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The Business and Culture of Digital Games
This book explores the lifecycle of digital games. Drawing upon a broad range of media studies perspectives with aspects of sociology, social theory and economics, Aphra Kerr explores this all-pervasive, but under-theorised, aspect of our media environment. Written as an introductory text for media and game students this book aims present an overview of industry and scholary work on who makes games, where they get made, what kind of media and cultural form they are and who plays them and where. The Business and Culture of Digital Games looks at: - games as a new media form; - the design, development and marketing of games; - the use of games in public and private spaces. Combining a theoretical and empirical analysis of the production, content and consumption of computer games, this book will be of interest to many students of media, culture and communication.
Governance of Digital Game Environments and Cultural Diversity
'This collection of legal, philosophical, economic, and cultural perspectives ultimately makes a strong case for the potential value of game environments for addressing diversity issues, but also raises important concerns regarding implementation of corporate and government policies in this sector highly recommended for anyone exploring this emerging field.' Benjamin T. Duranske, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, US 'Videogaming is serious business. But the legal and theoretical implications of online and virtual environments are little understood. Professor Graber and Ms. Burri-Nenova have done a masterful job of bringing together several insightful articles that inform us about the busi...
Global Games
In the last decade our mobile phones have been infiltrated by angry birds, our computers by leagues of legends and our social networks by pleas for help down on the farm. As digital games have become networked, mobile and casual they have become a pervasive cultural form. Based on original empirical work, including interviews with workers, virtual ethnographies in online games and analysis of industry related documents, Global Games provides a political, economic and sociological analysis of the growth and restructuring of the digital games industry over the past decade. Situating the games industry as both cultural and creative and examining the relative growth of console, PC, online and mobile, Aphra Kerr analyses the core production logics in the industry, and the expansion of circulation processes as game services have developed. In an industry dominated by North American and Japanese companies, Kerr explores the recent success of companies from China and Europe, and the emergent spatial politics as countries, cities, companies and communities compete to reshape digital games in the networked age.
Point of Sale
Point of Sale offers the first significant attempt to center media retail as a vital component in the study of popular culture. It brings together fifteen essays by top media scholars with their fingers on the pulse of both the changes that foreground retail in a digital age and the history that has made retail a fundamental part of the culture industries. The book reveals why retail matters as a site of transactional significance to industries as well as a crucial locus of meaning and interactional participation for consumers. In addition to examining how industries connect books, DVDs, video games, lifestyle products, toys, and more to consumers, it also interrogates the changes in media circulation driven by the collision of digital platforms with existing retail institutions. By grappling with the contexts in which we buy media, Point of Sale uncovers the underlying tensions that define the contemporary culture industries.
Games in the Platform Economy
This book examines the evolution of digital platform economies through the lens of online gaming. Offering valuable empirical work on Valve’s ‘Steam’ platform, Thorhauge examines the architecture of this global online videogame marketplace and the way it enables new markets and economic transactions. Drawing on infrastructure, software, platform and game studies, the book interrogates the implications of these transactions, both in terms of their legality, but also in how they create new forms of immaterial labour. Shedding new light on a previously under-explored branch of the study of digital platforms, this book brings a unique economic sociology perspective into the growing literature on videogame studies.
Digital Media Distribution
"This book examines the current state of global media distribution today, including legacy and born-digital media industries, and the social, cultural, and economic impact of the digital distribution ecosystem"--
Ethnographies of the Videogame
Ethnographies of the Videogame uses the medium of the videogame to explore wider significant sociological issues around new media, interaction, identity, performance, memory and mediation. Addressing questions of how we interpret, mediate and use media texts, particularly in the face of claims about the power of new media to continuously shift the parameters of lived experience, gaming is employed as a 'tool' through which we can understand the gendered and socio-culturally constructed phenomenon of our everyday engagement with media. The book is particularly concerned with issues of agency and power, identifying strong correlations between perceptions of gaming and actual gaming practices, ...
Perceiving Play
"Computer games are increasingly prevalent, and cause both curiosity and concern in the general public, so understanding these games and play is important. Game researchers need to work quickly to document, report, and analyse the effect on our modern society as an increasing amount of people make new and drastically different choices in how they spend their time. Perceiving Play: The Art and Study of Computer Games looks at the directions and findings of this research, and examines how game research integrates the studies of social science, ethnography, textual analysis and criticism, economy, law, and technology." --Book Jacket.
Video Gamers
Video gaming is economically, educationally, culturally, socially and theoretically important, and has, in a relatively short period of time, firmly cemented its place within contemporary life. It is fair to say, however, that the majority of research to date has focused most specifically on either the video games themselves, or the direct engagement of gamers with a specific piece of game technology. In contrast, Video Gamers is the first book to explicitly and comprehensively address how digital games are engaged with and experienced in the everyday lives, social networks and consumer patterns of those who play them. In doing so, the book provides a key introduction to the study of gamers and the games they play, whilst also reflecting on the current debates and literatures surrounding gaming practices.
Computer Games and the Social Imaginary
In this compelling book, Graeme Kirkpatrick argues that computer games have fundamentally altered the relation of self and society in the digital age. Tracing the origins of gaming to the revival of play in the 1960s counter culture, Computer Games and the Social Imaginary describes how the energies of that movement transformed computer technology from something ugly and machine-like into a world of colour and ‘fun’. In the process, play with computers became computer gaming – a new cultural practice with its own values. From the late 1980s gaming became a resource for people to draw upon as they faced the challenges of life in a new, globalizing digital economy. Gamer identity furnishes a revivified capitalism with compliant and ‘streamlined’ workers, but at times gaming culture also challenges the corporations that control game production. Analysing topics such as the links between technology and power, the formation of gaming culture and the subjective impact of play with computer games, this insightful text will be of great interest to students and scholars of digital media, games studies and the information society.
