building these connections will not beeasy for there exists little common ground, and games are surroundedby supposition and saddled with the contradictory presumptionsof harm and triviality. Despite these challenges, it is timeto study games.
Key Words: online worlds • user creation • Second Life • game development
What are the pleasures and the dangers of theway that the studyof digital games has crystallized over the past 3 years? Theauthor argues here that a pluralistic approach is required ifthe full complexity of games is to be addressed and analyzed,and as such, textual approaches to the analysis games shouldnot be dismissed no matter what the particular focus of attention.To understand a game's design, the way it seeks to shape theplayer's experience and to make the game meaningful, it is essentialto take account of the formal features of a given game. Beingup close and personal forces one to think through the specificitiesof a game and what it is like to play that game. The authortherefore advocates a combination of a formal and phenomenologicalapproach as a means of exploring the complex relationship betweengame text and player.
Key Words: game play • textual analysis • phenomenology • power • pleasure
Toby Miller 