Online Gaming in Context: The Social and Cultural Significance of Online Games

ISBN-13: 9780415714976 / Angielski / Miękka / 2013 / 302 str.

Garry Crawford; Victoria K. Gosling; Ben Light

Opis

There is little question of the social, cultural and economic importance of video games in the world today, with gaming now rivalling the movie and music sectors as a major leisure industry and pastime. The significance of video games within our everyday lives has certainly been increased and shaped by new technologies and gaming patterns, including the rise of home-based games consoles, advances in mobile telephone technology, the rise in more 'sociable' forms of gaming, and of course the advent of the Internet. This book explores the opportunities, challenges and patterns of gameplay and sociality afforded by the Internet and online gaming. Bringing together a series of original essays from both leading and emerging academics in the field of game studies, many of which employ new empirical work and innovative theoretical approaches to gaming, this book considers key issues crucial to our understanding of online gaming and associated social relations, including: patterns of play, legal and copyright issues, player production, identity construction, gamer communities, communication, patterns of social exclusion and inclusion around religion, gender and disability, and future directions in online gaming.

Spis treści

Part I: Introduction  1. The Social and Cultural Significance of Online Gaming  Part II: Production and Play  2. Player Production and Innovation in Online Games: Time for New Rules?  3. Conflict, Thought Communities and Textual Appropriation in MMORPGs  4. Thrift Players in a Twisted Game World? A Study of Private Online Game Servers  5. The Only (End)Game in Town: Designing for Retention in 'World of Warcraft'  6. The Boardgame Online: Simulating the Experience of Physical Games  7. Games in the Mobile Internet: Understanding Contextual Play in Flickr and Facebook  8. The Whereabouts of Play, or How the Magic Circle Helps Create Social Identities in Virtual Worlds  9. Framing the Game: Four Game-related Approaches to Goffman's Frames  Part III: Communities and Communication  10. Identity-as-Place: The Construction of Game Refugees and Fictive Ethnicities  11. The Rise and Fall of 'Cardboard Tube Samurai': Kenneth Burke Identifying with the 'World of Warcraft'  12. Analyzing Player Communication in Multi-player Games  13. Recallin' Fagin: Linguistic Accents, Intertextuality and Othering in Narrative Offline and Online Video Games  14. 'Second Life' as a Digitally Mediated Third Place: Social Capital in Virtual World Communities  15. Representations of Race and Gender within the Gamespace of the MMO 'Everquest'  16. 'Wordslinger': Visualizing Physical Abuse in a Virtual Environment  Part IV: Conclusion  17. It's Not Just a Game: Contemporary Challenges for Games Research and the Internet