Mia Consalvo

Concordia University Montreal

This work explores the relationship of “4x” games rules, the historical narratives they offer, and player choice. Such games offer an ability for players to alter the accepted form and format of history by playing through alternate scenarios based on their choices as key countries, governments, and political groups. However, these choices are limit...

This paper examines how microstreamers either intentionally or unintentionally share their intimate physical spaces with audiences. While most streaming research focuses on larger and/or monetized professional streamers, there is emerging research on ‘microstreaming’—streams whose audiences are often as low as single digits—and their importance as...

Video games have entered the cultural mainstream and in terms of economic profits they now rival established entertainment industries such as film or television. As careers in video game development become more common, so do the stories about precarious working conditions and structural inequalities within the industry. Yet, scholars have largely o...

This essay describes current research in player studies, focusing on how play is a social activity, and how sociality is mediated and performed in a variety of settings. It starts by explaining the concept of tandem play and then moves to an exploration of gameplay that is performed for differently sized audiences via the Twitch.tv platform. Our re...

This article is an exploration of players’ understandings of games that offer moral dilemmas in order to explore player choice in tandem with game mechanics. We investigate how game structures, including the presence of choice, a game’s length, and avatar presentation, push players in particular ways and also how players use those systems for their...

Digital games have become a popular form of media entertainment. However, it remains unclear whether a canon of accepted knowledge and research practices has emerged that may define an independent field of research. The present study is a collaborative effort to analyze the outlines of digital games research (DGR) through a survey among the members...

In this manifesto, we argue that social media research needs to take the broader field of game studies in the exploration and understanding of social media. Many of the results, theories, and concepts developed in the study of games has significant implications for the study of all social media. Of course, game studies should be paying attention to...

In the world of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), Faunasphere was but a blip on the screen in its short public life from 2009 to 2011. Its devoted players, many of them middle—aged women, entered a world that did not build on common fantasy or science-fiction tropes. There was no evil to defeat or realms to conquer, only friendly animals...

This article explores how Facebook as a game platform influences players’ gameplay, arguing that platforms shape play as well as cheating behaviours. Based on a player survey and follow-up qualitative interviews, it asks how players theorize cheating in such games relative to their existing social networks, Facebook’s Terms of Service, and the spec...

The act of cheating in digital games helps us understand the play process in ways that examining normative or “ideal” play cannot. Scholars investigating the phenomenon have uncovered a rich diversity of practices and justifications that demonstrate how seriously players take the process of playing offline games, and how much they can invest in the...

Social, casual and mobile games, played on devices such as smartphones, tablets, or PCs and accessed through online social networks, have become extremely popular, and are changing the ways in which games are designed, understood, and played. These games have sparked a revolution as more people from a broader demographic than ever play games, shift...

Based on a study of individuals playing online social network games (SNG), this article focuses on the opinions and practices of people who play Facebook games with family members. Gameplay is contextualized in terms of (1) the structures of SNG (which shape gameplay in specific ways) and (2) via the norms and expectations for family leisure activi...

This exploratory paper answers questions about how Facebook as a game platform influences players' game play, arguing that platforms can shape play as well as cheating behaviors in important ways. It is based on a survey of players of social network games, exploring their attitudes towards cheating in games such as The Sims Social and City Ville. I...

As players craft and enact identities in digital games, the relationship between player and avatar gender remains unclear. This study examines how 11 in-game chat, movement, and appearance behaviors differed by gender and by men who did and did not use a female avatar – or ‘gender-switchers’. Drawing on social role and feminist theories of gender,...

Although we know how and why players cheat in videogames released on consoles or via PC, we know less about perceptions and practices surrounding cheating in social networks games. Such games offer players a style of gameplay—often without an ending and with a free-to-play model—that is quite different from other types of games. In addition, new au...

This chapter details some of the strategies and decisions made by Square Enix as it has labored to stay competitive in a global marketplace. First is the concept of cosmopolitanism, which can be a useful way to think through the actions of companies as well as individuals, particularly if we consider how a business such as Square Enix must form its...

