Gameworlds: Virtual Media and Children's Everyday Play

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. 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.

Table of Contents:
1. Acknowledgements 2. List of illustrations 3. Introduction: gameworlds 4. Chapter 1: Virtual and Actual Worlds 5. Chapter 2: Virtual Media & Children’s Everyday Play 6. Chapter 3: Microethology: methods for studying gameworlds 7. Chapter 4: Media Worlds 8. Chapter 5: Soft Worlds: play with computers 9. Chapter 6: Playgrounds: the material and immaterial in play 10. Chapter 7: Real Worlds: realities, virtualities, and the protopolitics of play 11. Bibliography

About the Author :
Seth Giddings is Associate Professor of Digital Culture & Design Winchester School of Art University of Southampton, UK.

Review :
This is a methodologically rich and thoroughly engaging book. Giddings gives us insight into the profound agencies of children in the midst of our new media saturated, yet still very material, culture. More than this, thanks to Giddings, we can now look to our young bricoleurs for analytic advice on how to make sense of the increasingly complex strands of power, pleasure and materiality that make up contemporary social life. Seth Giddings has long been one of the most astute observers of the complexities of digital play and this book offers a compelling, sophisticated look at gaming. Anchored in evocative analysis across a variety of 'gameworlds,' he beautifully shows of how everyday play lives are interwoven between the virtual and the material. This is a must read for anyone interested not only children and gaming, but media technology more broadly. This timely study is at once specific in its ethnographic attention to the micro-detail of children’s play and excitingly ambitious in its theoretical range. Seth Giddings connects the work of the Opies to contemporary game studies, and worries away productively at the complex overlap between the virtual worlds children fabricate in gardens and playgrounds and those they inhabit in digital games. He acknowledges pre-digital play cultures, and valuably posits post-digital play. All students of games, childhood, media and play should keep this book open on their desk. This is an exciting and important book that challenges traditional notions of play and gaming, exploring as it does the liminal spaces occupied by play across online and offline spaces. Drawing on rich ethnographic data, Seth Giddings demonstrates how play that is embedded in digital worlds is rich, imaginative and crosses the boundaries between physical and virtual spaces in fluid and complex ways. Through close analysis of extended play episodes, Giddings argues convincingly that play is not dying in the technological age, and he challenges those who seek to dichotomise digital and non-digital play by suggesting that the latter is more traditional and thus more ‘worthy’ in some way. Gameworlds is a book that will set the agenda for anyone interested in the future of play and should be read by policy-makers, researchers, students, teachers, playworkers and parents alike, all of whom will find much of value in its pages.