This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Game studies is a rapidly developing field across the world, with a growing number of dedicated courses addressing video games and digital play as significant phenomena in contemporary everyday life and media cultures. Seth Giddings looks to fill a gap by focusing on the relationship between the actual and virtual worlds of play in everyday life. He addresses both the continuities and differences between digital play and longer-established modes of play. The 'gameworlds' title indicates both the virtual world designed into the videogame and the wider environments in which play is manifested: social relationships between players; hardware and software; between the virtual worlds of the game and the media universes they extend (e.g. Pokémon, Harry Potter, Lego, Star Wars); and the gameworlds generated by children's imaginations and creativity (through talk and role-play, drawings and outdoor play). The gameworld raises questions about who, and what, is in play. Drawing on recent theoretical work in science and technology studies, games studies and new media studies, a key theme is the material and embodied character of these gameworlds and their components (players' bodies, computer hardware, toys, virtual physics, and the physical environment). Building on detailed small-scale ethnographic case studies, Gameworlds is the first book to explore the nature of play in the virtual worlds of video games and how this play relates to, and crosses over into, everyday play in the actual world.
Les mer
1. Acknowledgements 2. List of illustrations 3. Introduction: gameworlds 4. Chapter 1: Virtual and Actual Worlds 5. Chapter 2: Virtual Media & Children’s Everyday Play 6. Chapter 3: Microethology: methods for studying gameworlds 7. Chapter 4: Media Worlds 8. Chapter 5: Soft Worlds: play with computers 9. Chapter 6: Playgrounds: the material and immaterial in play 10. Chapter 7: Real Worlds: realities, virtualities, and the protopolitics of play 11. Bibliography
Les mer
This is a methodologically rich and thoroughly engaging book. Giddings gives us insight into the profound agencies of children in the midst of our new media saturated, yet still very material, culture. More than this, thanks to Giddings, we can now look to our young bricoleurs for analytic advice on how to make sense of the increasingly complex strands of power, pleasure and materiality that make up contemporary social life.
Les mer
Explores the nature of play in the virtual worlds of videogames and how this relates, and crosses over, into everyday play in the actual world.
Uses microethnography as an innovative method for describing and theorizing digital play

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781501318290
Publisert
2016-05-19
Utgiver
Vendor
Bloomsbury Academic USA
Vekt
268 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
U, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
192

Forfatter

Biographical note

Seth Giddings is Associate Professor of Digital Culture & Design Winchester School of Art University of Southampton, UK.