A common complaint among those who teach in wired classrooms is that students often become immersed in games of MS-Solitaire or Minesweeper instead of their class work. Pew Senior Research Fellow Steve Jones' recent report found, in fact, that 32% of the college students he surveyed (sample size= 1,162) "admitted playing games that were not part of the instructional activities during classes" (2). Despite students' best efforts to hide their play, in-class gaming is rarely clandestine; the phenomenon is easily detectable from across the room by the "game glaze" on players' faces. The intensity and ubiquity of this play, as well as the proliferation of personal computers, cell phones, PDAs and other gaming devices in college classrooms, prompted us to ask how we might use games to our pedagogical advantage. This article describes several strategies we have developed over the past several years for teaching media culture- that is, teaching students about the socio-cultural, economic and ideological elements of the mass media- with the most recent addition to the media stable, computer games. Read more...

The following paper analyses the relationship between the modding community and the games industry from a political economy perspective, without disregarding the pleasures and rewards individual modders may derive from their work. Within this context, the questions of whether modders can be regarded in terms of a "dispersed multitude", and how the power that comes with this status can be realised more fully, deserve special attention. At the same time, this paper seeks to gain insight into the changing relationship between work and play in the creative industries, and the ideological ramifications of this change. Read more...

In this essay, I will stress the contribution Game Studies can make to our thinking about learning, knowledge, and the human mind. Video games are a relatively new technology replete with important, and not yet fully understood, implications (Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy). Read more...

While video games have been analyzed in comparison to other new media forms by scholars like Lev Manovich, and to older media like novels and plays by scholars like Janet Murray and Brenda Laurel, few studies have examined the influence of older toys on video games. Despite this neglect, however, the connections between older toys and video games point to several important issues in hurnanities-based game studies, including those that investigate the place of game studies in academia and the archiving and preservation of games. By connecting video games to a variety of nonelectronic predecessors, this article raises several questions linked to video game classification, the hybridity of video games, and the problems that hybrid forms must negotiate. Toward this end, we specifically address movable books and toy theaters in relation to video games like Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (2004) to show how video games both draw on and change earlier interactive entertainment formats. Overall, this article explicates the relationship between games and older forms like movable books to show how comparative studies of older forms can elucidate and inform current scholarship. Read more...

In computer and video games, the player resides at the interface of viewer and actor. This position makes possible the playerʼs creative participation in these interactive media, a contribution that cannot be described in terms of the traditional roles of creator or consumer. The player is more than a consumer of what game developers and designers have created, and more than a reader or viewer. A game designer “creates a context to be encountered by a participant, from which meaning emerges” (Salen and Zimmerman 41). In the last decade or so, game players have used computer games as platforms for creating their own games, narratives, texts, and performances. They have reshaped the context of computer play, not simply by creating personal artifacts equivalent to a home movie, doodle, or diary, but by fully exploiting games as a new medium for performance and artistic expression. These efforts on occasion have challenged storytelling technologies such as frame-based animation, and have entered the mainstream through music videos, web-based serial programming, and other popular formats. The performer has pushed forward into the spotlight of game culture. So, how might game studies reveal players as performers? Learning more about the meanings players attach to play gestures, studying high-level competitive play, understanding what it means to watch others as they play, examining more closely the significance of replays and game movies in game culture, describing the formation of player identities, documenting in-game social dynamics, and tracing the networked virtual communities that thrive around computer games are but a few of many topics that might contribute to better understanding of game performance. This article presents a few ideas about playersʼ active participation in game culture through one mode of visible public performance: machinima and related game movies. Read more...

Educators are poised to fail the next generation of learners. Students are showing educators by their entertainment choices and information seeking behaviors (and sources) the way they want to learn and engage with media. There is now, and will continue to be, a dissonance between the ways current and coming generations of learners prefer to learn, and the tools used to teach them. Read more...