Despite their popularity, online video games have been met with suspicion by the popular media and academic community. In particular, there is a growing concern that online video game play may be associated with deficits in social functioning. Due to a lack of empirical consistency, the debate surrounding the potential impact of online video game play on a user's sociability remains an active one. This book contributes to this debate by exploring the potential impact of online video game involvement on social competence outcomes, theoretically and empirically. Through empirical research,...

Role-playing games offer a chance to pretend, make believe, and share fantasy. They often invoke heavy themes into their game play: morality, violence, politics, spirituality, or sexuality. Although interesting moral debates perennially appear in the media and academia concerning the appropriateness of games' ability to deal with such adult concepts, very little is known about the intersection between games, playfulness, and sexuality and what this might mean for players.

This book offers an in-depth, ethnographic look into the phenomenon of erotic role-play through the experiences...

Western digital game play has shifted in important ways over the last decade, with a plethora of personal devices affording a range of increasingly diverse play experiences. Despite the celebration of a more inclusive environment of digital game play, very little grounded research has been devoted to the examination of familial play and the domestication of digital games, as opposed to evolving public and educational contexts. This book is the first study to provide a situated investigation of the site of family play- the shared spaces and private places of gameplay within the domestic...

Games allow players to experiment and play with subject positions, values and moral choice. In game worlds players can take on the role of antagonists; they allow us to play with behaviour that would be offensive, illegal or immoral if it happened outside of the game sphere. While contemporary games have always handled certain problematic topics, such as war, disasters, human decay, post-apocalyptic futures, cruelty and betrayal, lately even the most playful of genres are introducing situations in which players are presented with difficult ethical and moral dilemmas. This volume is an...

This book provides the first in-depth exploration of video games as history. Chapman puts forth five basic categories of analysis for understanding historical video games: simulation and epistemology, time, space, narrative, and affordance. Through these methods of analysis he explores what these games uniquely offer as a new form of history and how they produce representations of the past. By taking an inter-disciplinary and accessible approach the book provides a specific and firm first foundation upon which to build further examination of the potential of video games as a historical...

In order to better understand and theorize video games and game playing, it is necessary to study the activities of gamers themselves. Gamers make literal the theoretical concept that Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva defined four decades ago: they are active creators in generating meaning; they are creators of media texts they share with other fans (mods, walkthroughs, machinima, etc); and they have played a central role in curating and preserving games. This volume brings together essays that explore game fandom from diverse perspectives to offer a broad and holistic understanding of the...

Expanding on the work in the volume Multiplayer, this new book explores several other areas related to social gaming in detail. The aim is to go beyond a typical "edited book" concept, and offer a very concise volume with several focal points that are most relevant for the current debate about multiplayer games, both in academia and society. As a result, the volume offers the latest research findings on online gaming, social forms of gaming, identification, gender issues and games for change, primarily applying a social-scientific approach.

Recent shifts in new literacy studies have expanded definitions of text, reading/viewing, and literacy itself. The inclusion of non-traditional media forms is essential, as texts beyond written words, images, or movement across a screen are becoming ever more prominent in media studies. Included in such non-print texts are interactive media forms like computer or video games that can be understood in similar, though distinct, terms as texts that are read by their users. This book examines how people are socially, culturally, and personally changing as a result of their reading of,...

This book argues that games offer a means of coming to terms with a world that is being transformed by digital technologies. As blends of software and fiction, videogames are uniquely capable of representing and exploring the effects of digitization on day-to-day life. By modeling and incorporating new technologies (from artificial intelligence routines and data mining techniques to augmented reality interfaces), and by dramatizing the implications of these technologies for understandings of identity, nationality, sexuality, health and work, games encourage us to playfully engage with...