Although considerable research has identified patterns in online communication and interaction related to a range of individual characteristics, analyses of age have been limited, especially those that compare age groups. Research that does examine online communication by age largely focuses on linguistic elements. However, social identity approach...

In North America, early computer games were developed by individuals and small teams, with many being distributed free or sold via hobbyist stores on floppy disks in plastic baggies. In that sense, the market might have been considered intensely local and small. With the growth of arcades and home consoles, companies emerged to create and mass prod...

On March 15, 2011 at 1:11 pm EST residents of the virtual world Faunasphere saw a network disconnect error message flash on their screens, suggesting that perhaps their Internet connections to the site had been lost. But the residents—known as Caretakers—knew better: Big Fish Games had pulled the plug on the casual MMOG they had launched less than...

In early 2008, what started as a small report in an online conservative outlet on the Xbox 360 videogame Mass Effect was picked up by a number of news outlets and blogs. In particular, Fox News’s ‘Live Desk with Martha MacCallum’ produced a segment on the game, claiming it was fully interactive digital pornography. One of the show’s guests, pop psy...

This article explores avatar appearance of 211 individuals in the virtual world Second Life (SL). Through analysis of observations, online interviews, and a survey, it examines the ways that players use avatars to perform self contextualized by group identities, from gender, race, and sexuality to specific communities, such as furries or role playe...

This paper analyzes the social mechanics in top social games. It identifies several mechanisms by which social games encourage sociality: the friend bar, gifting, visiting, challenge/competition, and communication. Different implementations of these components result in varying gameplay experiences. However, no mechanics were found to offer very de...

A Short History of Virtual WorldsResearch on Virtual WorldsConclusions References

The Handbook of Internet Studies brings together scholars from a variety of fields to explore the profound shift that has occurred in how we communicate and experience our world as we have moved from the industrial era into the age of digital media. • Presents a wide range of original essays by established scholars in everything from online ethics...

Introducing the ChaptersFuture QuestionsReferences

Introducing the ChaptersFinal Questions

A persistent topic in MMO studies is player motivation: why do players play? Attempts to answer this question have resulted in several frameworks, but these are built from studies of games that are very similar to each other. MMOs tend to feature fictional worlds drawn from common fantasy and science fiction tropes, and gameplay tends to focus on c...

Every massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) begins new players at Level 1. The player must grind his or her way through many early levels to reach any kind of decent reward for the hours invested. Compared to films going back to Rocky and television shows such as Crime Scene Investigation (CSI), there is no montage to fast-forward through the wo...

Several hypotheses regarding the importance of gender and relationships were tested by combining a large survey dataset with unobtrusive behavioral data from 1 year of play. Consistent with expectations, males played for achievement-oriented reasons and were more aggressive, especially within romantic relationships where both partners played. Femal...

Games are created through the act of gameplay, which is contingent on player acts. However, to understand gameplay, we must also investigate contexts, justifications, and limitations. Cheating can be an excellent path into studying the gameplay situation, because it lays bare player's frustrations and limitations. It points to ludic hopes and activ...

A large-scale content analysis of characters in video games was employed to answer questions about their representations of gender, race and age in comparison to the US population. The sample included 150 games from a year across nine platforms, with the results weighted according to game sales. This innovation enabled the results to be analyzed in...

Although violent video game content and its effects have been examined extensively by empirical research, verbal aggression in the form of profanity has received less attention. Building on preliminary findings from previous studies, an extensive content analysis of profanity in video games was conducted using a sample of the 150 top-selling video...

Surveying the field of knowledge about digital games, we engage the articles in this symposium as reviewers, focusing particularly on issues of labor, bodies, space/time, economics, and the use of metaphor.

Scholarly attention to game culture has mostly focused on games that cater to gamers that the literature has deemed 'hardcore,' 'heavy' or at least 'mainstream,' games. Researchers doing so have explored how those who put in large amounts of time playing such games are also productive of the culture surrounding the game. Yet in relation to casual g...

