Games and Culture 

About: Games and Culture is an academic journal published by SAGE Publishing. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Video game & Computer science. It has an ISSN identifier of 1555-4120. Over the lifetime, 650 publications have been published receiving 18449 citations.

From Tree House to Barracks The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft

Abstract: A representative sample of players of a popular massively multiplayer online game (World of Warcraft) was interviewed to map out the social dynamics of guilds. An initial survey and network mapping of players and guilds helped form a baseline. Next, the resulting interview transcripts were reviewed to explore player behaviors, attitudes, and opinions; the meanings they make; the social capital they derive; and the networks they form and to develop a typology of players and guilds. In keeping with current Internet research findings, players were found to use the game to extend real-life relationships, meet new people, form relationships of varying strength, and also use others merely as a backdrop. The key moderator of these outcomes appears to be the game's mechanic, which encourages some kinds of interactions while discouraging others. The findings are discussed with respect to the growing role of code in shaping social interactions.

Playing and Making Games for Learning: Instructionist and Constructionist Perspectives for Game Studies

Abstract: This article presents an overview of what we know about two perspectives, coined instructionist and constructionist, to games for learning. The instructionists, accustomed to thinking in terms of m...

From Edutainment to Serious Games: A Change in the Use of Game Characteristics

Abstract: Serious games use instructional and video game elements for nonentertainment purposes. Serious games attempt to create instructionally sound and relevant learning experiences for a wide variety of audiences and industries. The author contends that for serious games to be effective, instructional designers and video game designers need to understand how the game characteristics, competition and goals, rules, challenges, choices, and fantasy, used in both edutainment and serious games, can influence motivation and facilitate learning.

Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games

Abstract: Games have intruded into popular, academic, and policy-maker awareness to an unprecedented level, and this creates new opportunities for advancing our understanding of the relationship of games to society. The author offers a new approach to games that stresses them as characterized by process. Games, the author argues, are domains of contrived contingency, capable of generating emergent practices and interpretations, and are intimately connected with everyday life to a degree heretofore poorly understood. This approach is both consistent with a range of existing social theory and avoids many of the limitations that have characterized much games scholarship to date, in particular its tendency toward unsustainable formalism and exceptionalism. Rather than seeing gaming as a subset of play, and therefore as an activity that is inherently separable, safe, and pleasurable, the author offers a pragmatic rethinking of games as social artifacts in their own right that are always in the process of becoming. This ...

The Labor of Fun How Video Games Blur the Boundaries of Work and Play

Abstract: Video games are often framed as sites of play and entertainment. Their transformation into work platforms and the staggering amount of work that is being done in these games often go unnoticed. Users spend on average 20 hours a week in online games, and many of them describe their game play as obligation, tedium, and more like a second job than entertainment. Using well-known behavior conditioning principles, video games are inherentlywork platforms that train us to become better gameworkers. And thework that is being performed in video games is increasingly similar to the work performed in business corporations. The microcosm of these online games may reveal larger social trends in the blurring boundaries between work and play.