Culture at Play : How Video Games Influence and Replicate Our World

What is video game culture? This volume avoids easy answers and deceitful single definitions. Instead, the collected essays included here navigate the messy and exciting waters of video games, of culture, and of the meeting of video games and culture.

Contents

Video Games, Culture, and Everything: An Introduction

Part 1 Players: Types and Identities
1 Is Your Masculinity Threatened? Then You’re Not Man Enough to Play: Robot Unicorn Attack 2 and Beyond the Gender Challenge
2 We Are Smash Bros: Understanding Player Types and Ideals Through Worldwide Game Design
3 Empowering Avatars: The Impact of In-Game Presence on Everyday Functioning
4 Without so Much as a Word: Non-Verbal Performances of Masculine Identity in Adolescent Call of Duty Players

Part 2 The Human/The Machine: Agents, Ethics, and Affect
5 Agents in Space and Time: Fundamentals of Interactive Narrative Systems
6 Killswitch Engage: Ethics in Game Design
7 Pushing the Lever: Rule-Consequentialism and Utilitarianism in Life is Strange
8 Light My (Camp-)Fire: Affect and Incitement in Firewatch

Part 3 Compassion, Recognition, and the Interpersonal
9 Representing Interpersonal Relationships in Videogame Terms
10 Press X to recognize the Other’s Suffering: Compassion and Recognition in Games

Part 4 Learning through Play
11 Toward Engaging Educational Digital Games
12 Serious Topics and Fun Games: Hidden in the Zoo
13 ‘You Can Deny Seriousness, but You Can’t Deny Play’: Emergent Resistance to Purposive Games

Index


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