For contemporary media scholars, convergence means more than technologies or content coming together in one box.1 It instead alludes to the convergence of content across media platforms, and the joining together of media producers and consumers in the production and negotiation of that content—through user-generated content, greater feedback mechan...

Chain-mail bikinis, boob sliders, and Barbie-like physiques. Female avatars in MMO games would seem to be the equivalent of pinup Playboy bunnies, constructed solely for male players’ pleasure. Yet women players choose female avatars almost exclusively, and regularly talk of their joy in creating powerful, creative, dangerous characters. Those joys...

This study examines how individual differences in the consumption of computer games intersect with gender and how games and gender mutually constitute each other.The study focused on adult women with particular attention to differences in level of play, as well as genre preferences.Three levels of game consumption were identified. For power gamers,...

The goal of this paper is to establish a framework for better understanding the relationships between Japanese and American games in relation to that industry, visual styles, and cultural influence. To do that, this paper draws on a larger cultural history of Japan and America, and critiques and questions current and potential uses the concept of O...

Although the study of digital games is steadily increasing, there has been little or no effort to develop a method for the qualitative, critical analysis of games as "texts" (broadly defined). This paper creates a template for such analyses by developing and explaining four areas that game researchers should consider when studying a game: Object In...

This article argues that the contemporary console video game industry is a hybrid encompassing a mixture of Japanese and American businesses and (more importantly) cultures to a degree unseen in other media industries, especially in regard to US popular culture. The particularities of the video game industry and culture can be recognized in the tra...

Purpose – Aims to determine how multiple play styles and use of “outside” materials can be successfully taken into account when designing user experiences in educational digital games. Design/methodology/approach – This research draws on over two dozen qualitative interviews and an open-ended survey of an additional 50 game players with a wide rang...

This paper addresses players' uses of supplemental items during gameplay, how they define what is and is not "cheating" in reference to these items, and then, what actions they ultimately take in accordance with their beliefs and reasoning. To do that, an analysis of the results of in-depth interviews with 24 game players and an open-ended survey o...

This article studies how representations of the Borg challenge as well as reinforce traditional ideas about gender and the posthuman body. The Borg demonstrate that while traditional ideas about gender are hard to shake, there are some clear challenges to old stereotypes. The article examines the embodiment of the Borg at both the individual and co...

ABSTRACT This study analyzes U.S. news media coverage of the second Gulf War, to determine how individuals used the term ‘videogame’ in reference to the war. By studying how the news media itself sought to praise or criticize coverage of the war as being un/like videogames, we can see how videogames continue to be constructed in popular media in tr...

This article examines media fans' Web sites devoted to Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer to determine how the code of the Internet allows fans some creative control over media artifacts of interest to them and how such actions pose a challenge to media corporations and their copyrights. However, this challenge is also limited by the changing c...

Past feminist analyses of violence against women have focused largely on the coverage of rape (see Cuklanz; Gordon and Riger; Meyers). Very few researchers have examined media presentations of domestic violence, with Marian Meyers being the notable exception. In her analysis of news coverage of domestic violence Meyers found that most often the cri...

This study analyzes U.S. news media coverage of the second Gulf War, to determine how individuals used the term 'videogame' in reference to the war. By studying how the news media itself sought to praise or criticize coverage of the war as being un/like videogames, we can see how videogames continue to be constructed in popular media in troublesome...

This paper explores avatar appearance of 206 individuals in the virtual world Second Life. Through analysis of observations, online interviews, and a survey, it uses a symbolic interactionist framework to examine the ways that players use avatars to express group identity, from gender, race, or sexual identity to specific communities such as furrie...

We argue that the Dreamcast hosted a remarkable amount of videogame development that went beyond the odd and unusual and is interesting when considered as avant-garde. After characterizing the avant-garde, we investigate reasons that Sega's position within the industry and their policies may have facilitated development that expressed itself in thi...