Gameworlds: Virtual Media and Children’s Everyday Play

Description

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. Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction Space and time of play Media worlds Gameworlds Sim you later Notes 1 Virtual and Actual Worlds Translations Mr Happy and the Age of Mythology Back to Sandy Bay Transduction Notes 2 Virtual Media and Children’s Everyday Play Events Anti-glossary: Virtual; media; children; the every day; play Children Play Virtual Media Virtual media The everyday Note 3 Microethology: Methods for Studying Gameworlds Ethnography Anthropology of technology Ecology and ethos Assemblage Ethology Practical approaches Aesthetics, kinaesthetics and soft ware ethology Notes 4 Media Worlds Media histories of decline From gameworlds to playworlds: Material for other play Singing games and the media Transmedia systems: Drawing Pokémon Activity and passivity Media materials Note 5 Soft Worlds: Play with Computers Play with technology Rules and laws Interactivity and avatars Lively worlds Virtual time Everyday cyberculture Control aesthetics: I’m the one who makes the Lego Racers go Notes 6 Play Grounds: The Material and Immaterial in Play Talking into being The environment of the playground The space-time of play Bodies A micro-carnival Flux of games Note 7 Real Worlds: Realities, Virtualities and the Protopolitics of Play Bad play Realities Poesis Phantasmagoria Meta-play Prosthetic imagination The protopolitics of play Notes Bibliography Index